[HN Gopher] Firefox tab groups are here
___________________________________________________________________
Firefox tab groups are here
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 442 points
Date : 2025-04-29 15:37 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.mozilla.org)
| hooverd wrote:
| Now we're cooking.
| canadianwriter wrote:
| I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely
| wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting!
|
| Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It
| seems to be super common to have tons and tons open.
|
| Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything
| interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it
| in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue with
| bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?
|
| Not judging or anything, I just find how other people use tools
| differently than I do an interesting subject.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I'm not consistent about going back and closing tabs. By the
| time I've browsed on a couple topics, I have enough tabs open I
| can't see the titles any more, and it's downhill from there.
| Some of them, I think "this is good, I'll come back to this
| when I get a chance" so I don't want to mass-close them.
| Eventually I'm opening new tabs of tabs I already have open,
| because it's faster than finding the original.
|
| Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark
| them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something
| important), and close them all.
|
| I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this way,
| looked at any of the bookmarks.
|
| [EDIT] I guess the main issue is that deciding to close tabs
| I'm not currently looking at takes time, because I have to
| evaluate each one, and when I'm down to just favicons on the
| tab itself, that means actually looking at each page. Just
| periodically mass-bookmarking and closing is less work. It's a
| UI issue. Plus, if I'm looking at my browser, it's because _I
| 'm doing something_, and that something is basically never
| "playing tab-gardener". My very first action is gonna be "new
| tab" and go from there.
| DigitalBison wrote:
| I'm essentially the same way, with the caveat that I do
| _occasionally_ go back and find something from one of those
| archived bookmarks. Maybe a couple times a year at most,
| which is all the validation my lizard brain needs to consider
| this a critical practice that I will continue doing without
| questioning for the rest of my life.
| pandemic_region wrote:
| Cue David Attenborough voice:
|
| And here we find the Tab Hoarder ...
| iworshipfaangs2 wrote:
| Good lord! If you mass bookmark, aren't you just turning your
| bookmarks into your history? In that case why not just use
| browser history instead?
| Arelius wrote:
| I don't do this, but it appeals to me, as History seems to
| be pretty spotty, I've a couple of times recently tried to
| find something in my history, and it ended up as if it was
| never there.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Ya history isn't forever, at least in default Firefox.
|
| I was quite annoyed when I realized that since I was
| hoping to find something from many years ago.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to, but I clear history on
| close. I don't clear bookmarks on close.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| - History gets cleared sometimes. Bookmarks are (basically)
| forever.
|
| - History includes tons of ephemeral shit, like search
| result pages (useless, will be different the next time you
| load it) and redirect pages, or things I've actively
| decided not to care about. If I looked at 20 shirts on a
| store-site but only had 3 still open, odds are good I
| already firmly rejected the other 17. Straight history
| loses the information of which ones I cared about the most.
| codethief wrote:
| I used to be the same and it drove me nuts. Eventually I
| looked for a solution and ended up installing Limit Tabs[0]
| to limit the number of my tabs[1] to 10-15. I couldn't be
| happier!
|
| [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rudolf-
| fernan...
|
| [1]: On my desktop. Unfortunately, the extension is not
| available for Firefox for Android, so on mobile I tell
| Firefox to discard tabs that I haven't used for a day.
| LTL_FTC wrote:
| Any one else favorite hackernews articles knowing they will
| never actually take the time to go back and read them and
| their comments? I feel like this is not too dissimilar to
| hoarding your tabs there. Tsundoku for the digital world.
| philsnow wrote:
| > By the time I've browsed on a couple topics, I have enough
| tabs open I can't see the titles any more
|
| Sidebery or TreeStyleTabs lets you see the titles no matter
| how many you have. ... Well, you have to scroll, but it's so
| much better than having to go through tab-by-tab with a
| typical horizontal tab bar.
|
| > Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark
| them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something
| important), and close them all.
|
| > I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this
| way, looked at any of the bookmarks.
|
| Even though I can see the tab titles, this is _exactly_ what
| I do(n 't). I threw together a couple scripts to extract all
| the tabs (including which window they're in), and export that
| all to an org-mode file.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I operate this way, but I didn't used to bookmark them. Until
| one day I needed to find a website that I had not bookmarked
| and had closed. I even remembered where the tab was supposed
| to be but I had mass closed my tabs. It took a long time
| until I found the page again.
| fikama wrote:
| More or less what you written + sometimes toxic multitasking I
| would leave one work half done and start something different.
| Also sometimes I open new tab is tead of working in the already
| opened one (that could be solved by some kind of tab dedup).
| Fun Fact IOS Safari has a limit of 500 pages per group then you
| have to open a new one.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I hit the 500 limit a couple times a year. Bookmark all,
| close all.
|
| I use groups when I'm _really_ deep in a topic, but the rest
| of the time I forget which groups I have and that I ought to
| use them, just end up putting it all on the default group
| until it hits 500.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Fun Fact IOS Safari has a limit of 500 pages per group then
| you have to open a new one.
|
| I just use the "Bookmark All" feature and save it to a folder
| with the date that I made the bookmarks, then I copy the
| folder to Joplin and export it as plain text to my computer.
| I never review these bookmarks, it's just a compulsion that
| allows me to feel like the information is still there if I
| need it.
| Macha wrote:
| This many tabs are a temporary todo list, basically. Bookmarks
| are permanent and the interface is worse for cleaning them up
| when you're done with them.
|
| Also, some sites, and especially app-like sites, are terrible
| at preserving your state if you close and navigate back. This
| could be something as simple as highlighted text in a document,
| or as advanced as the settings for the piano practice app
| session I'm in.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| As I type this, I have about 20 HN tabs open. Why do I have so
| many tabs open? Many of them are 200 plus comment posts about
| stuff I really care about. HN has lots of quality content and I
| actively consume it. I don't use bookmarks because I plan to
| consume the content, derive insights and discard the tab. While
| I use bookmarks for stuff I plan to check regularly.
| breput wrote:
| I am not a tab hoarder, but I have been using Tab Groups as a
| way to collect (and hide) YouTube videos for future viewing.
|
| I had previously used the Pin Tab feature to collapse them, but
| Tab Groups allows you to have essentially unlimited videos that
| only take up a single favicon-sized space when collapsed.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| As someone who somewhat does the same thing, I'd recommend
| just adding the youtube videos to playlists so that you can
| just close out the youtube tab and only keep the one with
| your playlist up. Like I slap all my interesting podcasts,
| tech videos, hobby related videos, conference talks etc in a
| "currently watching" playlist and it greatly cuts down on
| decision fatigue to just have it all thrown into a queue that
| you can just sit down and consume (with occasional
| reordering).
| chupasaurus wrote:
| Pinning tabs is very bad for YouTube because they are always
| rendered and thus always leaking.
| firefax wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this? What does "always rendered"
| mean?
| chupasaurus wrote:
| Basically they have a higher priority than regular tabs,
| mentioned here [0] in context of unloading and the same
| applies to execution scheduling.
|
| [0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/10/tab-unloading-in-
| firefox-9...
| reginald78 wrote:
| I use tree style tabs and typically have anywhere from 20 to
| hundreds of tabs open. My workflow is basically opening
| anything I find interesting for further review which naturally
| opens in a tree so the main task grouped together. I use them
| as soft bookmarks to come back to where I am, generally closing
| the sub tabs when I'm done with them or closing the whole tree
| if I'm done with the main topic.
|
| I use bookmarks for infrequently used items that I know I will
| come back to at some point, the tab groups are more transient.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Mainly because the interfaces for tabs, bookmarks, and history
| are all quite disparate instead of being unified like they
| should be. None of them are _good_ , but the interface for tabs
| is more manageable.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Also search in the history should also involve the content of
| the cache and not just the page title.
|
| This is such an obvious one.
|
| It might have been an unreasonable request in 1995 when these
| concepts were coming into form but maybe we can move on...
| elcomet wrote:
| Arc browser unifies the tabs and bookmarks in a very clever
| way.
| jeltz wrote:
| The UX for bokmarks is terrible in Firefox, almost useless
| fir ny needs.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My impression is that the history for web browsers is excellent
| and it's usually pretty easy to find things, even in cases
| where I looked at maybe 100 images and have to actually look at
| the pages and not just the titles. I think though there are a
| lot of people who don't know the history is there, or don't use
| it, or don't psychologically want to accept that it exists or
| something.
|
| I wish browsers had better APIs to get history and bookmarks
| out, so if I did decide I had to find one of out 100 images I
| looked at on a particular site yesterday I could write some
| script to download those images and show all of them on one
| page.
| lurk2 wrote:
| The problem with Firefox is that the history feature doesn't
| store duplicate entries. If you go to google.com on
| 2025-04-28, it creates an entry reflecting that:
|
| ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28 10:35 google.com - 2025-04-28
| 10:30 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25
|
| If you go to google.com again the next day, it just reorders
| the list:
|
| google.com - 2025-04-29 11:30 ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28
| 10:35 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25
|
| This can make it hard to reconstruct groupings of tabs from
| the history alone if two or more groups shared a given link.
| It's not an issue for most users, but it is the reason some
| users prefer to hoard tabs.
| bearcobra wrote:
| Being able to navigate back within the page history of a tab is
| the major reason I keep them open
| felbane wrote:
| This is the primary reason I keep so many tabs open instead
| of just bookmarking things or copying URLs into my project
| notes.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Sometimes I go through email, open a bunch of links as things
| to follow up on. I keep the tabs open until I've finished with
| them. I also keep tabs open per doc I need to review, code
| review still pending completion, etc. For a given project I
| keep a host of tabs open for things like documentation and
| research. Organizing these ephemeral tabs into groups (docs,
| code reviews, project abc, etc) keeps me organized. It's far
| more lightweight than bookmarks and works great with tab
| search. It keeps me from losing track of things while also
| being able to focus better.
|
| Think of it like organizing papers on your desk vs putting them
| in the filing cabinet.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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 etc. Once I'm done with the
| purchase, I'll close them all.
|
| I sometimes use sideberry's ability to have tab groups, but not
| much.
|
| To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off
| my radar. Most of the tabs at the bottom of my sideberry tab
| list are ones I have not visited in many months. There's very
| little point having them there. However the cognitive cost and
| computational costs are close to zero.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Have you checked out Arc? I switched the other day and their
| approach to somewhat-permanent "tabs" is interesting. At
| first I missed bookmarks but then I realized that what they
| were doing is actually closer to how I _want_ to use the
| browser.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| 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/
| imcritic wrote:
| Poor UI, judging by the screenshots on that page. Another
| piece of software that treats users as imbeciles in dire
| need of being saved from "clutter".
