- 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.
The way they did it though… the tab group name cant be collapsed so it takes a lot of room. I find I’m still using task oriented groups from the Simple Tab Groups extension, and then using the new core groups feature as a way to group subtopics for that task.
And before you say “you must have a million tabs”… I used to have millions of tabs, but now i average less than 100 when I have a lot of tasks I need to balance, and I know what all of them are open for. So when I complete a task I delete the Simple Tab Group and say by Felicia to all those tabs.
Why people like 50 tabs at once. I can’t understand.
Agile and task reprioritization at work.
To many projects to work on at home.
Games.
They don’t know how bookmarks work.
Bookmarks are great if I remember what I want is there. Usually bookmarking is like putting a piece of paper in cabinet that I will never open… A tab is leaving the paper on my desk for me that I will rediscover.
Use the bookmarks toolbar then.
I used to feel the same way. But recently, I just don’t have time to ‘finish’ each tab/section. When I was younger with more time, I could.
For example, the first section of my browser is several self hosted apps I’m currently implementing. So, I don’t want to lose the relevant forum posts/documentation.
The second section is some articles I couldn’t finish reading.
The third section is something I’m researching for my work.
Fourth are media tabs, some YouTube videos I haven’t finished, a music tab, etc etc
So basically, if I had time to read the articles, one section closed. Or finished my implementation, etc.
The hard part this is this is every week. Always new projects, work or personal. Always new studies to read. Always new vids. You get the point.
adhd. I’m considering making at alert for when my browser uses so much tabs that I’m almost out of RAM
Just install the Auto Tab Discard extension. After a certain amount of time it will replace your loaded tab with a (RAM-free) placeholder that reloads when you click it again. Me, my ADHD brain, and my 500 tabs can be at peace now.
The only way to keep my ADHD at bay when I’m on the computer is to be radical with my tabs. Don’t need it in the next hour? That’s definitely a bookmark, not a tab. I configured my browser to not save tabs between sessions so I always start clean. I’d long be dead otherwise, suffocated by my own browser tabs.
to hide thier porn tabs.
I storing YouTube links that I would watch next time
Text document
“Save to watch later”
Bookmark
There are options
You clearly do not have ADHD. Those are where things go to be forgotten forever.
Yeah, that is just asking for data to be forgotten. The functional difference is:
You have your browser with let’s say 30 tabs. You can’t forget what you need to, because they are always open. So to catch up, you have to close out your tabs or lose everything.
Compared to adding something to a list, which requires you to manually go back and remember what you needed to do. But if you have 100 things to every week, and those constantly get added on, you will always lose data to return to if you’re not actively tracking it, hence the tabs.
It’s a very simple concept. A lot of people have a lot less time to do all the things they need to during the week. People on their computers all day, or with less of a workload, can’t comprehend this without opening their mind to a different perspective.
I know, because I used to feel the same way about people who had 20+ tabs. But at that point in time, the thought of not having enough time to get to everything and adding 50+ things to do every week (meaning 200 - 400 new tabs every week) was foreign to me, and your suggestion makes it quite literally impossible without extra work involved, if you care to actually complete everything you wanted.
Text document - very lack of quality features Others - just place where I would forget them forever
So youll just leave them where you would forget them forever instead?
What’s the functional difference between a tab bar and bookmark bar for this specific purpose other than the former taking more resources?
Genuine question because I cannot comprehend
I can’t tell if you’re serious or not. A bookmark bar will never be able to easily contain everything you need. It requires manual review (expanding the bar, manually browsing every bookmark and re-opening tabs [and you’re suggesting to bookmark 50+ pages every week… impossible]). So not only are you implying it would be better to add 2 - 3 additional steps to the workflow, but also you are missing the very functional fact that a bookmark bar is a lot less accessible than a scrollable tab bar with an instantly opened window with what you were working on.
Tabs also remember where you are on the page. I read long studies, and implement complex projects. Bookmarks will re-open every tab at the start of the page, not word 600. There are just too many reasons as to why tabs are more functional than bookmarks and saving data to lists. A big part of it is the size of the persons workflow, someone with a smaller workflow may not be able to see how impactful those additional steps in the process are.
whoa. mozilla doing something the people want?? WHAT PARALLEL WORLD IS THIS?
Don’t worry they say they’ll shove AI in it so it’s definitely our world
ive seen this in opera, and instantly ran into the options to disable it. i donno how many tab you guys have in the browser, but may god forgive you all for using the browser wrong.
Maybe you only have 300 or less but I typically have several windows open.
So now when I open my mom’s computer, she see 20 tab groups, I’ll know it’s even worse than it looks…
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/
I’ll never understand you people that need like 50 tabs open at once.
