Mozilla Firefox is Working on a Tab Grouping Feature

Multi-account containers are almost indispensable for developers. As for tab groups, I am currently using an add-on to manage them, but having a native feature would be very cool.

SimpleTabGroups and the ability to place pinned addons in any area of the browser UI already gives you that

https://tux.social/@Rhababerbarbar/112077769187609417

A better frontend for about:profiles would be great as well.

I need tiling as well. But even without that, Firefox is my daily driver.

The Multi-Account Containers extension is great for this. Each container keeps its own context, so you can be logged in to the same service twice (or more) in tabs in one window. Can set it up so that some sites will always use a certain container, or that sites in a container will always use a proxy. That is EXTREMELY useful to me.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

Firefox has profiles, so you can further separate your work browsing from personal browsing. Each profile acts like a separate instance with it's own history, bookmarks, addons, everything...

I use Simple Tab Groups personally. Been working for years. Might be overkill for some though.

Yeah I ran tab groups for years too. I finally quit because I just had too many things open but it was definitely handy.

It did

yes

I look up a lot of things and sometimes one page doesn't fully answer it so you need to do extra research, then you end up 40 tabs deep in the history of it and it all ties back to each other.

Also programming, that also requires a crap load of tabs.

I think I have five browser containers across three devices with dozens of tabs on each. I don't sort them. Autocomplete from the omnibox usually gives an option to jump to the tab I need.

I usually always have between 20 and 40 tabs open, but I’ve seen a few people in forums complaining that some add-ons would crash because those individuals had hundreds or even over a thousand tabs open simultaneously.

For work, ya I've found it useful. Personally, at home no.

It may be a little niche, but I’d bet plenty of people will use it. I’m in the middle of a personal research project, and it would make things so much easier for me. I’m currently grouping my tabs by having multiple windows open…

Different people have different ways of working. Some people are accustomed to having a million tabs open, others can’t stand it.

My use case is probably a bit more niche but I have Memory Impairment and bookmarks don't work that well for me. I'm a very organised person and did previously use things like bookmarks extensively. But since my memory has gotten really bad I need more visual representations. Visual bookmarks could kinda work for this but I am yet to find something that's private, easy to set up (or just works out of the box) and isn't fiddly to use. Bookmarks that aren't visual, don't stay in my memory so I forget about them. Search bar helps a bit but sometimes I also can't think of the right words to use to get Firefox to bring up the right bookmark (even with extensive keywords - because I also can't always think of the right keywords to set).

So I have heap of tabs open. I need things to stay in my recent memory and recent use, otherwise they just get forgotten. It does mean over time more and more tabs get left open. But I do fairly regular sort throughs where I go through each tab to make sure it's something unimportant where I've just forgotten to close the tab or something I am actually using/working on.

It's not ideal but it's the only thing that works for me right now. I have so many things going on at once, it sucks that I have to remember so much at once when I have memory issues but such is life when disabled folks aren't properly supported, lack of volunteers means I have to take more volunteer work that I should, western society sucks for supporting parents, and sexism means that I'm still default parent (mother) despite my husband being more progressive than most hsubands/dads are (he's also woefully disorganised which is in part just him and also in part how boys and men are socialised). Anyway, this isn't meant as a commentary on the differences in organisations levels and how that affects tab usage between mothers and fathers lol.

Generally, its not that I have too many tabs as much as I have some tabs I leave open all the time and want to condense down a bit.

For example, at work I use Chrome for my main web work, and FF for my... uh... shit like this. So I have a bunch of Chrome tabs open that I know I'll have to make changes to again in the future, so they stay open. I also have 'projects' which contain a bunch of pages that are all related to each other. Being able to group those together and collapse makes it easy to quickly get back into them when someone wants a small, insignificant (sorry, extremely important!) change to them that needs to be done yesterday, and I can eventually just throw the group away once the project is mostly complete and not going to be touched by human hands ever again (until a year later, when it suddenly becomes a critical problem for someone, and thus a problem for me... I'm not complaining, you're complaining).