| pawelduda wrote:
| And here I was, thinking 200-300 tabs is a lot. Turns out
| these are rookie numbers.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| 2000 is still in the same category :)
| radicality wrote:
| 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?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The tabs don't get loaded until I revisit them after
| restarting firefox.
|
| So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| Well not exactly. Tab suspenders (at least the ones I
| use) dump the current DOM state, etc to disk so when you
| reload the tab, it reloads it in mostly the same state it
| was in when you left it. Of course some pages don't like
| that and force a full refresh but generally I find when I
| get a tab reload on a documentation page when it loads
| back up I end up at roughly the same part of the page I
| was on when I left off.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Wouldn't each one still use up some memory_
|
| Firefox unloads tabs that haven't recently been used, or as
| memory approaches system limits. You can also manually
| unload your least-recently-used loaded tab.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Yes, but in practice I've experienced Firefox (at least
| under linux) getting killed by the OS when RAM runs low.
| I recently lost some low-priority reading projects after
| I couldn't recover the tab sets (they were opened months
| ago, so hard to dig back through history)
|
| I've found myself using Sidebery and the manual 'unload'
| tab option quite a bit.
| ksec wrote:
| Interesting, because out of all the three browser Firefox
| should be the best at memory management, unloading tabs
| along with Sessions recovery.
|
| But I have only ever used it on Windows and Mac. So no
| idea about Linux. You can do About:memory to check out
| which tabs are using more memory as well as manual memory
| compact.
|
| Firefox also allows unlimited History, unlike Chrome
| which I believe you cant even have history for more than
| 90 days.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| FF memory management on Linux is usually outpaced by
| oom_killer.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Not my experience at all with 16 GB RAM. Perhaps a
| configuration issue? zswap and mglru do their job well
| here and the only issue with reaching tens of thousands
| open tabs in Firefox is that it tends to become
| noticeably slower at that point.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| Firefox with any number of open tabs is stable on memory
| usage because it has a target budget for it, most of the
| oom situations come either from external processes or a
| spike from FF's own.
| Izkata wrote:
| There is a memory problem on Firefox I only found out
| about a few months ago when it started happening to me
| after an upgrade, "ghost windows" that use memory and
| never get deallocated. Restarting Firefox is the only way
| to clear them.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I suggest using the session manager extension & having it
| do periodic snapshots.
| riquito wrote:
| They don't consume anything, at my peak I closed 2736 tabs
| (I have a photo to commemorate). Firefox somehow didn't
| care
| hs86 wrote:
| (Not OP) Sidebery is half tab manager, half session
| manager. It stays in the sidebar, and if I collapse parts
| of my tree, I have set it to unload those folded tabs after
| 60 minutes. There is also an option to hide those folded
| tabs from the native tab bar.
|
| Sidebery, Tree Style Tabs, and Tabs Outliner (for Chrome)
| all go beyond just adding a linear/flat vertical tab bar to
| your browser. They preserve a nested hierarchy for child
| tabs and allow you to restore the entire tree (or just
| parts of it) on another device, which is super handy if you
| often switch between desktop, laptop, etc.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Wow! My total bookmarks in raindrops are much less than that.
| The moment I reach 30ish tabs I start experiencing micro
| panic attacks.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Hello fellow 1k+ tab hoarder.
| quesera wrote:
| > _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 not
| a problem!
| m4rtink wrote:
| 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. ;-)
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| It's doable with a single window on a 16 GB RAM machine
| as well.
| jerf wrote:
| "To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls
| off my radar."
|
| That's a feature, not a bug. A system that _doesn 't_ let
| things fall off your radar is a taskmaster, not a servant.
| You have to let things fall off your radar.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Maybe not, if there's no way to differentiate between
| something that has fallen off the radar, and something that
| is currently on the radar (I mean that all the tabs are in
| one big flat list, no matter if they're relevant or not).
| Also, if additional cruft increases the search time (i.e.
| how long does it take me to find the right tab from among
| these 2000 open ones) then each unused tab is a small
| additional burden. I'm not arguing for or against any
| position that works for anybody, I'm just pointing out some
| possible wrinkles I see from the outside.
| glenstein wrote:
| This approach has made me wonder about the utility of a pin
| board style bookmark managing service where browser history
| and bookmarking amount to the same thing. As a way of kind of
| serving that process that's served by having all kinds of
| tabs. And maybe it could even overlap with tab management.
| Like if you name a tab group something, it gets named that as
| part of a persistent history. Like a tag for your bookmark or
| something.
| imcritic wrote:
| Browser history gets rotated. I've lost a beautiful song
| that way, forgetting to like/bookmark it properly, thinking
| I'd just find it in history...
| jiehong wrote:
| Safari tends to do a good job at that too.
|
| I currently have 867 tabs on Firefox desktop, and 495 in
| Safari mobile on my phone (I need to start cleaning safari,
| because weird things happen at 500 when a new tabs is
| opened).
|
| Safari on desktop also keeps tabs unloaded when re-opening a
| window.
|
| I just wish safari would allow me to hide the top tab bar
| when I open the vertical sidebar (if someone knows how to do
| that, let me know!).
| drtgh wrote:
| I use instead the bookmarks toolbar, where you create a
| folder by topic, select the open tabs with Ctrl, and do a
| drag&drop into the folder to store such urls. You can then
| press "Open all tabs" from within the folder when you need
| to, or individually.
|
| When you have many folders in the bookmarks toolbar, an ">>"
| icon will appear at the end to the right of the bar, which
| will expand the rest of the folders vertically, that I scroll
| with the mouse wheel. So I have my at first sight folders of
| common use, and also the other ones by pressing ">>". I like
| much such dynamic (first sight horizontal, and ">>").
|
| I do not like the folder-icon on such first sight bar with
| folders, I find it a bit distracting and takes up valuable
| space, so I have a css in userChrome.css to hide such icons
| (only there, not in the ones unfolded by ">>") leaving this
| way only the folder name, where I use short names.
|
| This in combination with another css to show only icons for
| some bookmarks placed at such first sight (bookmarks with no
| name was the easier way for this). I also had to reduce the
| separation between such first sight bookmarks.
|
| In addition, I also have the bookmarks button to the left of
| the url bar, which unfolds another group of different
| bookmarks vertically.
|
| Sometimes I get the feeling that people are using tabs for
| what bookmarks were designed for, which is why the number of
| tabs open is so high.
|
| About the OP, I often search several topics at once, and/or a
| topic with several sub-topics where the open tabs of
| different topics sometimes get visually mixed up or I lose
| the track/focus, for what this new tabs groups sounds ideal.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I use it as a queue of things to read or watch. Also a few are
| soft bookmarks, yeah. These days I try to keep a lot fewer tabs
| though because I noticed that it actually stressed me out to
| have so many open. Right now, just 17.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?
|
| Basically, bookmarking webpages has been broken since the
| 1990s. It was (still is?) too difficult to bookmark something
| with a meaningful name so that you can find it again.
| Bookmarking is (without extensions... there's one that saves
| them to Nextcloud) local, so you have them stranded on a work
| computer or a home computer or your phone. And, they go stale
| (likely, a proper bookmarking system could check that Wayback
| saved it at least once, and also save a link to that just in
| case).
|
| Many of the tabs I open could be closed soon after, certainly a
| few days on. Perhaps even most. But they're mixed in with tabs
| that I would like to keep that content longer-term (weeks or
| months), and it's tedious to go back through closing them.
| Giving me tools to have ever-more-complicated schemes to
| arrange them would only make the problem worse, not better.
|
| >Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as
| useful as they could be?
|
| History is even more fucked up than bookmarking, which is
| saying something. If I do start closing tabs carelessly,
| they'll end up in the closed tabs list, which is so full of
| junk (all with similar page titles, more often than not) that
| finding them again will be impossible. If we use full history,
| then it's so spammed up with hundreds of pages per day that
| I'll never find anything in that. I don't have a team of
| forensic data technicians on staff to help me find that one
| doodad I saw while searching for something else on Amazon last
| week. Bookmarking is salvageable as a concept, if someone were
| to truly nail the implementation, but history hasn't been
| useful since 1995 when Grandma would browse the web for 10
| minutes per week.
|
| >Not judging or anything,
|
| It's ok. Judge me. I know I have a problem.
|
| PS It occurs to me that at least some of this problem has been
| that I've never found a good note-taking app that could be used
| long-term. If I had that, then I could jot down notes that
| would be superior to bookmarking pages... often times there's
| just a trick to writing a one-liner on the command line that I
| can't keep clear in my head. I don't need the link to the stack
| overflow page for that, I need an example with a comment. But
| note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right
| than bookmarking. I need to be able to access it from anywhere,
| but not be held hostage by some corporate cloud. I need rich
| text, but something around the level of markdown, not
| Evernote's "paste a pdf into it" crud. I am subscription-
| averse. And so on.
| dguest wrote:
| I discovered the feature accidentally a few days ago while I
| was trying to simultaneously write a presentation, book
| accommodations, submit travel paperwork, and brief my
| colleagues on what they should do while I'm away. And for the
| last day or so it was very useful.
|
| Basically, though, it's a sign of toxic multitasking, as some
| others have said. I'm not happy that this feature was useful
| but it _was_ useful.
| catapart wrote:
| I do project work, which generally requires dozens of tabs,
| sometimes across multiple browsers, depending up on the project
| (usually a browser-based software project).
|
| In some cases, I'll have 6 or so tabs open about different
| steps of a woodworking project, for example. Not bookmarked,
| because it's unlikely I'll need those tabs again; either for
| never working on a similar project, or for being outdated by
| the time I need to circle back. So I just leave the tabs open,
| and when I finish the project, I go through and close all the
| tabs.
|
| In my head, it's understood as: this is my
| garage/workbench/workspace; it'll be messy DURING project work,
| and it'll get cleaned up as much as I can as I go, but it'll be
| a bit unruly until the project is done. Then it'll get wound
| down.
|
| Multiply that by the 3-6 projects I'm working on at any given
| time, and then add in the utility tabs (task manager, email,
| note app, git repos, npm, cloudflare, etc), the social tabs
| (only bluesky, discord, and soundcloud), the news tabs (a tab
| for "news" like CNN/Fox/NBC/etc that I cycle through, and then
| others like HackerNews and hobbyist news sites like video
| gaming or hunting or whatever), and the experiment tabs
| (searches and likely dead-ends that I'm using to try and figure
| stuff out), and you've already got dozens of tabs. But on top
| of that, I also tend to curate "entertainment" tabs, like
| YouTube videos that I'll probably find interesting, or
| whatever. Things that I will consume and then close the tab.
