- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
Thousands of users wanted it, so Firefox delivered it. Tab Groups are now live to help you declutter and stay organized while browsing.
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Maybe add some decent vertical tabs too?
What’s wrong about it? I really like it.
Vertical tabs are working great in FireDragon.
Wait, how do you turn them on?
Go to Settings > Design, and then under Tab Bar Style select “Vertical Tab Bar (experimental)”. I recommend checking the “Collapse Vertical Tab Bar” checkbox, too. That way, the tab bar collapses into icons when your cursor isn’t over it, taking up less window space.
I’ve started using vertical tabs in Firefox as soon as I got the notification. I never thought I would have liked them so much.
Why are you asking for decent vertical tabs? Are they inferior to some other browser you have in mind?
I’ve been using the tree-style-tabs plugin for the last 4 years, because I like vertical tabs, and nesting it provides.
But now that Firefox actually finally has proper vertical tabs, and tab groups, I can move away from tree-style-tabs (I don’t use any of its other features).
I like Arc’s user experience with vertical tabs. They are bigger, easier to organize and they are cleaner. Also, the sidebar toggle is hard to work with, ideally I would prefer the ability to toggle with a shortcut or reveal on hover.
Aside Arc, Zen browser has a good vertical tab experience.
Overall, I still main firefox for my personal browser, though it’s UX is still lacking.
I wanted to like them but I dont know, I think they are more natural at the top still.
I’m going to stick it out for maybe a couple months (past this first ~month period) just to see if maybe they are superior somehow
finally firefox re-added tab groups, after removing them once already in the past >_>
https://venturebeat.com/mobile/mozilla-is-removing-tab-groups-and-complete-themes-from-firefox/
It looks like the ux is very different this time tho
yeah it sadly just seems to be a copy of the chrome one
The chrome tab groups were what I missed the most when I switched, so I’m happy with the change. It’s a little jankier feeling as in chrome it’s harder to drag a tab out of the group, while in Firefox if you move a tab to the end it’s hard to get it to stay in the group.
It would also be nice if any of it was themeable, but themeability in Firefox is a whole other problem.
Mh, I’ll check out how it works but if I don’t like it I can always stick with
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/
(And obviously 👎 for the inclusion of useless AI bs, would be nice if you can turn that off?)
The AI is local, privacy respecting and optional to use, but I agree a config option to hide the button would be nice
I’m not sure which button you’re talking about, but if it’s the one in the sidebar, click “Customise sidebar”, and then uncheck “AI chatbot”.
You can disable it in about:config
What’s the name of the option?
I’ve been out and about all day, and can’t check my desktop. But when I looked earlier this week, I found it by searching for “group”. AI tab group something or other.
After everybody else yeah… woopie fkn doo. I say this as a LibreWolf user and using Firefox on alt PC.
Meh. The number of tabs I have open at any given time almost never exceeds six. If I don’t need em, I close em. I do make use of bookmark folders: I have three folders called ‘Today’, ‘Weekend’ and ‘Temp’, which is the order of going though websites I have saved. That way, I take action on every website I’ve added to those folders and end up with no tab clutter or bookmark hoarding.
Folders as a to do mechanism sounds interesting.
I’m wondering if a date-based system could work.
This is super neat, but I swapped to Floorp awhile back because I like the workspaces feature.
Super happy for folks who wanted this built-in tho.
I really liked Floorp, but it kept breaking on work sites, so I had to switch back to FF. Super glad they are bringing this back.
Thank christ
why “thank christ”? Was Christ advocating for tab groups?
What, you don’t remember that part of the Bible?
Mozilla 11:28 - “Come to me, all of you who have 87 tabs open, and I will give you grouping.”
“Let he who is without tab, cast the last grouping”
PRAISE BE
Only 87? Those are rookie numbers
It’s just an expression to express how great something is. It’s not an actual attempt to thank Jesus Christ for this.
Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who makes a scene when someone says “god bless you” too
may The Flying Spaghetti Monster bless your fingers
That’s why I always carry holy water in a spray bottle, I just spritz anyone who sneezes around me
Many races believe that the creation of the Universe involved some sort of God, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being known as the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids live in perpetual fear of the time they call “the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief,” somewhat similar to the Apocalypse. However, the Great Green Arkleseizure theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being as wide and strange as it is, other explanations are constantly being sought by different races throughout the Galaxy.
Oh my Satan
What’s the difference to the tab group extension?
It actually works, without a bunch of insane weird behavior.
Can someone at least help me understand what tabs have that bookmarks don’t?
If i have more then 4 tabs open i get anxious because i can’t intuitively remember what each does. I have folders for categories of bookmarks.
It’s a combination of things… I’m a software developer, so I’ll often end up with 20+ tabs open while resolving a problem.
