- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Thousands of users wanted it, so Firefox delivered it. Tab Groups are now live to help you declutter and stay organized while browsing.
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I’ve never understood this. You guys know you can have multiple Firefox windows, right? What’s the point of tab groups when you can just group related tabs in a different window? Between multiple workspaces, multiple monitors, and multiple browser windows, I never feel the need to have more than 5-10 tabs open on any one of them at a time. More than that and I’m clearly doing something wrong and need to clean up anyway.
Different strokes for different folks. I replied to the guy who replied to you and raised a couple of ideas that I think may distinguish the options to answer your question.
Oh, here’s the ol’ “I have no use for this feature, and I can’t see why anyone else would have one, either”, so I get to check that off my bingo card.
He’s just asking as in, maybe someone can share their perspective on why there may be an advantage to tab groups over windows. And to that end… isn’t there a certain amount of system resources that are increased more with a whole new window as opposed to just more tabs in groups? I would think it would consume more resources, albeit perhaps not to any severe degree. —?
And to the actual question I think visually tab groups are easier to navigate than swapping back through windows. Task managers don’t really tend to present windows in a fashion where you could refer to them in context of one-another. Maybe some custom views that you can install in Linux but even then, ones I’ve tried still don’t quite give you a quick easy overview that shows enough detail. You pretty much see what program you’re swapping to, but not laid out in ways you can compare and choose on the fly the way you want when it’s the same application but different content. That’s my experience, anyhow.
You underestimate the tab hoarders.
I’m also like you where I barely have more than a few tabs open. But I regularly witness people I know fill the tab bar until you can’t read the first 3 letters of the title anymore.
tabing through multiple windows of the same program is annoying, having one window with groups is way easier. plus 1-2 monitors is the norm, so sometimes its just a screen space issue.
tabing through multiple windows of the same program is annoying,
How is it any less annoying than tabbing through multiple browser tabs in the same window?
Well it’s all in the same window and generally easier at least to me.
Switching between windows is far less fluid than switching between tabs.
Then maybe switch to a better OS / Window manager?
It doesn’t matter which one you have.
It’s called the ‘inner platform effect’. They are basically replicating parts of the underlying platform (the OS in this case) inside their own application, until the application turns into a platform itself, one crappier than the one below it. You see this happening with web browsers and ‘web apps’.
Maybe add some decent vertical tabs too?
Vertical tabs are working great in FireDragon.
I have tried Zen and I like it, I will give ForeDragon a spin, thanks 🙏
Wait, how do you turn them on?
Go to Settings > Design, and then under Tab Bar Style select “Vertical Tab Bar (experimental)”. I recommend checking the “Collapse Vertical Tab Bar” checkbox, too. That way, the tab bar collapses into icons when your cursor isn’t over it, taking up less window space.
Wow, this is brilliant! Now all I need is proper mouse gestures support and I can migrate full-time!
I’ve started using vertical tabs in Firefox as soon as I got the notification. I never thought I would have liked them so much.
Why are you asking for decent vertical tabs? Are they inferior to some other browser you have in mind?
I’ve been using the tree-style-tabs plugin for the last 4 years, because I like vertical tabs, and nesting it provides.
But now that Firefox actually finally has proper vertical tabs, and tab groups, I can move away from tree-style-tabs (I don’t use any of its other features).
I wanted to like them but I dont know, I think they are more natural at the top still.
I’m going to stick it out for maybe a couple months (past this first ~month period) just to see if maybe they are superior somehow
I like Arc’s user experience with vertical tabs. They are bigger, easier to organize and they are cleaner. Also, the sidebar toggle is hard to work with, ideally I would prefer the ability to toggle with a shortcut or reveal on hover.
Aside Arc, Zen browser has a good vertical tab experience.
Overall, I still main firefox for my personal browser, though it’s UX is still lacking.
There is a keyboard shortcut. It’s CTRL+ALT+Z for me. Unless you mean something else?
As for the “reveal on hover”, iirc there was a dismissable message that said it is coming soon.
If I can share my opinion, they are more than big enough if you toggle the checkbox “optimize for touch screen”. I would have to try Arc or Zen again to understand what you mean.
The only complaint I have is that I need to hover (or expand) to see the title. It becomes annoying when I’m reading documentation and I end up with multiple tabs with the same icon.
EDIT: I can’t seem to find the “optimize for touch screen” checkbox anymore, but I’m sure there is something like that somewhere because I enabled it on one of my devices which has a touch screen.
EDIT 2: the “optimize for touch screen” option can be seen by right clicking the toolbar and choosing “Customize toolbar”. Changing the density to “Touch” (on the bottom) makes these icons bigger.
What’s wrong about it? I really like it.
A second browser window is the real solution. Or simply accept the chaos.
As if I wasn’t already doing that lol I have 64 gigs of ram and I will use 64 gigs of ram!
I haven’t even gotten close… Maybe if I spin up several VMs that each have 8+GB allocated. But why would I do that.
Oh man, thats even more chaos having a new window for a group of tabs.