|
| I've been told it's a lot of tabs to have open, but it's always
| between around 10 and 100. I've definitely seen worse. /shrug
|
| ETA: regarding the thread topic, I would find groups useful
| because I can dump all of the project tabs into a single group
| and that would help me navigate faster. But, I'm not really
| happy with Mozilla and I don't find Firefox to be particularly
| good (pages with custom elements are too slow for my taste; too
| slow on web standards, too - it's well past time for WebGPU to
| be working), so I doubt I'll use the feature much because I'm
| jumping ship to the next best thing as soon as anyone puts
| something out (looking forward to Servo for this; still not
| sold on the mac-focused Ladybird and everything else - Chrome,
| Brave, Arc, etc - are either badly built or badly managed). If
| I'm going to have to go back to non-grouping, anyway, I'm not
| sure I'll be keen to start doing it in the first place.
| dkarl wrote:
| I mostly use tab groups to keep and hide the context for a task
| I'm going to return to later. For a given task I might have
| design docs, Jira tickets, meeting notes, technical
| documentation, and a dashboard open. I can group all of those
| into a tab group, collapse it, and then they're out of sight,
| out of mind until I return to that task.
|
| I could use windows the same way, but my personal preference is
| to use tab groups so I can keep fewer windows open.
|
| Right now I also have several tab groups that are each a
| collection of current documentation and historical context for
| a particular internal system at my company. I always intend to
| turn a tab group like that into a list of links in a note, and
| sometimes I do, but a lot of them are still sitting around.
| Chrome is reliable enough at restoring them that I have tab
| groups I've kept for over a year.
|
| I also have groups of documents I intend to read and digest
| better. They are 90% aspirational, but they serve a
| psychological purpose. I frequently scan through them, so
| anything that gets ignored for very long probably isn't
| important.
| hollerith wrote:
| I don't get it.
|
| To me a browser tab is like an Emacs buffer: although I need
| the ability to have more than one Emacs buffer open at a time
| and to switch between them, if some process ran at random times
| and deleted all the buffers I haven't looked at in the last 2
| minutes, I probably wouldn't be significantly annoyed or
| hindered.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Any task that can't be accomplished in one sitting is left to
| return to later (Note: If this isn't a given - for example, "I
| simply don't do things I don't have time for" - then you may
| not have enough in common with the people you're asking about
| to be able to relate).
|
| Step two: You just need a little discipline to audit your tasks
| and admit when something has fallen off the top layer of your
| priority list and take the couple minutes to archive it into a
| folder of bookmarks or text file or other format of your
| choice.
|
| And then you need the discipline to occasionally take the time
| to audit your archives for things that have fallen even lower
| and delete them (or archive them more deeply...).
|
| For many, it's difficult to justify spending time you already
| clearly don't have enough of doing such audits. Same psychology
| behind procrastination. Hence a self-perpetuating problem.
|
| Logically if your task income is greater than your available
| time, this pattern occurs.
|
| Task income increases both with curiosity/goals and obligation,
| and most people have an abundance of those. Time is necessarily
| scarce. So, logically, many people have a lot of tabs.
|
| Note that learning or researching is one of the most common
| tasks, is an _active_ task, and usually requires multiple
| concurrent tabs. I.e. it 's not simply one article you want to
| read later.
| iworshipfaangs2 wrote:
| I don't think I ever need even ten, but I inevitably end up
| with 30+ spread across two browsers because I just don't close.
| Then I close all in CTRL+W rage* and rely on history + memory
| to find anything I'd like to return to.
|
| *Thanks for your post. It reminded me to go into firefox and
| unset "Open previous windows and tabs," which I accidentally
| turned on and has ruined my ability to rage X out of firefox
| everytime I have too many tabs.
| schmorptron wrote:
| Yeah, I'm using them as soft bookmarks. Turn them into hard
| bookmarks every month or so, not to actively look at them, but
| the firefox address bar searches in bookmarks as well and
| offers them up first when typing, so I have a repository of
| things I've declared interesting / cool / good before that I
| can refer back to when typing keywords into the address bar.
| Messy, but it works! I must have a couple tens of thousands of
| bookmarks by now...
| thibran wrote:
| It's not uncommon to work on multiple things over a certain
| period of time. So I have a bunch of tabs with all the
| information needed open for every topic. From time to time I
| close a 'group' of tabs when I'm done. This workflow seems very
| natural to me.
|
| Using bookmarks would not fit here, because I have no intention
| to access the tabs in future (e.g. a year from now) again.
| xnx wrote:
| > Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically
| anything interesting?
|
| Reading queue. Unfortunately, every app becomes its own sort of
| todo list: email, browser tabs, social feeds, RSS feed.
|
| Maybe someone will be smart enough to make an AI agent that
| collects, cleans (ad removal, de-sensationalizing,
| summarization), and prioritizes information from disparate
| sources.
| Arelius wrote:
| I'm actually really curious what the experience is like having
| not more than 10 tabs at a time, like what thing causes you to
| close a tab? 10 seems sort of wild to me, it's enough that you
| are clearly not just monotasking, somehow bounded. Probably in
| contrast, if you could imagine just forgetting to do that whole
| closing tabs thing, eventually you have hundreds or thousands
| of tabs.
|
| Some context, for starters, I have about 10 tabs pinned,
| discord, 3 slack instances, my fastmail, my gmail, my work
| mail, spotify, my task list.
|
| Then, there is the things I left open because I am going to
| read it, a stack of documentation I'm working on. A few random
| products I'm researching as procrastination. Any search I'm on,
| and a tree of tabs from different results that I'm working
| through.
|
| There are the various layers of those things for the things I
| was working on 30 minutes or a day ago, that I haven't worked
| back to yet.
|
| And most importantly, there are all the tabs that used to fall
| in the prior categories, that I just forgot to close, or
| haven't gotten around to closing yet.
| iaaan wrote:
| I only have 10-20 tabs open at a time, generally, but I still
| use tab groups to reduce the cognitive load of remembering
| which tabs relate to which projects/tasks. Previously, I would
| separate groups of tabs using a blank "New Tab" tab, so this
| update effectively just gave me a good way to name the groups
| and organize them more compactly.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| I use the simple tab groups plugin and I normally have quite a
| few tabs open (but only a few visible at a time).
|
| I group my tabs by project/topic so I can just send them to the
| background when I'm not working on that project and bring them
| back up when I context switch back to that project. So I'll
| have like 20 different groups, each dedicated to a specific
| personal project, some upstream project I'm contributing to, to
| an academic topic I'm studying (ex: PL theory, abstract
| algebra, topology, cryptography, etc), a group dedicated to
| looking into job opportunities, and then also some
| entertainment groups that have the youtube playlists I'm
| currently working through (some just fun, some niche topics,
| some tech) as well as other "third monitor content".
|
| Each group acts less like bookmarks and more like a workspace
| you can quickly send to the background, pull back up to the
| foreground, or rotate between windows/monitors (without also
| moving pinned tabs which stay fixed to the window they are in).
|
| It makes multitasking easier and you don't really get much
| memory overhead since the tabs generally all suspend
| automatically after a certain amount of inactivity anyways
| (might be due to the tab group plugin or another autosuspend
| plugin I have).
|
| To give a TLDR: I use it to context switch quickly between
| projects without having to manually reopen stuff in the order
| it was in and at the spots on the pages where I was when I left
| off. So when I tab over on tmux to the workspace for a project
| that I haven't touched in a while, I can pull up the firefox
| tab group on my documentation window/monitor and immediately
| see where I left off and I can pick right back up again.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I don't use an excessive tab count I don't think, but still
| find it useful to simply organize tabs by "topic". Eg. research
| question, what github issue I'm working on and so on. Since
| they can be temporarily hidden it allows a less cluttered tab
| bar and improves focus when context switching.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?
| It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open_
|
| Doing some EE work last week, I hit my personal worst-case
| scenario for tab usage. A certain chip manufacturer whose name
| will not be cited here except by the initials T and I has a
| particularly nice part that outperforms its peers from other
| manufacturers. Its data sheet is unfortunately among the worst
| I've ever seen. Lots of missing and wrong information that is
| absolutely required to write and debug firmware for the chip.
|
| The only way to succeed with this particular chip if you don't
| have an FAE on speed-dial is to comb through their customer
| forum and read every post related to the chip, where one or two
| hapless employees are actually doing a great job filling in
| where the data sheet falls short. And the quickest way to do
| that is to go through the list of search results and middle-
| click the link to every message thread that looks like it might
| be important.
|
| I didn't count the number of tabs I had open, but it was easily
| over 50 and probably close to 100. Rookie numbers compared to
| some, as has been pointed out, but it's certainly necessary to
| be able to juggle more than a dozen tabs or so.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Like garbage collection, closing tabs isn't a job that should
| have to be performed by humans.
|
| Browsers are basically designed wrong. Sort of like how after
| you learn about the write ahead log (WAL), you wonder how
| databases could have ever worked before. Or reducers, or
| Firebase, or anything like that.
|
| Browsers should record everything, including a cache of all
| data received or sent, so that the user can rewind to any time
| in history, a bit like Apple's Time Machine. Then pruning
| history should be a task for heuristics.
|
| I've given up hope that browsers will ever improve now.
| Although I've dreamed of taking something like WebKit and
| building a real browser where every tab is truly an isolated
| process, then attacking it like a video game and getting
| rendering performance up to multiple thousands of frames per
| second. With something like Russian doll caching or a hash tree
| to cache renderings for gigabyte per second throughput. So that
| page loads are measured in milliseconds and restoring 1000 tabs
| could happen in 1 second or be skipped entirely since they
| aren't visible.
|
| I grew up in the 80s with 1 MHz computers, so consider
| computers today as running thousands of times slower than they
| should. The web runs millions of times slower. That collective
| waste puts the onus on the user to be self-sufficient. A bit
| like how capitalism can only reach low single digits of
| efficiency because it forces every consumer to own a copy of
| everything. Alternatives like socialism are little better,
| because the real problem is that artificial scarcity isn't
| being addressed through automation, so we can't see beyond
| economic systems and think they're fundamental.
|
| "Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?"
| is asking the wrong question. The question should be: what's
| wrong with browsers that causes people to have so many tabs
| open?
| jeltz wrote:
| I am not sure if your proposed solution is the right one or
| not but you are certainly asking the right questions. What is
| wrong with browsers?
| 2mlWQbCK wrote:
| I used to have 200+ tabs open all the time, but it's just
| noise. Now I close tabs asap. If the page contents are of any
| interest I save the contents first using the Single File
| extension. If the page address is for some reason interesting
| (that is far less common) I save a bookmark. I started having
| the bookmarks bar enabled again and it pretty much serves the
| purpose that the tabs used to serve for me, but in a more
| organized way.
| em-bee wrote:
| the problem is that bookmarks are to static.
|
| remember where the term "bookmark" came from. a strip of paper
| or string that you lay in the pages of a book to remember where
| you are reading. when you read further you move the bookmark to
| the new position.
