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Firefox tab groups are here

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#411

Post by LadyCailin »

reginald78 wrote: post #30
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #5

Already using Tree Style Tabs. It's the one critical plugin I need. I still don't understand how anyone works without it.

It is particularly bizarre to me that the tab bar is horizontal on browsers. We switched to wide screen monitors close to 20 years ago, then stubbornly continued to waste vertical real estate for UI elements. Then webpages all went hard on mobile oriented designs and literally throw away the extra horizontal space by forcing portrait layouts. Yet we still use horizontal bars that make it hard to display tab titles an…

Both FF and Chrome (or anyways, at least Edge) have vertical tabs already. One of the better novel features that browsers have.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#412

Post by throwaway290 »

evilpie wrote: post #374
johnnyanmac wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

odd. There's one nitpick I have where you can't move a tab group (you gotta move other tabs around it), but it otherwise is everything I wanted. It even "just works" with no issue alongside tab containers, letting you mix in groups from different containers into one group.

Make sure you have Firefox 138! From the release notes: > You can also now reposition a tab group on the tab bar by dragging it.

I upgraded mine to FF 138. After the update it even opened the tab groups blog post. 15 minutes of going through settings later, no, my browser has no tab groups feature at all. Of course then I see it's a progressive rollout. Sad.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#413

Post by PurpleRamen »

radicality wrote: post #56
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. > Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time. Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages…

Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks? > computational costs are close to zero Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?

> Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks?

Sidebery offers a hierarchy of tabs, supports group-tabs inside the hierarchy and also has panels, which are basically groups outside/parallel to the hierarchy. With this, you can have very diversified organization-tools.

I also oscillate between 1k to 3k tabs, and I see them more as a process-state. I use tabs for my working-memory, and bookmarks for permanent memory. So any projects, I organize into groups, for every area I have a panel where I collect the corresponding groups. And if the project is over, I close them.

With bookmarks on the other side, I collect links to websites I might visit at some random time, but not necessarily because of a specific project, or with multiple projects. For example, I have bookmarks for my bank, my provider, video-sites (Youtube, Netflix...), Social Media, but also resources like Wikipedia, or self-hosted apps, etc. Those are links I never want to delete, unless the service itself shuts down, or I switch to a different one. So in that sense, they are "stateless".

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#414

Post by throw10920 »

wtallis wrote: post #368
throw10920 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox moved away from XUL extensions years ago - they now use a well-defined WebExtension model that is kind of the opposite of hacky.

And yet, many of the extensions that in the XUL days could cleanly change the browser's UI now have a much more hacky user experience.

Yes, because the APIs aren't perfectly fleshed-out. And they may never be, and yet that's still completely OK because the WebExtension model is obviously better along the performance, security, portability, and API stability axes.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#415

Post by eviks »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #405
eviks wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to be entirely preferential Having this whole functionality is entirely preferential, so? > If you prefer naming tabs it's extra friction to access the input field. It's not, you can have different commands/mouse gestures for different workflows with customizable defaults to avoid most of the friction > Options are always nice, but you will rarely cover 100% user cases on a first release. That's a bad, tho…

>Having this whole functionality is entirely preferential, so? Sure. No feature will please everyone and some may actively oppose a few individuals https://xkcd.com/1172/ That's why options to customize the experience is the best of both worlds. But focusing on solid defaults and then opening up with options seems to make sense. >>That's a bad, though universal (can say exactly the same thing on 100th release) excuse…

> But focusing on solid defaults and then opening up with options seems to make sense.

Since everything is entirely preferential, you can't claim the current defaults are solid

> As the kids say, "let them cook".

They had decades to cook

> I sure prefer an iterative release over even more delay on such a widely requested feature

This is just another bad excuse (and also universal), especially since the current design is more complicated (due to the extra UI element), so likely took more time to implement. Sometimes better is faster.

> You can start by measuring actual width instead of making up tiny numbers.

> And you don't think the designers and engineers at Mozilla did this and simply interpret a different benchmark from you?

How is this relevant to you making up 5px?

> challenge trying to accommodate such a range

There is no challenge here, waste becomes apparent as soon as you reach 100% width, 100 or 40k tabs doesn't matter.