(Source: thats my daily experience)
No chaos. Only Sidebery.
They added sidebar tabs with this stuff too, doesn’t do a full tree structure and it needs some other work though.
That’s nice to see actually. Though Sidebery is much more than sidebar or vertical tabs. It has everything.
ive seen this in opera, and instantly ran into the options to disable it. i donno how many tab you guys have in the browser, but may god forgive you all for using the browser wrong.
Maybe you only have 300 or less but I typically have several windows open.
I’m not usually one to really care about how others use their tools, but I agree with this completely. Tab hoarding is pathological.
I get stressed out if I have enough tabs open in one session so that none of them can display any text… But I will still exit them all every time I exit the browser. What am I a maniac?
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why “thank christ”? Was Christ advocating for tab groups?
What, you don’t remember that part of the Bible?
Mozilla 11:28 - “Come to me, all of you who have 87 tabs open, and I will give you grouping.”
Only 87? Those are rookie numbers
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“Let he who is without tab, cast the last grouping”
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That’s why I always carry holy water in a spray bottle, I just spritz anyone who sneezes around me
Many races believe that the creation of the Universe involved some sort of God, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being known as the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids live in perpetual fear of the time they call “the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief,” somewhat similar to the Apocalypse. However, the Great Green Arkleseizure theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being as wide and strange as it is, other explanations are constantly being sought by different races throughout the Galaxy.
may The Flying Spaghetti Monster bless your fingers
Oh my Satan
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… again
Can someone at least help me understand what tabs have that bookmarks don’t?
If i have more then 4 tabs open i get anxious because i can’t intuitively remember what each does. I have folders for categories of bookmarks.
if i bookmark something i will never look at it again
You don’t have to, my dude, you can set your address bar to search through them.
through titles sure. but that’s not what i need from any site.
I only find my saved bookmarks randomly by typing something in the address bar and the bookmark popping up as the first result.
Isn’t that the best way, though? I’m searching for something, but now I don’t need to do a web search because I’ve saved the link to it already. And I didn’t have to dig through a long list to find it.
Oh yeah, when it comes to bookmarks I gave up trying to organize them into folders a long time ago, and I now try to add a few keywords/tags to the description to hopefully get the bookmark when I type in the address bar now.
if only there was a fuzzy content search included. usually i don’t remember the page, or the topic, but just like… a quote.
that’s actually a good use for this local ai stuff, take the contents of pages i bookmark and auto-tag it based on that. for that matter, archive the contents as well.
nb will do that for you whenever you create a bookmark with it.
nb embeds the page content in the bookmark, making it available for full text search with
nb searchand locally-served, distraction-free reading and browsing withnb browse. When Pandoc is installed, the HTML page content is converted to Markdown. When readability-cli is installed, markup is cleaned up to focus on content. When Chromium or Chrome is installed, JavaScript-dependent pages are rendered and the resulting markup is saved.that is… pretty neat. is there some way to get it to interop with a browser’s bookmarks?
You mean like syncing the two? Not that I know of. The most you can do is open nb bookmarks in the browser. If you know how to do any shell scripting, there’s probably a way to export your browser bookmarks and then import them into nb. I’ll have to research this.
You are entitled to this but I don’t understand why it makes a difference if the icon is above or below the url here.
If you have bookmarks hidden, thats an argument for a pretty bookmark manager.
i use bookmarks for sites i access frequently, like a speed dial thing. i’ve set up my bookmarks toolbar to be in-line with the address bar and icon-only, so that it blends in with the rest of the interface. if i’m just going to go back to something one time i leave a tab open until i get time.
I’m the same way, I think it’s just a younger generation thing where they never close tabs and can have 100+ open at once
Yeah, older folks remember the times before browsers had any kind of memory management w.r.t. tabs. And you had maybe 8GB RAM (and that would have been considered beefy). The browsers themselves were also, more often than not, just straight up memory leaks. The longer you kept the program open, the the more RAM it would take until it broke.
No shot you could run up anywhere near those numbers of tabs before your entire system would get bogged down and eventually the browser would crash (and you’d lose them all)
Tabs get in the way and force you to actually address them instead of ignoring them. In theory.
It’s a combination of things… I’m a software developer, so I’ll often end up with 20+ tabs open while resolving a problem.
- I don’t want to bookmark them because I don’t need them when I finish the task.
- I can’t close the tabs until I’m sure everything’s working because Google sucks these days and who knows how hard it’ll be to find the source again.
- Relying on browser history is like finding a needle in a haystack. Tasks can take multiple days and 100 different entries in history.
- I might have “finished” a task that still needs tested and I know it’s a bit shaky; I’ll want to move onto a new task but keep the most useful references until I no longer need them.
- I only bookmark pages that I’ll need long-term or multiple times. It’s already hard enough to keep those organized…
My tab hoarding has only gotten this bad because search engines are terrible now and the amount of AI garbage to sort through makes finding anything useful a pain in the ass the first time; let alone trying to find it a second time.