|
| browser bookmarks don't do that. instead every time you
| remember a location you get a new bookmark. and then you have
| to go around and search for the old one to remove it.
|
| a tab always remembers the latest state and gets updated
| automatically as i move forward or backward. the state is also
| cached as long as the tab is open. that matters for hackernews
| for example which tells me which messages are new since i last
| loaded the page. when i go to a tab the page doesn't get
| automatically reloaded so i get back to the old state, whereas
| with bookmarks that state is lost.
|
| if bookmarks could keep the state (that means permanently cache
| the old version until i force a reload) and allow me to update
| them when that state changes while using the page, then i could
| use them instead of tabs.
| eviks wrote:
| Tabs can be better than bookmarks for "project"/"workspace"
| type groups because they preserve (and maintain) actual working
| order of pages in the same primary browser interface. Bookmarks
| require a separate one and are not synced to the actual working
| order
| Tagbert wrote:
| I use tab groups for work projects. I am a project manager. I
| usually have somewhere around 200 long term tabs open at a time
| with several other transient tabs.
|
| I typically am working on 4-5 projects at a time with some
| other non-project work categories like status reporting. A lot
| of my work involves reading and editing multiple web pages or
| writing updates on web pages based on communications in other
| channels. I reuse the same web pages multiple times a day and
| it is not feasible to close and reopen them constantly. Tab
| groups let me switch between the web pages for projects, read
| or update the pages, and then switch to another project. If
| nothing else, it means that I can actually see the titles of
| most tabs within a project rather than having them all collapse
| into identical icons. Tab groups helps keep this sane.
|
| I am currently using Firefox-based Zen because its Tab
| Workspaces gives me the project separation I need. Chrome's tab
| groups don't offer enough separate between groups for me. I'll
| have to checkout this Firefox implementation but from what I
| saw earlier they may be adopting Chrome's minimal separation
| method of grouping so that may not work. I was using Arc for a
| while as they have a similar grouping to what Zen does.
| pmontra wrote:
| I have 53 tabs open on Firefox Android. They are a dump of what
| I'm reading or wish to read or what I want to come back to.
| Sometimes I send a tab to my desktop using the KDE Connect app.
| I have Gnome with GS Connect on my Linux laptop.
|
| I've got 113 tabs on that machine (about:telemetry#scalars-
| tab_search=tab). I'm using 5 virtual desktop, 2 for me and one
| for each of my customers. One Firefox window per desktop (maybe
| my workaround for tab groups), one editor window per desktop,
| one terminal per desktop. The Slack app on the desktop I'm
| currently using. My password manager on all desktops. I switch
| using an hotkey, Windows + the first letter of the customer. No
| animations, no Activities, nothing. I was OK with Gnome 2.
|
| It's nice to have 32 GB of RAM. 113
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Does it need really that much RAM? RAM you don't use tend to
| get swapped out, and browsers themselves are pretty good
| working with a large amount of tabs opened, sometimes by
| unloading those that are currently unused. Note: swap is
| good!
|
| I think what kill memory more than having dozens of windows
| on many desktops is self contained apps and VMs. For example,
| if you have a browser with 1000 tabs open, you will only have
| one instance of the engine, and the browser can manage the
| memory associated with tabs effectively. Now if you have 10
| distinct browsers opened with all their dependencies, which
| can happen if you are running electron apps and you are
| actually using them, you are going to need a lot of RAM. Also
| if they all come with their dependencies instead of using
| what's on the system, you also multiply RAM usage.
|
| Running many instances of the same apps running the same
| libraries tend to not cost that much, as they only need to be
| loaded once and are shared. There are a reason we call .so
| and .dll files _shared_ libraries.
|
| VMs are even worse, as they need a whole fixed chunk of
| memory that is mostly opaque to the host OS, meaning there
| isn't much it can do.
| pmontra wrote:
| I checked. htop reports 22.7 GB. I do have one VM with 4 GB
| RAM. Having 32 GB I disabled swap. It's been maybe 8 years
| since the last time I had swap on. No problems at all.
| ksec wrote:
| Most common scenario. RSS Reading.
|
| I often wonder how other people read their RSS feeds. I open
| them as new tab for all my interested links. My Subscribed list
| mostly generate about 400 - 500 links per day. Most of them are
| news. And scanning through all of them I mostly open about 30 -
| 40 tabs. Sometimes it could be up to 100s depending on topics.
| Then I just run through them one by one. The same goes with HN.
| Normally I get about 10 - 20 tabs opened on HN per day. All
| Together this could be 50 - 60 Tabs opened. And if you dont
| have time to read through them all they stayed there. Another
| day another reading cycle.
|
| Another category which happens to have lots of tabs is Shopping
| and comparing. Trying to look for the best tools for the best
| price and where I could buy them. This normally includes
| opening 5 - 10 Tabs form the like of Reddit or some other
| specific forums.
|
| Or Researching about a Topic where it leads to 5 other sub
| topic and every sub topic has 5 - 8 tabs.
|
| I currently have different "Groups" of tabs, MBA, Jobs
| Searching, People I follow, Surgery operation comparison,
| Insurance, Youtube [1], AI, Electric Toothbrush and Water and
| Water Floss ( Any Recommendation from HN ? ), HN, Twitter.
|
| I used to do 1000s of tabs but Nowadays I tend to limit to
| within a few hundred at most. Although that is also partly
| because Safari is the worst browser for multiple tabs and
| Firefox on iOS dont work as well.
|
| [1] I increasingly think Youtube should have a Desktop App
| because the web simply does not provide good enough experience.
| brooke2k wrote:
| I just don't close them, that's all. If I search something, I
| open a new tab. After hours or days, there's a lot of them, at
| which point I go "whoops," close all the windows, and start
| fresh.
|
| Maybe that's not typical tab use though, idk
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs
| for?"_
|
| Why are you qualifying "normal" there? I have thousands of tabs
| open because I have infinite curiosity and a psychological
| deficit of attention span.
|
| An open tab is earnest expression of a curiosity one is
| unlikely to actualize in this short life.
|
| > _" A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven
| for?"_
| coldpie wrote:
| So, suppose you have 2200 tabs open right now. Under what
| circumstances would you open, say, the 330th tab from the
| left? How would you access it?
| perihelions wrote:
| It's a different question to ask "how will you access it?"
| and "have you abandoned the hope of accessing it again?"
|
| Sometimes they come up in my search results in the Omnibar.
| Open tabs are in the top rank of results.
| coldpie wrote:
| The omnibar feature also searches your bookmarks and
| history, so they are recoverable using the same method if
| you closed the tab.
|
| _But_ that depends on you thinking to bookmark the page;
| or accepting that some things will age out of the browser
| history. So I guess it 's kind of like a fragile
| bookmark: probably reliable, but not the end of the world
| if tab restoration failed for some reason.
|
| Also, (I assume) tabs retain their Previous Page list,
| which also has some value.
|
| Interesting. Thanks for the discussion!
| homebrewer wrote:
| The tab will also have the context around it (in form of
| other tabs). When you often switch between various tech
| stacks/frameworks and open 30 pages of documentation for
| each one, it's useful to be able to restore all of it
| easily without messing with bookmarks (that haven't
| improved in the slightest over the past two decades).
| hysan wrote:
| Primary use cases for me:
|
| 1. Organizing threads of research into context groups. Usually
| doing heavy deep dives where it's uncertain if I need to
| revisit a previous branch, so rather than closing, it's much
| more beneficial to group and collapse. It's also easier to
| reopen and glance at the topics you looked at.
|
| 2. Similarly, grouping tabs by purpose while developing. It
| lets me organize tabs in a way that makes it so they I don't
| need multiple browser windows open. It makes for a much more
| zen-like development environment.
|
| 3. Testing across dev, staging, and prod. Want the same tabs
| open but grouped so that I don't accidentally do something
| destructive on prod that I meant to do locally. Now that this
| is in Firefox, I can also combine it with multi-account
| containers for more workflows.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?
|
| Because book marking sucks as there's no associated metadata on
| the site behind the link. You have to insert that data yourself
| by changing the page description. How do I search my links for
| battery charging if the link that leads to battery charging is
| joe6pack.com/foo?bla=foiuewyrocv9yetn75y9087wn7y9ewsygbatmobile
| ? History is similar and something I dont want to bother with.
|
| It's easier to just leave the tabs open and come back to them
| later. I do this all the time with sites like bandcamp,
| shopping sites, and so on - open a bunch of tabs and slowly
| work through them. I might have upwards of 50+ tabs open at
| times but they are mostly short lived, lasting a few days until
| I get frustrated and go on a tab nuking spree.
|
| These days I manually maintain my own bookmarks in flat text
| files arranged by subject with my own metadata and just use
| grep. The link goes on one line, the next lines are "meta data"
| followed by a blank line. The list is mainly filled with stuff
| I really want to find again in the future so I put in the
| effort.
| bityard wrote:
| I use Vivaldi which has had excellent support for tab groups
| (as "Workspaces") for quite a while now.
|
| At work and at home, I always have multiple projects ongoing at
| the same time. I use one tab group per project. I typically
| have my notes for that project in the first tab and then other
| tabs contain documentation, reference material, forum threads,
| search engine queries, and whatever else that I want OPEN and
| AVAILABLE while I'm working so that I'm not always wasting time
| closing and opening tabs that I keep coming back to.
|
| This way, when I switch between projects, I just select the tab
| group for that project and everything is exactly the way I left
| it last time. Didn't have to remember to manually save anything
| beforehand last time, or manually restore a folder of bookmarks
| or whatever.
|
| Why not use bookmarks? For me, bookmarks are only ever used for
| links that I go to semi-regularly to regularly. I will NEVER
| add a bookmark to a site that I visit once, or might want to go
| back to again, because eventually you have to dedicate time to
| sorting, cleaning up, reorganizing, deleting them. And I HATE
| curating things.
|
| Why not use browser history? Because it's full of all kinds of
| garbage which can hard to sort through and because my browser
| history only goes back about 6 months. I don't need (or want)
| to keep my history forever because it just needlessly fills up
| the disk and becomes a liability if my computer ever gets
| compromised. And sometimes my projects go longer than that.
| bityard wrote:
| How about I try a metaphor: Imagine you work in a building.
| Inside the building, there are multiple rooms. Each room has a
| different project going on inside it. In one room, you are
| building a canoe. In another, you are restoring a motorcycle.
| Another is a music production studio. And so on. Every day, you
| enter this hypothetical building to get some work done in one
| or more of the rooms.
|
| Now imagine every night while you're asleep, a cleaning crew
| comes into your building and tidies up. But they don't just
| sweep the floor and take out the garbage, they also put away
| all the tools, pick up any open books and put them back on the
| bookshelf, re-assemble the motorcycle, and put the music
| equipment back in its retail boxes.