I have a few use cases:
- Many youtube videos that are like 30+ minutes long saved for later
- Documentation on some stuff that I need to go back and forth
- Movies or games that I found, but don’t want to write down and forget
- Going down rabbit holes on wikipedia and saving it for another day
- Everything else that catches my attention and deserves a honorable spot in the tab bar
Basically, I use my browser as a notebook. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
So a shit ton of tabs that never get looked at again? I swear all of you secretly want your tabs to disappear so you have something to complain about.
Not the slightest! I can perfectly fine live without them, but I would be a little bit sad if they were gone. It happened once after my OneTab extension got somehow corrupted.
Yeah those all seem like great uses of bookmarks and save functions.
Bookmarks are only for the stuff I will always need again. Tabs just for the stuff I haven’t finished yet and don’t want to forget about.
Buddy have I got some news for you. You can actually delete bookmarks when you’re done with them.
RIGHT
So why’s it hard to explain why they’re not the same… 🤔
I will do my good deed of the month. You seem like a prime candidate for Tab Stash. Does the same but better than Tab Groups. Check it out. You might like it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/
Let me know, love it or hate it. Cheers.
Hey, this looks like a better OneTab that I always wanted!
Is there some way this could work on android?
Tab Stash is great, yes. That’s the answer.
I have a colleague who even saves all his tabs using a plugin, just in case he will need them at some point.
I dont know, I never have problems finding what I need so dont need to save anything.
Tab groups are great though, I need them so I can have groups with our aws accounts at work. That way i can just quickly get in to any account.
I used to never close tabs and they would accumulate as I kept doing more web searches and other activities. Now when I need to do stuff I usually open a new window instead for different tasks and if I need to free up RAM then I start closing other windows for tasks I’m not doing anymore so it closes all of the related tabs at the same time
Sometimes I ended up with +50 tabs because I just don’t close them. But when the computer restart and Firefox ask me to restore them or start a new session, I always go for a new session. And I never felt that I lost something.
I closed my tabs with the window automatically
Nah, just 200 or more
live to help you declutter
Me ready to clutter even more 😈
Hi sorry to bother, how come your name is red in voyager? Tyvm
Hey no bother at all, I think it’s just because I’m an admin in my instance
Ahh makes sense, thank you!
Right??! So instead of clutter of tabs it will be clutter of tab groups… of tabs, lol.
Now that’s my kinda thing!
There is only solace in chaos
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.enabled
to 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(with good intentions) 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.
Ever since i switched to zen browser i hace not thought of coming back for a second.
I tried it -> couldn’t figure out how to get rid off vertical tabs -> uninstalled -> installed Librewolf
Yea Zen is amazing, especially the neat Workspaces feature.
I’m still going back to Firefox because of tab groups.
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 🤪
Now do it on mobile and I’ll happily switch
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.
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.
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.
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.
You need Tab Stash in your life.
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.
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.
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 search
and 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.
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.
You are entitled to this but I don’t understand why it makes a difference if the icon is above or below the url here.
If you have bookmarks hidden, thats an argument for a pretty bookmark manager.
i use bookmarks for sites i access frequently, like a speed dial thing. i’ve set up my bookmarks toolbar to be in-line with the address bar and icon-only, so that it blends in with the rest of the interface. if i’m just going to go back to something one time i leave a tab open until i get time.
I keep tabs open for active projects. Once the project is over, I bookmark them for future reference.
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 suitable for this purpose. History doesn’t do what it does.
- History shows everything I’ve ever been to including the “nope that top result in my search engine actually didn’t contain the search string anywhere in its contents and is thus useless to me.” pages
- Bookmarks are for things I routinely go to for years
- Tabs are useful results for the projects I’m working on now.
- Pinned tabs are the pages I visit multiple times a day.
None of those is a substitute for any other.
You might have a valid point if history fucking worked.
I can’t stand having more than maybe 5-6 tabs open. As the poster above stated, it just gives me anxiety to have random tabs open. I get disoriented trying to figure out what my focus is in a sea of tabs.
Exactly, and if its important you just bookmark it.
I tend to shorten my bookmarks to just a space so in practice they are just a row of tiny icons anyway. They are always at the same spot and only take resources when needed.
I would love a vertical bookmark sidebar but for some reason we have to reinvent the wheel with tabs.
The bookmarks are already vertically aligned in the side bar.
If i have more then 4 tabs open i get anxious
You are alone on that one. Virtually everyone I know, I look over and they have 50 tabs open LOL
This was the only thing keeping me on chrome at work. Tab groups are so nice for keeping resources related to specific projects together, especially if you’re juggling several features/fixes at the same time.
Amg I couldn’t figure out how to collapse. I’m so happy rn. I’ve been containerising everything. It’s so soothing.