- I don’t want to bookmark them because I don’t need them when I finish the task.
- I can’t close the tabs until I’m sure everything’s working because Google sucks these days and who knows how hard it’ll be to find the source again.
- Relying on browser history is like finding a needle in a haystack. Tasks can take multiple days and 100 different entries in history.
- I might have “finished” a task that still needs tested and I know it’s a bit shaky; I’ll want to move onto a new task but keep the most useful references until I no longer need them.
- I only bookmark pages that I’ll need long-term or multiple times. It’s already hard enough to keep those organized…
My tab hoarding has only gotten this bad because search engines are terrible now and the amount of AI garbage to sort through makes finding anything useful a pain in the ass the first time; let alone trying to find it a second time.
Maybe a better solution is to stop using Google…?
I have, mostly. The search engine wasn’t the point; they’re all pretty terrible these days with the absurd AI spam everywhere.
I can’t stay productive with 20 tabs or applications open. I waste time searching. I feel drained if I’m working on a tough job and need something that is hidden. Maybe it’s on another desktop. Maybe it’s open in another instance. Maybe it’s not even open. Not for me.
I feel you, and agree with most of it… buuutttt I think it’s even more frustrating to know you had a good reference that was closed and then spent a stupid amount of time to find again.
Everyone has their own workflow, whatever works.
Relying on browser history is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Oh sweet Satan, yes. I wish somebody could explain to me why browser history is so awful.
You need Tab Stash in your life.
I have the same workflow. Usually, I never have more than maybe three tabs open, but when I’m debugging something… oh god. Easily 15 or 20.
I also bookmark extensively, and actually have my address bar set up to only give me suggestions from my bookmarks. Additionally, I use a tiling window manager, which makes managing windows and tabs very easy. I really don’t have a use for tab groups, but, who knows, maybe I’ll learn to use them someday.
I also bookmark extensively, and actually have my address bar set up to only give me suggestions from my bookmarks.
This is what people don’t seem to realize they can do… You can literally create a bookmarks folder that you never look at again, only search through using your address bar.
You can use a tab stash extension to turn all of your open tabs into bookmarks if you want to preserve what you had open that session. Then you can search through those bookmarks in your address bar.
I’m the same way, I think it’s just a younger generation thing where they never close tabs and can have 100+ open at once
You’re on of us then!
I, and many others, start closing stuff when there’s more than a handful.
Others, like many, just run then forever and ever. A sea of icons, tiny and compressed. Worrying they’ll lose that tab they really like in amongst the clutter. Unaware of the history feature.
I’m aware of the history feature. It doesn’t do what you seem to think it does (keep a tab in suspension in an easily accessible location over multiple hours or days of browsing).
Now, the OneTab extension? That’s actually for for this purpose. History doesn’t do what it does.
- History shows everything I’ve ever been to including the “nope that top result in my search engine actually didn’t contain the search string anywhere in its contents and is thus useless to me.” pages
- Bookmarks are for things I routinely go to for years
- Tabs are useful results for the projects I’m working on now.
- Pinned tabs are the pages I visit multiple times a day.
None of those is a substitute for any other.
Exactly, and if its important you just bookmark it.
I tend to shorten my bookmarks to just a space so in practice they are just a row of tiny icons anyway. They are always at the same spot and only take resources when needed.
I would love a vertical bookmark sidebar but for some reason we have to reinvent the wheel with tabs.
The bookmarks are already vertically aligned in the side bar.
You might have a valid point if history fucking worked.
I keep tabs open for active projects. Once the project is over, I bookmark them for future reference.
if i bookmark something i will never look at it again
I only find my saved bookmarks randomly by typing something in the address bar and the bookmark popping up as the first result.
Isn’t that the best way, though? I’m searching for something, but now I don’t need to do a web search because I’ve saved the link to it already. And I didn’t have to dig through a long list to find it.
Oh yeah, when it comes to bookmarks I gave up trying to organize them into folders a long time ago, and I now try to add a few keywords/tags to the description to hopefully get the bookmark when I type in the address bar now.
if only there was a fuzzy content search included. usually i don’t remember the page, or the topic, but just like… a quote.
that’s actually a good use for this local ai stuff, take the contents of pages i bookmark and auto-tag it based on that. for that matter, archive the contents as well.
nb will do that for you whenever you create a bookmark with it.
nb embeds the page content in the bookmark, making it available for full text search with
nb searchand locally-served, distraction-free reading and browsing withnb browse. When Pandoc is installed, the HTML page content is converted to Markdown. When readability-cli is installed, markup is cleaned up to focus on content. When Chromium or Chrome is installed, JavaScript-dependent pages are rendered and the resulting markup is saved.that is… pretty neat. is there some way to get it to interop with a browser’s bookmarks?