|
| When you come back in the morning, you have to dedicate minutes
| to hours just getting things back to where they were when you
| left. And because you're ADHD as fuck, you probably don't
| remember exactly where you left off and frequently end up
| skipping some major step or accidentally redoing work that you
| did before.
|
| That is what my life feels like without tab groups.
| asqueella wrote:
| A perfect metaphor for Windows auto-update!
| em-bee wrote:
| i feel exactly like you, but i managed to solve that problem
| with windows, each room/project is a window with tabs. since
| the UI makes switching windows easy, that makes switching
| projects easy. eventually i discovered the winger extension
| which allows me to give windows a name, its important
| feature, because it makes finding the right window easier. it
| also makes it easy to move tabs from one window to another.
| npteljes wrote:
| I also rarely have many things open, but now I have a bunch,
| and it's very useful to have them in group (in Edge). I am
| working on three services at once, because we need a change
| that impacts all three, and they depend on each other as well.
| I have my ticket open, and its parent ticket as well for
| context. I have the pull request, the build pipeline, and the
| deployment settings open for each service. I have an AI open,
| an API reference open, and I have 1-2 random internet searches
| open. All in all, this is 14-15 tabs.
|
| I can imagine that other people who have different contexts,
| and some web apps like mail, im and socials, that can easily
| make use of tab groups. Grouping and coloring them makes it
| really easy to not get lost in the bunch that is open at the
| same time.
| new_user_final wrote:
| I had a meeting, so I opened 5/6 relevant pages to quickly show
| something. I thought the meeting was postponed, so I created a
| chrome tab group and close the group and continue working with
| 1 or 2 tab in my browser.
|
| Suddenly, meeting was scheduled again, I simply clicked on the
| group, and got all the tabs open again.
| deredede wrote:
| > Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their
| history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue with bookmarks and
| history not being as useful as they could be?
|
| I think tabs are just the better user interface.
|
| It's not that I'm afraid I won't find the page in my history
| and bookmarks, it's that I don't want to have to do that
| because it's painful. History is full of irrelevant pages.
| Bookmarks make me lose my flow constantly wondering if I should
| bookmark a page or it's not needed (and in which directory!).
|
| Tabs have a very simple workflow with low cognitive overhead.
| Everything is preserved by default (middle click/ctrl click is
| my default click in a browser), unless I'm clearly in a linear
| workflow where I don't want to keep the page (left click).
| Self-organizing due to the way they open, but very easy to
| manually reorder (or close) if needed. Kept in memory so going
| back to a (recent) tab is instantaneous.
|
| They just... get out of the way and let me work. Tabs make
| browsing feel like one continuous task, where history/bookmarks
| feel like constant interruptions.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I think an interesting feature might be tabs that turn into
| bookmarks automatically after a week/month of being open but
| not interacted with.
| m463 wrote:
| > It seems to be super common
|
| I've always wondered if this kind of thing is just embarassing
| to talk about.
|
| Sort of like admitting "the trunk of my car is full of
| unresolved stuff" or "my refrigerator is where things go to
| die"
|
| it's just recently that lots of tabs has become normalized and
| people talk about it.
|
| Maybe telemetry normalized it ("lots of people use 100's of
| tabs")
| colordrops wrote:
| I use them for work. Usually I have multiple efforts going on
| at once, so I put jira tickets, documents, deployment tools,
| etc for each effort in a group.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Yes, soft bookmark for ongoing threads. Bookmark folders are
| fine for other things, but generally bookmarks end up out of
| sight, and out of mind.
| sammyteee wrote:
| Personally, I find myself working on multiple tasks/projects
| across a day and the easiest way to decompartmentalize it all
| in my head is to move tabs related to a project into it's own
| group, that way I can click around Project A, Project B et
| cetera
| butterlettuce wrote:
| Where can I download it? I don't see a link in the blog.
| echoangle wrote:
| There's a link at the bottom for me:
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
|
| Assuming you want to download firefox. It seems to be
| integrated into the browser, there's no add-on or so for this
| that you would need to download separately.
| butterlettuce wrote:
| Weird, I had to go into about:config, search for
| "browser.tabs.groups.enabled" (which was set to false) and
| enable it there.
| graton wrote:
| It is built into the latest version of Firefox.
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
| neogodless wrote:
| As others said, it will be built into Firefox, and is already
| part of the mid-April release, but apparently not yet enabled.
| When I updated to 137.0.2, it opened the following page:
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups
|
| > Starting in Firefox version 137, you can use tab groups to
| manage open tabs in Firefox by grouping them together and
| labelling them. All users should expect to see the feature by
| May 6, 2025.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Already using Tree Style Tabs. It's the one critical plugin I
| need. I still don't understand how anyone works without it.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| Very interesting plugin, I will need to review it sometime soon
| silveira wrote:
| The same. Sometimes I pair with people working (programming)
| and having dozens of tabs open without any vertical tabs
| plugin. They pretty much have to spend time clicking and
| searching tab by tab what they need.
|
| I don't get why vertical tab is not at least an option in all
| browsers.
| masfuerte wrote:
| TIL that Firefox gained native vertical tabs recently!
|
| It's in the General section of Settings.
| reginald78 wrote:
| 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 and can't show
| more than a handful of tabs without a scrollbar showing up.
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| I do a decent amount of front-end work, so I'll have a
| browser and code editor side-by side on a 29in monitor. In
| this situation, I very much prefer horizontal tabs. So that's
| one use case.
| sdk- wrote:
| Exactly this. Plus, I rarely have over 20 tabs and even
| when I'm close to that number I mainly use the 10 first
| ones. Vertical tabs is a cool feature but both modes are
| useful depending your needs.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| FYI. Firefox supports vertical tabs natively now.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Tree style is better, it gives you a visual hierarchy of
| where each tab has come from. Makes Wikipedia rabbit holes
| more interesting.
| Cshelton wrote:
| Yes, I wish the native vertical tabs gave that same
| hierarchy. I will keep using Tree Style Tabs until it does.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Personally, it's easy for me. If I get above 10 tabs, I just
| close them all. I don't see any value in having more than that
| and they just become a distraction for me. Tree style, sidebar
| tabs, tab groups, etc. are just overkill for me.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| I'm in this boat as well. From my perspective, I'd only
| bother keeping a tab open for a long period of time if it
| meets the following criteria:
|
| 1) It's something I'd actually want to go and view later
| (most stuff fails this criteria)
|
| 2) It's not something I can easily find again
|
| 3) It's something that I only anticipate going back to a
| couple of times, and thus isn't worth making into a bookmark
|
| And over all my years browsing the web, almost nothing
| satisfies all that criteria. I'm pretty aggressive with
| closing tabs, and I almost never regret closing a tab.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's just not how some people browse. When I hit HN's
| frontpage, I open every thread with an interesting headline
| in a new tab (within the HN tree.) Then I visit them one by
| one, and at least each one gets another tab opened (for the
| article.) The article may get multiple tabs opened if it has
| references or links that are interesting. If there's
| something that I want to get back to later, or don't have
| time to read now but looks interesting, it stays open. If I
| won't get to it for a while (before the next time I return to
| HN) it gets pulled out of the HN tree into its own tree.
| HN frontpage |> Interesting thread .|>
| Interesting article ..|> Interesting link from article
| 1 ..|> Interesting link from article 2 .|> Link
| from interesting thread. |> Interesting thread |>
| Interesting thread |> Interesting thread |>
| Interesting thread
|
| Things that get moved out of tree I might get back to in an
| hour or a year.
|
| If I'm at Amazon trying to buy a spatula, I have 10 different
| Amazon spatula pages open, and also three articles about
| spatulas within the tab tree.
|
| I dunno. When I go to a bookstore, I don't buy one book, go
| home, then come back and buy another book. I browse the
| bookstore, buy everything that I want, and I put most of them
| on a shelf while I read one. I do not find the shelf a
| distraction.
| felbane wrote:
| I wish there were better coupling between TST and STG (Simple
| Tab Groups). Automatic nesting of TST is great, but sometimes
| I'd like to just move a whole tree into a named group. Maybe
| I'm just doing it wrong.
| neogodless wrote:
| Hmm if this would just automatically work with / integrate with
| multi-account containers it would probably be particularly
| helpful.
|
| e.g. just let me check an option to group items that share a
| multi-account container into the same tab group.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Why did it take so long? It was their number one request for 3
| years and chrome pushed this feature nearly 5 years ago. The
| design looks like a straight copy of chrome so it's not like
| there was a large design process to work out. It feels like it
| was finally prioritized so that they could "improve" it with ai,
| similar to what chrome is doing.
| ianwalter wrote:
| Yea crazy how long it took. Zen browser users have been waiting
| for them to ship this so it can be used in Zen. Of course they
| announce this the day I switch to Orion.
| Spunkie wrote:
| 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 standing sticking point for some users.
| hysan wrote:
| 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.
| fikama wrote:
| It's just a clone of chrome feature. Cool they impelmented it
| too. I just don't see this "we listen to the community" more like
| "we are just trailing behind chrome"
| CivBase wrote:
| I really hope their implementation on mobile is better than
| Chrome's. I prefer no tab groups on mobile over what Chrome
| did.
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| Opera had vertical tabs and groups in 2010.
| BuckRogers wrote:
| I used FF for 20 years and moved to Edge a few years ago. I
| thought similar about this feature, Edge has had tab groups and
| vertical tabs for a long time now.
| lencastre wrote:
| Is this a superior solution to the firefox containers add on?
| graton wrote:
| Seems different to me. Containers allow you to have different
| cookies per container.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I think I'd combine the two features, each tab group having
| it's own container. I'm sure some use would lose their space-
| bar actuated room heater or whatever the relevant xkcd is.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I'm hoping they can auto-assign tabs to groups by domain name.
| Most of my tabs are just random Github links into various repos.
| freddydumont wrote:
| Seems like it still won't replace Sidebery for me as this
| provides only a single grouping layer.
| Ezhik wrote:
| To replace Sidebery Firefox would need to clone like half of
| Arc Browser.
| honieware wrote:
| Arc is dead, long live Arc. Best we can hope for while The
| Browser Company is toying with their investor-bait "AI
| browser" is for other browsers and extensions to copy the
| good parts of it.
| blackenedgem wrote:
| The funny thing is Firefox already perfected this feature years
| ago with Panorama. Then one day decided to remove it because
| "less than 1% of users use it"
| (https://news.softpedia.com/news/firefox-45-will-drop-tab-gro...)
|
| There's been community forks of it since then that I switched to
| and will continue to use instead. Grouping tabs at the top is
| much worse UX than an entire page you can drag and drop around,
| and blatantly copying Chrome.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| What percent of their users even have telemetry enabled?
| Mozilla always pulls this crap, using these biased telemetry
| numbers as a fig leaf to drop genuinely useful features.