I have the same workflow. Usually, I never have more than maybe three tabs open, but when I’m debugging something… oh god. Easily 15 or 20.
I also bookmark extensively, and actually have my address bar set up to only give me suggestions from my bookmarks. Additionally, I use a tiling window manager, which makes managing windows and tabs very easy. I really don’t have a use for tab groups, but, who knows, maybe I’ll learn to use them someday.
I also bookmark extensively, and actually have my address bar set up to only give me suggestions from my bookmarks.
This is what people don’t seem to realize they can do… You can literally create a bookmarks folder that you never look at again, only search through using your address bar.
You can use a tab stash extension to turn all of your open tabs into bookmarks if you want to preserve what you had open that session. Then you can search through those bookmarks in your address bar.
I freaking love Tab Stash! Great minds clearly think alike…
Relying on browser history is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Oh sweet Satan, yes. I wish somebody could explain to me why browser history is so awful.
Maybe a better solution is to stop using Google…?
I have, mostly. The search engine wasn’t the point; they’re all pretty terrible these days with the absurd AI spam everywhere.
You need Tab Stash in your life.
I can’t stay productive with 20 tabs or applications open. I waste time searching. I feel drained if I’m working on a tough job and need something that is hidden. Maybe it’s on another desktop. Maybe it’s open in another instance. Maybe it’s not even open. Not for me.
I feel you, and agree with most of it… buuutttt I think it’s even more frustrating to know you had a good reference that was closed and then spent a stupid amount of time to find again.
Everyone has their own workflow, whatever works.
If i have more then 4 tabs open i get anxious
You are alone on that one. Virtually everyone I know, I look over and they have 50 tabs open LOL
You’re on of us then!
I, and many others, start closing stuff when there’s more than a handful.
Others, like many, just run then forever and ever. A sea of icons, tiny and compressed. Worrying they’ll lose that tab they really like in amongst the clutter. Unaware of the history feature.
I’m aware of the history feature. It doesn’t do what you seem to think it does (keep a tab in suspension in an easily accessible location over multiple hours or days of browsing).
Now, the OneTab extension? That’s actually suitable for this purpose. History doesn’t do what it does.
- History shows everything I’ve ever been to including the “nope that top result in my search engine actually didn’t contain the search string anywhere in its contents and is thus useless to me.” pages
- Bookmarks are for things I routinely go to for years
- Tabs are useful results for the projects I’m working on now.
- Pinned tabs are the pages I visit multiple times a day.
None of those is a substitute for any other.
I can’t stand having more than maybe 5-6 tabs open. As the poster above stated, it just gives me anxiety to have random tabs open. I get disoriented trying to figure out what my focus is in a sea of tabs.
Exactly, and if its important you just bookmark it.
I tend to shorten my bookmarks to just a space so in practice they are just a row of tiny icons anyway. They are always at the same spot and only take resources when needed.
I would love a vertical bookmark sidebar but for some reason we have to reinvent the wheel with tabs.
The bookmarks are already vertically aligned in the side bar.
You might have a valid point if history fucking worked.
I keep tabs open for active projects. Once the project is over, I bookmark them for future reference.
Amg I couldn’t figure out how to collapse. I’m so happy rn. I’ve been containerising everything. It’s so soothing.
Ever since i switched to zen browser i hace not thought of coming back for a second.
I tried it -> couldn’t figure out how to get rid off vertical tabs -> uninstalled -> installed Librewolf
Yea Zen is amazing, especially the neat Workspaces feature.
I’m still going back to Firefox because of tab groups.
Go fuck yourself
“Lastly, curious power users can flip the browser.tabs.smartGroups preference in Nightly to preview on-device AI grouping—just remember the prototype tag means rough edges are part of the deal.”
You ok? Forgot your meds again,?
If its called smart and uses Ai, then its advanced. We need Ai for renaming groups of tabs.
The prototype scans open tabs locally, suggests topical names, and auto-bundles related pages. Because all processing happens on the user’s computer, the company says, neither raw content nor behavioral signals are uploaded to the cloud.
“AI” is just a buzzword, this isn’t chatbot nonsense as far as I can tell.
Might switch back, use vivaldi for workspaces, I switched because it synced across devices but I never use that feature I just end up retyping everything if I need to open something.
So after I save and close a group… where do I find it?
It’s in the tab overview menu https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-overview-menu
Thanks!
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Folders as a to do mechanism sounds interesring.
I’m wondering if a date-based system could work.
The lack of groups was the deal breaker for me, so after it rolled out to beta, I finally switched back to Firefox as my primary browser.
Last I tried, I don’t think you could reorder or drag/drop groups and selecting multiple tabs doesn’t result in “group tabs” in the context menu, but it is still decent enough.
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Why this would be a reason? Librewolf will have tab groups too. They don’t change the main structure, they just harden Firefox.
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Oh, you mean you were waiting for tab groups. Sorry, without enough context I thought you were telling one of those bullshit reasons people use against Firefox. Well then, see you with Librewolf soon.