> average tab count maintained is on the lower side.

You've said nothing specific here. What % of users have tabs that don't fit tab bar width? And which % counts as "anyone" from your perspective?

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#416

Post by martin82 »

quesera wrote: post #175
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. > Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time. Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages…

> I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. I'm just here to report that Firefox + Sidebery continues to work perfectly well at 14571 "open" tabs. All but a few hundred are unloaded, and I block JavaScript fairly aggressively. Currently measuring 1992 MB, explicitly allocated. I won't argue with anyone who tells me that I have a problem, but I will say that Firefox and Sidebery make my problem…

A few days ago there was a post here about "the internet in a box"...

I guess what you are attempting is "the internet in a fox"...

...fascinating!

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#417

Post by jowea »

m4rtink wrote: post #188
quesera wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. I'm just here to report that Firefox + Sidebery continues to work perfectly well at 14571 "open" tabs. All but a few hundred are unloaded, and I block JavaScript fairly aggressively. Currently measuring 1992 MB, explicitly allocated. I won't argue with anyone who tells me that I have a problem, but I will say that Firefox and Sidebery make my problem…

Can report that my testing indicates 40k+ tabs is doable with unloading on a 64 GB machine, across multiple Firefox windows with tree style tab. Since task manager has been introduced, making it easy to unload whole related tab groups its even easier to reach absurd total tab counts. ;-)

As someone who has gotten to 2000 a few times, even I have to ask myself "how? why?"

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#418

Post by eddyg »

ibll wrote: post #356
cassianoleal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like Arc but would prefer if it was open source and/or non-Blink/Chromium, Zen is based on Firefox but with an Arc-like interface. https://zen-browser.app/

It copies a lot of Arc, but the core tab organisation features from Arc are significantly lacking. Last I checked (a few weeks ago), Zen didn't even have a keybind for pinning a tab. It fully keeps the Firefox bookmarks and prioritises those all over the UI. The Arc tab system is meant to entirely replace all of that. It just makes Zen feel very shallow in comparison. It's just firefox with some goofy Arc features ma…

What are you going to do now that Arc development has stopped and The Browser Company is pivoting? (I'm also a big fan of Arc, especially the Air Traffic Control feature to keep certain sites organized into Spaces.)

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#419

Post by kelipso »

hysan wrote: post #206
Spunkie wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was just stubbornness, pure and simple. Firefox actually had a feature like tab groups a long time ago. It was removed for "low usage" and ever since then they have been resisting reimplementing it. Anyways it still needs improvement but I am very happy to see this finally land. At work we have been moving everyone off of chrome after the manifest v3 shenanigans and the lack of tabs groups was a long stand…

This sums up my experience with everything Firefox. It's why it slowly fell behind in UX and stopped being my primary browser ages ago. I keep giving it a try every year, but the gap between FF and other browsers just keeps getting wider and wider. This is a nice small step, but FF has a long way to go to catchup.

Same. Related example is Chrome and Safari have profiles while Firefox is still stuck in the tab groups era.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#420

Post by quesera »

pdntspa wrote: post #317
quesera wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. I'm just here to report that Firefox + Sidebery continues to work perfectly well at 14571 "open" tabs. All but a few hundred are unloaded, and I block JavaScript fairly aggressively. Currently measuring 1992 MB, explicitly allocated. I won't argue with anyone who tells me that I have a problem, but I will say that Firefox and Sidebery make my problem…

This sort of thing sounds like a fantastic use of Firefox's bookmarks system.

Bookmarks don't retain scroll position, and must be actively managed to preserve hierarchy.

Firefox tabs are a zero-cost, and far more usable, implementation of bookmarks.

Chrome tabs are terrible -- the UI and memory demands are absurd.

Firefox (vertical) tabs are great, convenient, fast, easy, and cause no resource drama.

I have bookmarks too though. They serve three purposes: a) remember this forever but get it out of my way for now, b) put this in a managed hierarchy easily accessed from my bookmarks toolbar, or c) save out this big hierarchy of tabs that I haven't looked at in a while but were each probably the culmination of some level of manual navigation that I don't want to repeat.

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