| Luckily they still allow for community modification.
| reginald78 wrote:
| Sadly, this seems to be the general purpose of telemetry. If
| the gathered statistics can be contorted to justify doing
| something you wanted to do anyway, then telemetry will be
| used for just that. If it says something else, just ignore it
| and say you don't have enough resources or something.
|
| Proponents suggest it is necessary to improve software.
| Microsoft has extensively used telemetry for at least 10
| years in Windows, does that feel improved to anyone during
| that time? I'm of the opinion they largely used it to
| identify what existing features users were still being
| productive with so they could be enshitified next.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Most users leave telemetry enabled. It's enabled by default.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Exactly. The Panorama View is descent, but it tends to lose
| everything if you accidentally close the wrong window.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| AI powered smart groups... more AI, yay.
|
| /s obviously
|
| I wish companies would spend less time shoving AI down our
| throats, because I feel like they are over-hyped and the privacy
| trade-off is rarely worth it.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Awesome, looks more convenient than onetab.
| lostmsu wrote:
| I started reconsidering Edge literally last week because Panorama
| View managed to lose my groups again, and Edge has excellent
| workspaces (envy).
|
| Haven't tried the new groups yet, but from the video it is
| unclear what to do if I don't want them to constantly stay
| visible in the tab bar. The whole point for me is decluttering it
| from something I don't need at the moment.
| yoavm wrote:
| This, together with the "Expand sidebar on hover" for vertical
| tabs, means that I can almost stop using a customized
| userchrome.css file completely, and that I've disabled Sidebery.
| It's great to have this implemented natively!
| nelblu wrote:
| A little tangential question, but what is up with the "Distilled"
| logo on their blog site? I don't think I ever noticed this
| earlier, and I can't seem to find anything on their blog
| explaining it.
| righthand wrote:
| Why is the demo video not of the actual implementation but
| instead using a barebones wireframe that looks nothing like
| Firefox?
| righthand wrote:
| I wonder when this will come to Librewolf.
| izzydata wrote:
| For some reason I had thought this was already implemented and I
| just wasn't using it because I don't have a lot of tabs open. It
| appears I was mistaken. Nice to see this implemented in Firefox.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| It _was_ an existing feature, then it got moved to an
| extension, then they broke the extension. And then, much later,
| they implemented it again.
| m4r1k wrote:
| Apparently, they've also released a new profile manager that's
| finally simpler than the clunky earlier one. This is the last
| feature I really need for my workflow to completely ditch Chrome.
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
| philsnow wrote:
| > Firefox prevents syncing multiple profiles with the same
| Mozilla account on the same device. If you create a new Firefox
| profile and then try to sign in to Sync with the same Mozilla
| account used in the other profile on that device, Firefox will
| block the sign-in to keep profiles separate.
|
| Is this just a temporary technical limitation / anybody know if
| there are plans to fix this? Why should the user need to
| remember which profile is synced on a given device?
| pxoe wrote:
| It's probably not broken but just works that way. Profiles
| are separate in more ways. Syncing all profiles could be
| counterproductive and unwanted. (for example, profiles which
| might just belong to different people - though it may be
| unlikely on a same pc but nonetheless. or syncing profiles
| that are intentionally kept separate, like work and personal
| stuff). It's not how it worked before in firefox, and it's
| not how it works on chrome or other browsers, and it's
| probably not in users expectations, when they expect separate
| things to be actually separate. (which seems to utterly
| confuse people who mix up container tabs and profiles
| functionality.) Conversely, why should someone remember, or
| rather, suddenly find out, that every profile in some firefox
| install is syncing to a same account, even though it is
| "intended" to be a separate, brand new, start from scratch
| kinda thing?
| pxoe wrote:
| Hooray, it only took them ...a decade or so?
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I've not changed anything on my home setup yet, but I've been
| experimenting with vertical tabs and tabs groups for the past
| week or so. I'm not sure if vertical tabs are doing me any good,
| but I think Tab Groups have really been aiding my productivity.
|
| I have so many tasks I'm working on in a given day, constantly
| jumping between specific instances of the same site over and
| over. For example, on any given ticket I'm working on, I've
| probably got tabs open for: the JIRA ticket, Bitbucket code,
| Sharepoint documentation, an AWS console, DataDog logs, etc. And
| I'm probably jumping between at least five tickets a day,
| depending on if I hit a roadblock with one or a different one is
| suddenly getting escalated. Being able to GROUP all of those five
| tabs into one little block that I can label with the ticket
| number, and then hide/re-expand them when I'm ready to come back
| to it...that's pretty awesome.
|
| The only part about Tab Groups that has confused me so far is
| that there's a right-click option when clicking on a group that
| says "Save and Close Group". I've closed it, but have not figured
| out how to bring it back once closed...so I'm not sure what the
| point of "saving" it is.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| The Panorama View extension can also help with organization. A
| whole set of tabs for a different context, for instance.
| abhinavk wrote:
| Saved groups are shown in the _List all Tabs_ menu (the button
| on the right of tab bar)
| LPNintendo wrote:
| that button is NOT there
| submeta wrote:
| Love Firefox. More than Safari or Chrome. Not only function wise.
| But also mission wise. Keep up the good work Mozilla.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > But also mission wise
|
| I have bad news for you my friend.
|
| For years, most of (+90%) Mozilla's revenue was ad partnership
| based*. Recently this has gotten worse:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096
|
| * https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-
| assume...
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The mission for the last five years or so seems to have been
| enrich the CEO and piss off the users?
| sh3rl0ck wrote:
| always wanted this, FINALLY.
|
| Moving from Arc to Zen, this was the biggest drawback I felt, and
| now, I'm just waiting for the merge!
| xemoka wrote:
| Similarly moved from Arc to Zen; hopefully this will allow for
| multiple windows/views into the same set of tabs? or at least a
| future possibility.
| ochronus wrote:
| Finally, I can use Firefox again!
| submeta wrote:
| I never thought I'd belong to the group of people who never close
| tabs. Had read David Allen some twenty years ago and subscribed
| to his ,,inbox zero" mantra. Until I realized I don't have the
| time to clean up. I keep doing stuff, and when the chaos
| surpasses thresholds, I reset that system (close all tabs,
| restart, start with a clean slate). But this sounds interesting.
| Will give it a try.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| I found that tab groups themselves are not synced. So, grouped
| tabs from one machine will appear as random set of tabs on
| another machine.
| thibran wrote:
| After Firefox Mobile, killing Thunderbird and a sharp decline in
| market share, Mozilla finally starts to build what it's users
| want. Selling it as gigantic success is very American.
|
| In the end vertical tabs are nice and I hope I like the new tab
| groups too (the previous official tab group addon got killed by
| Mozilla and 'destroyed' my workflows at the time).
|
| Let's see, maybe Mozilla is on the path to something great yet
| again by being more innovative.
| yapyap wrote:
| > What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At
| Firefox, we build it
|
| How about 4500 people ask mozilla not to sell their data?
|
| Snark aside, I'm still a firefox user because they haven't
| molested us with manifest v3 yet. I hope it stays that way.
| Torwald wrote:
| Every Firefox upgrade involving tabs makes me hope they finally
| debug the tab closing button on macOS. Disappointed again. On
| macOS the tab close button belongs to the left side, not on the
| right side. Firefox still gets it wrong.
|
| This is a usability flaw that renders it basically unusable to
| me. I suspect this oversight stems from too many programmers not
| having enough understanding about proper application design and
| development on the Mac. It's a cultural issue then.
|
| But I keep hoping, mainly because other browser vendors get it
| right. Namely Vivaldi and Opera amongst others.
| causality0 wrote:
| I have tons of tabs open but tab grouping is an anti-feature. It
| takes way more time fucking around with tab groups, opening them,
| closing them, moving then around than I've ever saved by using
| them.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Yeah, I've had close to a thousand tabs open regularly on my
| main system, but I just use windows as my tab groups (and
| workspaces as my window groups). Another layer of grouping
| isn't what I need to manage that better.
|
| I do think it's nice to have as an option for the many people
| who seem to want it, though.
| pppp wrote:
| Is there a way to hide the colored tab group buttons so they can
| only be seen in the List-all-tabs drop-down?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| You can Right Click->Save and Close Group. Though it will
| reopen if you select it from the dropdown.
| LPNintendo wrote:
| there is no drop down
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I open a new window for each "topic" to keep the tabs grouped
| while keeping unrelated things separate.
|
| I also use an extension (on my phone so can't lookup the name) to
| give names to each of these groups of tabs. Only the "main"
| window with it's tabs automatically starts up upon browser
| launch. For the rest of the named groups, the extension provides
| a button on the toolbar to "resume" any named group which
| launches its tabs in a new window. This workflow reduces startup
| time and only keeps those things open that I'm actively looking
| at.
| fifilura wrote:
| Wikipedia has an entire, rather amusing, section on the dangers
| of tab hoarding.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#Tab_hoarding
| 201984 wrote:
| That's hilarious.
|
| > Tab hoarding can lead to stress and information overload,
| distraction, and reduced computer performance. It can develop
| into emotional attachment to the set of open tabs, including
| fear of losing them upon a crash or other reboot, and
| conversely, relief when tabs are properly restored. Tab
| hoarders have attributed the behavior to anxiety, fear of
| missing out, procrastination, and poor personal information
| management practices.
| guerby wrote:
| about:config and then set browser.tabs.groups.enabled
|
| I'm really puzzled by the UI, you have to drag and drop a tab
| onto another to create a tab group.
|
| This really sucks because now when you want to move a tab you
| have to be pixel _and_ timing exact to not create a tab group.
| Most of the time when moving a tab I end up creating a tab group
| then having to right click and then "ungroup tab"
|
| Also you cannot move tab group at all
|
| Why not just having a right click or icon to create a tab group?
|
| Anyone else being annoyed?
|
| Note: I'm using vertical tabs option in firefox settings
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >I'm really puzzled by the UI, you have to drag and drop a tab
| onto another to create a tab group.
|
| You can also use Right Click->Add Tab To Group
|
| This is what I use as the pull tabs together is very bad UI.
| It's to easy to move the tab instead and / or open a new
| window. Hope this improves with time.
| guerby wrote:
| Thanks for the right click, I don't know how I missed it the
| first time I looked...
|
| Do you know how do you move a tab group once created?
|
| Right click has a menu manage but only option is to create a
| new window with the tab group. Drag and drop doesn't to work
| on the tab group (to reorder it vs other groups and tabs).
| dao- wrote:
| > Do you know how do you move a tab group once created?
|
| It should work once you've updated to Firefox 138.
| guerby wrote:
| It does thanks!
