I want workspaces, ideally in a sidebar like in opera. Arc also does workspaces well but Firefox doesn’t have to go that far and have the tabs on the side too.
You could check out Sidebery (Firefox addon) (A note: I use it with Floorp, a fork of Firefox built around user control. Floorp link)
Ton of features and very nuanced customization (you can change pretty much all minutia of its UI, which is a huge plus over other stuff I used). Some noteworthy features I like:
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Vertical tab bar with collapsible parent/child tabs
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Tab Grouping, which seems to be functionally the same as workspaces
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Unload or refresh tabs or groups en masse easily
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Customizable new tab buttons. ie: you can have “new tab”, “new private (or other container) tab”, and “new lemmy.world tab” all at once.
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Customizable movement of tabs to specific Tab Groups based on domain and/or container. ie: I have a “Media” tab group, and I set it up so any domain from youtube.com or dropout.tv automatically get moved from other tab groups over to “Media”
There’s more, but those are the points that I find the most useful.
Sideberry is great! I discovered it recently after quite a long time of not being satisfied with tree style tab.
I appreciate that it works with Firefox sync.
Btw thanks for the tip about media. That sounds really convenient.
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Makes sense. Clearly a popular feature.
I recently started using simple tab groups and like it. I just wish there was a way to keep my tabs in groups sync’d across devices. So if I open or close a tab in a group on my desktop, when I go to my laptop that group would be updated with the changes. It doesn’t seem to work that way currently, at least when I tested it out.
Chrome’s only had this for like four years
I have been using the Simple Tab Group extension for quite a while now - imho it has been pretty great. Not sure if this announcement adds anything for me
Simple tab groups emulates a function that used to be built in, but if this tab grouping works like other browsers it will be nothing like the add on.
Default feature about 1% of userbase use, the seventh.
I mean, why not just make it an addon?
Because webextension addons are shit for things like this. Accept that it might have features that real people who aren’t you actually use and enjoy life. Or go use SeaMonkey and live like it’s 1999.
And Firefox had built in tab groups already, for years. The feature was hidden, then they removed them and said “nobody uses this, use an add on” and the addons have always performed worse than when it was built in.
Go fiddle with tab groups in Chrome then try the addons that do it in Firefox.
Please give me vertical tabs to I can switch to FF
Maybe you want to try the Tree Style Tabs or Sideberry extension.
I just use power tabs. gives me vertical, grouping, search, sorting, and some rules behaviour you can do but I don’t use that last part.
There are Extensions to do that if you want.
They require a lot of tinkering for a half-arsed result. Built in vertical tabs like in Vivaldi or edge work and feel much better with just a single setting.
I might finally be able to switch to FF! Yay!
It’s already a feature available as an addon
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/
Not even comparable
The UX sucks. Look at Vivaldi and Arc for good UX.
Maybe I never learned how to properly use grouping in Vivaldi, but I concluded that Simple tab groups extension is better for my use case. In Vivaldi it seemed too simple to accidentally open new tab in another group. With STG extension I am always locked in 1 group and do not even see tabs from other groups.
At that point, why wouldn’t you just have separate windows. It’s not that different in terms of usage except navigation.
Need to save those open tabs somewhere + I don’t want 6 windows open if I have 6 categories.
Respectfully, all the tab group addons suck unless they do it on the tab bar itself.
It is not just one feature that makes the browser better. When you switch, you have to take the good with the bad.
Different people have different priorities.
This is absolutely THE feature that has kept me away from FF for a long, long time. I like most other stuff about it, but tab groups are a necessity for me. I exclusively use browsers with Tab Groups and Tab Stacking
As.someone who only used a couple of tabs open and even then upon restart of Firefox only has one tab open, this seems like a feature I wouldn’t really use?
You are one of the blessed minimalist ones. I feel most users are drowning in tabs.
I have 1408 tabs open. I use Tab Manager Plus to make sense of it all
Can’t wait until we can use a locally running AI to search inside the tab contents and group tabs by content topic, because TMP can only search tab titles!You might as well close the tabs and use a search engine at that point right? I honestly dont understand the workflow here
But I found the content … I don’t want to have to search again. Also google is becoming terribler by the day And I want to search that stuff locally, in my browser, I want to search the content of the tabs from my browser. From a single tab and only the subset of my tabs, not the whole internet.
It’s like having your books on the table, open on the right page. And putting them back on the shelves, and then searching for which books to search. When we have a functionally infinite lenght table (well, about 2000 active tabs is about the limit for my 64gb system)
It’s like having your books open, with a mark in the book for the page. A book mark, if you will
Maybe that’s good enough for 1996, but that doesn’t do it for me.
I want all those tabs, and all their content, in ram, and disable auto-discard. If the memory overflows it should write it to my pcie5 m.2 ssd not discard.
And that’s just a stop-gap measure, because I want this data in my GPU’s VRAM part of a locally running open source text generative AI’s context, so I can ask it questions about it.