You mean like syncing the two? Not that I know of. The most you can do is open nb bookmarks in the browser. If you know how to do any shell scripting, there’s probably a way to export your browser bookmarks and then import them into nb. I’ll have to research this.
You don’t have to, my dude, you can set your address bar to search through them.
You are entitled to this but I don’t understand why it makes a difference if the icon is above or below the url here.
If you have bookmarks hidden, thats an argument for a pretty bookmark manager.
i use bookmarks for sites i access frequently, like a speed dial thing. i’ve set up my bookmarks toolbar to be in-line with the address bar and icon-only, so that it blends in with the rest of the interface. if i’m just going to go back to something one time i leave a tab open until i get time.
The lack of groups was the deal breaker for me, so after it rolled out to beta, I finally switched back to Firefox as my primary browser.
Last I tried, I don’t think you could reorder or drag/drop groups and selecting multiple tabs doesn’t result in “group tabs” in the context menu, but it is still decent enough.
Go fuck yourself
“Lastly, curious power users can flip the browser.tabs.smartGroups preference in Nightly to preview on-device AI grouping—just remember the prototype tag means rough edges are part of the deal.”
If its called smart and uses Ai, then its advanced. We need Ai for renaming groups of tabs.
The prototype scans open tabs locally, suggests topical names, and auto-bundles related pages. Because all processing happens on the user’s computer, the company says, neither raw content nor behavioral signals are uploaded to the cloud.
“AI” is just a buzzword, this isn’t chatbot nonsense as far as I can tell.
Now do it on mobile and I’ll happily switch
I’m glad they’ve added it to desktop, but based on my usage it’s more important for me on mobile. Hopefully they bring it to Android soon.
A million times this. But now the backend is done, hopefully mobile isn’t that far off.
Agreed. But I’m glad it’s native to desktop Firefox now. Grouping tabs in desktop works for me to hide the hundreds of tabs I keep to tens of groups 🤪
As someone who is disgusted by people’s browser tab hygiene on desktop, I will say that I do have this issue on mobile. But it’s really more about how the browser is set up (on Android at least). Every single link I click opens a new tab, and I almost never scroll through existing tabs because, out of sight out of mind.
As a librewolf babe, I’m keeping an eye on this: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/issues/issues/2458
Tab grouping is so useful and something I’ve always had to resort to extensions for. Good for Firefox for this, can’t wait for it to make its way to a browser that doesn’t sell users data.
Hey, you can use tab grouping in Librewolf if you set
browser.tabs.groups.enabledto true in about:configThank you for this!
By now you would’ve expected someone to have pointed out what code is actually collecting that data that’s supposedly sold.
Yeah, it still seems like an overreaction to a poorly communicated change, which, yes, might mean they’ll do it in the future. But for now, they have the benefit of the doubt from me, and once it starts happening, I’ll move to a fork.
That being said, I don’t know anything about the code, so I have to count on the community to make it known that it’s actually been implemented.
For now, as far as I understand, the only indication that they’re even considering it, is that change in the ToS or whatever. Nothing else to suggest it’s happening.I’d agree that it’s overblown and I suspect this reaction comes from users not understanding the complex legal framework Mozilla operates in globally and regionally, and Mozilla doing what it does best, miscommunication.
IANAL but my interpretation of the situation is that in certain jurisdictions, California for example (where Mozilla is headquartered and where they have a legally binding contract in place with Google), they are and always have been “selling” your data from a LEGAL standpoint. It is a difference between how we users define selling (a literal exchange of data for money) versus how the law defines selling which can be much more broad and include things we wouldn’t define as selling.
As far as the law is concerned, again, in some but not all jurisdictions, a) all data has monetary value to tech companies, and b) with Mozilla & Google in particular there is a monetary exchange (ie. a contract worth millions of dollars) for Google Search being integrated into Firefox as the default.
Therefore, as far as the law is concerned, when you type into the Awesomebar or search box in Firefox, Firefox sends (sells) the data you entered (your data) to Google (because of course it does, that’s how the internet works) and this is a “sale of your data” under the legal definition. This is just one example from one jurisdiction Mozilla operates within, albeit a majorly influential and litigious jurisdiction.
My understanding is they had to make that their terms of use because if they didn’t they’d be liable to get sued into oblivion in jurisdictions where using a web browser to browse the internet constituted a legal sale.
Does this open the door to abuse and the literal sale of our data in the future, absolutely. But it’s on us to trust but verify, and do what we, the community, do best and hold Mozilla to account when they inevitably screw up.
Anyway, this was a much longer comment than I intended to write, but that’s my take as a someone who has not just used Mozilla products for decades but also contributed labour as well.
Amg I couldn’t figure out how to collapse. I’m so happy rn. I’ve been containerising everything. It’s so soothing.