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW, that was also my experience when Edge added this feature.
| It was _particularly_ annoying as I did not ever want to use
| the feature. I guess Firefox wanted to be bug-for-bug
| compatible? :(
| dao- wrote:
| In about:config, try looking for browser.tabs.dragDrop. The
| createGroup... and moveOverThresholdPercent flags control the
| group creation behavior during drag and drop. If anyone finds
| values that make it less likely to accidentally create groups
| while still allowing intentional grouping via drag and drop,
| I can channel these back to the team.
| guerby wrote:
| Is there a way to disable the creation of tab group by drag
| and drop altogether by tweaking these parameters ?
|
| Also I noticed another thing: drag and droping a tab on a
| folded tab group doesn't work. You have to unfold the tab
| group then you can drag and drop a tab into it.
|
| It would be great to allow drag and drop of a tab on a
| folded tab group and if dropped just put the tab at the end
| of the group, it would make the tab group feature more
| useful by allowing to quickly select and drop tabs where
| they should go.
| olex wrote:
| With the horizontal tab layout, you can drag-and-drop the group
| name to move the whole group, same as singular tab. Although
| the first time I tried it it didn't work, now that I keep
| trying with different click timing etc it seems reliable - not
| sure if there's maybe a drag handling bug hiding in there
| somewhere.
| dao- wrote:
| We've implemented drag and drop of groups for both horizontal
| and vertical in 138 which presumably you were updated to
| today :)
| olex wrote:
| I've only enabled tab groups on my profile after updating
| to 138 today. That first attempt where drag-and-drop didn't
| work was already on 138. But I can't reproduce it anymore,
| so I assume that was a fluke. Looks good so far!
| conceptualspace wrote:
| one reason tab management is so important is because bookmark
| management is so bad.
|
| ive tried to solve for this with a thumbnail view for bookmarks
| on the new tab page:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/yet-another-speed-d...
|
| it uses open graph images so the previews are more useful on a
| wider range of pages than simple favicons like the native new tab
| page.
|
| any suggestions or feedback welcome, ama!
| skydhash wrote:
| Bookmarks are OK. I's just that their purposes largely varies.
| There's the "pin this" bookmark for sites that are often
| visited, there's the "save for later" bookmark for things you
| want to go back to later", and there's the "interesting"
| bookmark for things you don't need now, but would be too much
| trouble to find. Maybe some days, I will code an extension for
| all those uses cases. For now, I put the first in the bookmark
| toolbar and the others in "Other bookmarks" while occasionally
| create folders for the last type.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Shame Google Meet doesn't work anymore.
| smilliken wrote:
| Works in firefox for many people I work with. Perhaps worth
| troubleshooting? Or maybe Google serves different bits to
| different people.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Camera frequently fails to work at all, or takes 45 seconds
| to detect. Audio is flakey, sometime mic doesn't work at all.
| Not to mention GitHub is unusable, they seem to have done
| something to the comments view that doesn't really work. And
| the Trello GitHub plugin doesn't work at all.
| antonchekhov wrote:
| Window-sharing doesn't work at all in Firefox (last several
| versions) on macOS 15.4; Safari works fine for Google Meet
| events.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Is there a way to migrate from tab groups implemented by an add-
| on?
|
| In my case I have been using Simple Tab Groups (STG) for years. I
| want to copy my STG tab groups, import them into the native tab
| groups, test that out and decide if I like STG or the native
| functionality better.
| mulhoon wrote:
| I know this sounds crazy, but has any browser just tried
| implementing two (or more) horizontal rows of tabs? - the user
| can decide to put them up the top or on the second row based on
| their own prioritising. Or just zip them up. Not saying it's a
| great idea but these kind of horizontal chrome groups never
| worked for me, and Arc tabs are too vertical for me.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Interesting trick imo
| seraphine wrote:
| Vivaldi has had this for some time now.
|
| https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-stacks/
| skydhash wrote:
| I would like more a completion based input for search. The
| address bar can work. but it's usually at a weird place and not
| configurable (in terms of number of items, labels, and
| sorting). I would like some command/query popup bar. And then I
| can reduce the vertical space taken by the tab bar, the
| toolbar, and the bookmarks menu.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> I know this sounds crazy, but has any browser just tried
| implementing two (or more) horizontal rows of tabs?_
|
| Yes. Firefox.
|
| (it was like that long ago)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This is weird to me because like 10 years ago Firefox had
| something with tabs that I loved, where you could have workspaces
| and switch between them, then that randomly disappeared.
|
| It was called Panorama and that was removed in Firefox 45
| opello wrote:
| There's an extension[1] now that restores the functionality,
| but the removal is exactly why I'm hesitant to try a new tab
| organizational tool: the loss of the last one was workflow
| breaking enough to break trust.
|
| [1] https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Wow, its a shame that looks unmaintained, that tabbing
| feature was one of the best things in Firefox at the time.
| opello wrote:
| I still use it successfully, but there are a few annoyances
| with drag and drop in the panorama view. It isn't as nice
| as when it was integrated unfortunately.
| m_t wrote:
| Thank you for mentioning this. I felt like I was going crazy
| not seeing anyone mentioning it in the comments.
|
| This was a very important feature to le at the time, as I used
| to work on multiple projects at the same time, and I had all of
| those organised in a simple, very visual way. I also had a
| group for "communication" with all my webmails, forums, etc.
| And another one with all the webcomics I used to read at the
| time.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I used the absolute heck out of the crazy stuff they did with
| tabs, I was upset when it went away.
| derfnugget wrote:
| "What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At
| Firefox, we build it."
|
| What a weird flex. I think if you make >700 million dollars a
| year you should have someone driving instead of feature farming
| the comments section.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| What a weird way to say they shouldn't listen to their users.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The parent is clearly bemoaning the lack of apparent
| creativity that comes from a FOSS golden child.
|
| Yes, implement generic features like vertical tabs (but who
| wouldn't implement them at this point without nesting?), but
| some creative experiments in UI/UX that seek to improve the
| browsing experience might also be possible?
| eviks wrote:
| Glad thousands of users who managed to find their feature voting
| site pushed Mozilla to do a few baby steps
|
| Though the current interface isn't good - mandatory group names
| (which also waste space in the precious tab bar by default) and
| inability to ungroup with a single key (due to naming conflict) -
| adds too much friction. Also drag&drop to group is too precise,
| but also can't be disable, so now you can't reliably move tabs
| around with a mouse without risking triggering the grouping
|
| And, of course, one other top-10 request - to have custom
| keybinds to group/ungroup - is still too far from the minimum
| 4500 required to implement it after a few years...
| GordonS wrote:
| I'd love to be able to use an icon instead of names - maybe it
| could let you select a favicon from one of the member tabs.
| reustle wrote:
| You can use a single emoji as a group name
| accrual wrote:
| Glad to hear this works. My bookmark folders are sometimes
| just a single emoji - takes up less space but still hints
| at the contents.
| maccard wrote:
| Mozilla can't win. They implement a feature and this is one of
| the top comments from the community that should be its target
| audience,
| account-5 wrote:
| I have been waiting for this. I currently use profiles, and
| container tabs, this will further help organising stuff.
| sebastian_z wrote:
| Since I do not need it and kept accidentally enabling tab groups
| I looked for a way to turn it off. You can do so by setting
| browser.tabs.groups.enabled and browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
| to false in about:config.
| AbuAssar wrote:
| Great news, I use tab groups daily in Safari and recently in
| Firefox beta.
|
| In Firefox, tab groups work better with a vertical tab bar.
|
| In Safari, there is a feature that I wish comes to Firefox: that
| the tabs in each group act as bookmarks, i.e., they persist
| across browser restarts and new windows. They are always there
| within their group; only the tabs that are not in a group are
| volatile.
|
| This makes tab groups more useful, as you don't fear losing them
| no matter what.
| Brybry wrote:
| Firefox tab groups persist across browser restarts (or at least
| mine have for ~5 months now). I haven't had any issues with new
| windows yet either though I have definitely lost Firefox tabs
| to that issue in the past.
|
| I agree though, Chrome does a similar implementation where tab
| groups act like a special class of bookmarks and it's much
| nicer. You have the same process where you never have to fear
| losing groups and you can 'hide' tab groups that you aren't
| actively using and they're potentially accessible from any
| window.
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| > What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At
| Firefox, we build it.
|
| That's allegedly less people asking for the feature than the tabs
| I have open or 0.0028% of the user base. I don't believe it.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| That's the critical limit. They build it in as a non-removable
| addon and reenable it every update. Anything more popular is
| not allowed! /s
| dizhn wrote:
| What a roller coaster ride of a post. Great job guys. No mention
| of whether the feature is available now on a stable release. What
| release version that is. How to enable it. How to actually use
| it. Where to go for documentation or bugs. And congratulations on
| concentrating on the one top feature request. What's next?
| Looking at some of the 20 year old bugs that still exist?
| godelski wrote:
| > No mention of whether the feature is available now on a
| stable release
|
| FWIW, I updated and was presented with a new tab announcing
| this feature. So... update. > Looking at some
| of the 20 year old bugs that still exist?
|
| Looks like browsers are hard
| https://gbhackers.com/google-to-patch-23-year-old-chrome-bug/
| SloopJon wrote:
| This is a better link for the actual feature, as opposed to the
| process that led to its prioritization:
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-tab-groups/
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| Meanwhile my pinned tabs still disappear when re-loading the
| browser.
| xacky wrote:
| How about fixing bug 1813919, which is an actual usability bug?
| billmcneale wrote:
| How is this different from creating a folder of links on my
| Bookmarks bar and selecting "Open all"?
| ksec wrote:
| Unfortunately I can no longer find it. But I still remember being
| called psychopath and having mental health issues on HN for
| having a few hundreds tabs opened.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I mean, I'm not surprised, how do you cope with so few tabs?!