I want to tell it, “take all my open tabs that relate to “HF radio” put them in their own window, open a new ownnotes and write an essay about the current status of my DIY amplifier project and then create a new check list of the design elements I still need to create”
So, bookmarks, with the broken search that won’t let you search just one folder, no categorization, no visual preview, it doesn’t even save the content and just assumes the content will still be available at a later date, it’s too cloudbrained.
I think this is totally reasonable, and a very forward thinking imagining of what the future of the internet could be like. I just thought that the analogy you made in the previous comment was a good one to like fun at.
I like the idea of being able to run elasticsearch/whatever on a local copy of the full text of all of your bookmarks.
If it’s at the point you need a tab manager, surely you could just use bookmarks.
What is the memory usage like?
Near 40gb, I’m running about 50 addons, using tons of containers and strict isolation.
Just use Tree Style Tab
This is absolutely not a replacement for the tab group experience Chrome and Edge offer
Absolutely this, there isn’t anything currently from what I’ve found that gives the easy experience that Chrome/Edge has.
Only thing that I’ve been missing when I moved from Edge, apart from PWA support.
Yeah honestly all the other solutions are just copium. Chrome tab groups are exactly what a tab group should be. It’s simple and useful. That’s all I need, all I want.
powertabs will give you vertical, grouping, search, sorting, and some rules behaviour
Does it mimic the functionality of chrome group tabs perfectly?
I would say its superior. You can create and add tabs to groups. expand and collapse them. make rules for certain sites to auto open in a group you made. sort based on url or name or last used. rename them. move the groups around visually. I do use it with the vertical tab view and tend to ignore the top bar though so it may depend on your usage.
It seems a bit too much like glorified bookmarks to me. I’m glad you find it useful though :)
It’s interesting, but it wastes to much of the screen.
True, sadly I’m unable to stop using tree style tabs after getting accustomed to it years ago. It’s one of those rabbit holes I’m unable to climb out of, similar to modern keyboard layouts.
Don’t be sad. I’d say you’re doing it right! Vertical space is much more limited than horizontal on 21st century monitors, and tabs are wide, not tall. Tree tab UI enables semantic layout (showing you practically unlimited levels of nesting), plus they always give you consistent room to read page titles. Why should the usability of tabs decrease as you open more of them?
The vertical tab bar is still there though as it’s apparently not removable? 😞
Found the 4:3 fan.
I’m away from my PC so I can’t name it but there’s another plugin similar to Tree Style Tabs. The creator claims that TST takes up a lot of resources. I do notice Firefox taking a lot of CPU/mem but that’s probably my fault. I’ve tried both and either works well.
Might be talking about Sidebery. I like them both and switch back and forth
I feel Sidebery is a more polished spiritual successor to TST.
tried them, they suck.
Finally!
Please allow me to not use this. I switched to FF mobile because Chrome forced groups on their users and left no way to turn them off.
about time! hoping for built-in vertical tabs some time soon as well 👀
YESSSSSSSSSSSS
Firefox had tab grouping first. Before Chrome. And then it broke support for it when they did the add-ons overhaul. I’m surprised bringing it back wasn’t a high priority…
Achutucally Opera had it first, back before it ditched Presto.
IIRC the old tab groups feature was eventually removed because telemetry showed that only very few people used it…
It didn’t help that they hid the button in the customize menu and made the feature not discoverable.
Watching people use Chrome, fucking nobody uses it there either, except for work situations where on FF, you’re supposed to be using Multi-Account containers anyways.
That’s because us power users know to turn the telemetry off and also have it blocked on our network.
Right, but then you shouldn’t be shocked to find out that a feature was removed because nobody seemed to be using it.
No, I expect Mozilla to know their market and use other means (like focus groups or surveys or something) to figure out which features are actually popular, instead of lazily using a bad metric.
Mozilla knows their market. Because of said telemetry.
How do you think that works? For any other app?
Hint:
(like focus groups or surveys or something)
Not like this. Because they have both shown to be absolutely terrible for this general market preference research.
Did you miss the part of the conversation where folks were pointing out that lots of users turn the telemetry off?
Your reply is as tone-deaf and non-responsive as sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling “nuh uh!” like a toddler.
If you want to be persuasive you’ve got to prove that the telemetry is somehow useful in spite of many users turning it off, and you’ve done absolutely fuck-all to argue that.
You are committing the same mistake as you accuse me of:
many users turning it off
[citation needed] [how many?]
For all you know, maybe the 15 very vocal users in here are the only ones who turn it off. Or do we know that many users do it? How many? 5%? 50%? 95%?
I remember those days. I was so sad when it went away.
I hope Firefox implements a great and robust tab grouping feature. Because they used to have one that worked beautifully.
Firefox used to have Panorama view, which was a way to group tabs with a nice visual interface. …and they removed it because not enough people were using it.
…Well if you stopped removing useful and perfectly functional features, maybe you wouldn’t need to rebuild them later when it turns out people do want that feature, huh, Mozilla?
There’s an extension that reimplements Panorama and it kinda sorta works like it used to.
THIS, im using n recommend it to everyone
Make sure it works for a few days first. Sometimes extensions that hide tabs from the tab bar can have unforeseen consequences.
Your link made my day. Thank you.