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i've been using horizontal tree tabs for years, but this looks
| like a built in native version
|
| maybe they can make it horizontal next
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Very frustrating that it's not available in my Firefox yet.
| olex wrote:
| It's available for everybody since FF 137, just randomly not
| enabled.
|
| Go to about:config and then set browser.tabs.groups.enabled to
| true.
| dublin wrote:
| We'll see how this holds up. I currently have nearly 3283 tabs in
| my primary Firefox window. (The other six windows only have
| 35-125 tabs at the moment. I sort of use the windows as tab
| groups.)
|
| To its credit, Firefox is the only browser that does not either
| slow to a crawl or just fall over dead with that many tabs.
|
| I still need a good tool to merge bookmarks from a bunch of older
| Firefox profiles, though. Does anyone know of a good tool to do
| that?
| Arech wrote:
| I don't want to rant, but I don't a tiny bit like the UI they
| have made for tab groups, and I won't use it.
|
| They should have just paid lavishly to the developer of Simple
| Tab Groups, and incorporate that extension into the master. Fast,
| cheap and perfect result. Instead they made....this :(
| godelski wrote:
| Is this feature failing for anyone else? I drag one tab onto
| another and it just tries moving the tabs, not grouping.
|
| Yes, I updated. After doing so it told me about this feature. No,
| I also cannot see the tab group creation when right clicking. FF
| 138.0, Sequoia
| aquova wrote:
| I just updated on my work Windows machine, it seems to be
| working great
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| Appears to still be rolling out progressively - something that
| the release notes left out. I'm on 138.0 and I don't have it
| either.
|
| > All users should expect to see the feature by May 6, 2025.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups
| godelski wrote:
| Seems weird to announce it as part of a version and then also
| as a rolling release. Seems like the message could be much
| clearer by saying it is part of the browser but may be
| disabled by default.
|
| FWIW, I checked about:config. There's some options in here
| that seem highly relevant
| browser.tabs.groups.enabled false
| browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled false
| browser.tabs.groups.smart.optin false
| browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled true
|
| These are the settings I have by default that are not
| allowing grouping.
|
| Changing `browser.tabs.groups.enabled` to `true` enables the
| feature. Though note that it can still be difficult to align
| them right such that they group. Presumably
| `browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled` is the AI feature
| mentioned in the article. But I have no idea what
| `browser.tabs.groups.smart.optin` and
| `browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled` are.
| ncr100 wrote:
| I'm so thankful for this.
|
| Chrome has tab groups and it helps. And I want to move away from
| Chrome because Google.
| neocron wrote:
| I wonder how many times I saw this feature implemented, die,
| missed and implemented again... Especially in Firefox all
| features seem to have relatively short but endless circles of
| dying and resurrection
| talles wrote:
| I think I've seen this feature announced a million of times, by
| pretty much all web browser makers
| 725686 wrote:
| I have never understood why people have hundreds, or even
| thousands of tabs. Why not use bookmarks? Hoarders.
| ryandrake wrote:
| These HN threads with people that have 20K tabs living for years
| are so wild! I guess I'm the only savage in the world who closes
| my browser window and quits the browser application whenever I'm
| done with my computer for the day. I occasionally use tabs to
| temporarily have one or two web pages open at a time, usually
| because I need to browse/compare both of them actively, but when
| I'm not actively reading a page, I see no reason to keep a tab
| around.
| HSO wrote:
| I'm pretty much the same now.
|
| I tried bookmarking everything in a dated folder "just in case"
| blabla but I always ended up either forgetting the site or if I
| really need it find and reopen it the normal way.
|
| Since I transitioned to Obsidian recently I wrote a few simple
| macros to put the link into my "daily note". Add a few tags or
| even a comment if I am so inclined and boom, so far when I
| really want to find sth back I can actually search for it in my
| own notes.
|
| Much better than a bunch of tabs!
|
| (It helps that I'm currently on a really small machine (8 GB
| RAM) so that gives some discipline)
| edave64 wrote:
| I do tend to let tabs accumulate, but then I turn off my PC at
| the end of the day and let all tabs fall into the void.
|
| I like to start the day with a blank slate. Which seems to be
| such an uncommon thing to do that I couldn't convince FF on my
| last few Linux installs not to restore tabs when reopening.
| I've changed the obvious settings for it, I've set the flags in
| about:config, I've even completely disabled crash recovery and
| related features. It would still always reopen the last session
| burkaman wrote:
| If you were really hardcore you'd erase your entire OS whenever
| you're done for the day: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-
| darlings/
| natebc wrote:
| I'm with you. New browser every morning. I shut my computer
| down at night too.
|
| More than 8 or 10 tabs open and i start cleaning 'em up.
| bityard wrote:
| It's worth remembering that Firefox HAD tab groups before, just
| under a different name and then killed it because "nobody used
| it":
|
| https://medium.com/@twidi/how-i-survived-the-removal-of-pano...
|
| The implementation here is a bit different, I'm sure, but the
| core idea is the same: Group your tabs however you like and
| switch between the groups at will.
|
| I use Vivaldi these days (thanks to it's excellent UI
| customization and "Workspaces" tab groups) so I don't see myself
| going back to Firefox. Maybe this is a new trend of FF devs
| actually adding features instead of only removing them. I guess
| we'll see how long this one lasts.
| bobajeff wrote:
| I'm nobody. I loved panorama. It was basically Expose but in a
| browser which allowed me to keep not just tabs but 'Windows'
| organized visually without taking up separate tasks in my
| actual task manager.
|
| This new feature (which I've already gotten to test), I can
| almost use the same way, though I'm wary of Mozilla yanking it
| away from me if I rely on it.
| y33t wrote:
| Personally I love the feature, but I really feel like window
| managers/desktop environments should be handling window tabs.
| Imagine your desktop handling all tabs across all programs
| the same exact way instead of being reimplemented differently
| for each program. You could window switch to Firefox with
| alt-tab, add a ctrl- to your key combo and cycle through tabs
| in that window. Or imagine typing the title of a tab in your
| desktop's searchbar and being taken directly to it.
|
| At the very least it'd make managing 100+ open tabs more
| feasible.
| rebelpixel wrote:
| Google Chrome had this on Android several years ago, but it
| was quickly yanked out--probably because people hated it as
| it felt like ti bogged down the OS with it. Personally, it
| felt like information overload forced into a limited UX
| context.
|
| But now with advancements like tab unloading/discarding and
| faster CPUs, it might work for some people om mobile
| devices. Desktop browsers though might still be hampered by
| limited task/context-switching options.
| nulld3v wrote:
| I totally understand the confusion it brought to users,
| but I'm equally disappointed in how quickly the idea was
| abandoned, especially by the broader Android app
| ecosystem. It would be so useful to be able to open
| multiple Amazon app tabs to compare products for example.
|
| The feature is still in the OS, so apps that declare
| support can allow users to open multiple simultaneous
| windows of itself. Most native Android apps can probably
| add support for this feature with minimal code changes,
| as Android "best practices" have pushed apps towards good
| reactivity support and rigorous handling of app state in
| these types of edge cases.
| sorenjan wrote:
| There are extensions that does the same thing, like this one:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-
| view...
| werdnapk wrote:
| This looks to be a bit more integrated into the UI than the old
| version. The old tab groups always seemed like a bit of a
| separate "app" and I tried to use them, but never really used
| them much because I had to manually switch to the tab group
| view and it just didn't seem very cohesive.
| m463 wrote:
| I love these "nobody used it" justifications companies
| sometimes proclaim.
|
| I guess there probably are features that can be trimmed back,
| that go unnoticed and don't draw attention.
|
| But sometimes I think companies refactor something and just
| don't want to think about supporting something. Or, they have
| an unpopular hidden motive.
|
| (I think of apple's target disk mode, and tesla's non-existent
| dashboard and now turn signal/drive select stalks)
| SietrixDev wrote:
| If I could assign a bookmark to a container, that would be great.
|
| I don't like Sidebery and it doesn't really work for me.
|
| Another thing that annoys me in Firefox is that they recently
| changed the sidebar. I still use Firefox though.
|
| Rant over.
| esafak wrote:
| I just updated to 138 on MacOS but I don't have this feature, so
| I guess it's not here for all of us.
| aodj wrote:
| Are there any known issues with it? I just updated on my Mac and
| don't appear to be able to group tabs - dragging one on top of
| another just reorders them
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Wow, this is a fantastic feature that was heavily requested, and
| HN cannot stop being negative.
|
| Great job Mozilla.
|
| I was already using the awesome "Simple Tab Groups" extension for
| this but will look into switching.
| throwaway743950 wrote:
| We get tab groups, but can't get a working gradient without
| banding. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771
| lupusreal wrote:
| Not that one actually has anything to do with the other, but
| I'd rather have useful functionality than meaningless aesthetic
| crap that I'd never notice if I wasn't examining the pixels
| with a magnifying glass.
| gitroom wrote:
| Kinda wild watching every browser finally get around to this
| after all these years - feels like the stuff people actually want
| is what keeps slipping through the cracks most. You ever wonder
| why the basics take forever to get built while every company
| chases the next shiny thing?
| ugh123 wrote:
| At minimum I should be able to re-group tabs by domain.
| bovermyer wrote:
| "I used to have 30 windows open, each with 30 or 40 tabs."
|
| I can't be the only person who only ever has about 2-3 tabs open
| at a time in a single window.
| Narushia wrote:
| Now they only need instant tab search, like Chrome does with
| Ctrl+Shift+A. It's like the last thing I'm personally missing
| before I can actually make Firefox my primary browser. Chrome's
| tab search is so damn good for navigating in a big tab jungle,
| it's one of my favorite and most used features of the browser.
| ssnepenthe wrote:
| Not sure how it compares to chrome but firefox does have a
| solid open tab search.
|
| You can either click "list all tabs" button (down arrow to the
| right of the new tab button) and then "search tabs" or enter
| "%" as the first character in the address bar followed by your
| search term.
|
| As far as I know there is no keyboard shortcut for it.
| Izkata wrote:
| They changed the official named from "address bar" to
| "location bar" ages ago when they added functionality like
| that, and to go with the new name, "ctrl + l" is a shortcut
| for it.
| appointment wrote:
| Netscape always called the url bar the "location bar".
| "Address bar" is Internet Explorer's term. (At some point
| Netscape/Mozilla copied the ctrl+d shortcut for A_d_dress
| from IE as well.)
| stzsch wrote:
| I've been really happy with the winger addon for managing tabs. I
| really am closer than ever to complete control.
|
| (no relation, just a user)
|
| It adds a dropdown list of windows in the tab bar in which you
| can name each window, move tabs between windows, and save/restore
| windows into bookmarks.
|
| Now instead of having 1000 tabs in 20 odd windows and eventually
| declaring bankrupcy, I have 1000 tabs in 20 _named_ windows
| alongside 500 bookmark folders of (named!) past sessions. Much
| better.
| BosunoB wrote:
| I switched to Floorp last month and it's amazing. It's a Firefox
| fork with tab rows. Tab rows are the real MVP. None of the
| annoying weirdness of Tree Style Tabs, where you have to keep
| track of a hierarchy of tabs that are hidden behind other tabs.
| Instead, you just see 3-4 rows of tabs and you make a mental map
| of what is where.
|
| Once they release the new version in a month or two, we'll also
| get newer Firefox features like these tab groups, and we'll also
| get workspace improvements. Floorp is 10/10.
| kif wrote:
| As someone who frequently has tens of open tabs across different
| windows, this will be massively helpful. Especially since I
| frequently find myself trying to remember which window was for
| which 'mental group'.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > Other browsers might send your tab info to the cloud, but
| Firefox keeps it on your device. Your tabs stay private and never
| leave your device.
|
| I guess it answer my question about having tab groups sync to
| mobile phone. Maybe in 3 more year..
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