At home, I mainly use Firefox. I have an extension that allows me to have tab groups, but its not as nice looking as the built-in Chrome version (Simple Tab Groups, which is actually quite nice, but not as pretty as the Chrome ones). I have a group for my usual fucking around stuff (Discord, YT, Kbin, DIM (Destiny app), wiki for whatever other game I'm playing), a tab for my streaming stuff (which I don't use often, but as I have a few container tabs for logging in to my brother's account for a handful. I like to just leave those open so I don't have to worry about it), and a group for my "working from home" stuff like email/OneDrive and a smaller amount of pages I always keep open because I'm always editing them for work.

So all in all, I don't have like a hundred tabs open at any given time, and I could make due with just having them all bookmarked and open them as need be... but honestly, that's a bit of a hassle and would also either leave me with a ton of useless bookmarks after a month or two, or require me to curate my bookmarks every month or two. Versus just having a tab group I can just kill off once I know I'm done with their work.

I have two windows in my main profile and two in a secondary profile. The main profile windows have 83 and 29 tabs open, and the secondary profile has 50 and 38 tabs.

And then more tabs in multiple windows on my tablet (sadly, Firefox still doesn't support multiple windows on iPadOS despite the feature being introduced nearly 5 years ago and all other major browsers supporting it...At this point it's literally the only reason I don't use Firefox as my main browser) and yet more on my phone.

That said, I don't actually use tab groups very much. I currently have just 4 of them, with a total of 19 tabs in them combined.

Yeah me neither.

ITT it kinda looks like people just leave tabs open as a way to remember where something is, or even as a way to remember that something needs their attention.

There are much better ways, but everyone needs to do their own thing I guess.

No not really a need at all, just an alternative to bookmarks imo. Having more than ~ 20 tabs open is a very inefficient way to work imo.

At least for me, I have ADHD—if it's out of sight (i.e. another bookmark in one of the hundreds of folders I have), it ceases to exist, no matter how important or interesting it is.

I have 6 virtual desktops for current projects, with all of the tabs (and other applications) for each project on a desktop, and with a Firefox window for each "topic" within that project. I go through and close out old windows periodically (i.e. when I need to free up desktops), saving anything I might want to refer back to with the Tab Stash plugin. Importantly, I also have the Auto-Discard Tabs plugin so they aren't using RAM until I need them again.

It might seem messy, but it's what works best for my brain. I do at least try to not have more than 12 tabs per window. On rare occasions I'm even successful! 🙃

pretty sure if you don't visit a tab for a while or reopen your browser with the "keep previous tabs" setting thingy on, those tabs are not all loaded in memory. even if I have 100 tabs open, most of them take up negligible space in ram and only load in once I click on it. also I'm lazy and creating/deleting bookmarks is more work than closing/opening tabs.

Those are my emotional support tabs, ok? yes all 22 of them.

I, to my daughter: "For (this and that reason), you have to reboot your laptop." Daughter: "But then I have to close the browser!!!" - she basically uses hundreds of browser tabs as temporary bookmarks, having pages open for weeks occasionally. Having to close down the browser is a panic-inducing thing for her...

My excuse would be ADHD, I constantly lose track of what I'm focusing on and when I do focus on something I want to explore every part of it, that means exploring every path/solution/fact etc about it, then it's a I want to have this open because I will need in the future like tomorrow or I want to explore it more later so I don't want to bookmark it because I will lose my thought process, but time goes on and I will focus on something else and the cycle repeat. I find it very hard to just close them because I keep thinking, I will need it soon but soon never comes or when it does I already closed it and now I'm blaming myself I didn't have it open. It's a silly issue to have but it's how my brain works.

Unfortunately, the way many companies are set up these days, they require employees to use multiple different web applications to do their job. And if you're a developer, you need many different tabs for testing scenarios.

Shut up heretic

A tab may ascend to a bookmark once it has been verified good and/or useful.

Right now it is TBD, i came across it while looking at/for something and will keep going down that path, but want to take that tab page in in the future.

Vivaldi has tab hibernation so that the extra tabs barely take any resources unless you open them.

I use over 100 tabs. Basically serves as an always changing bookmarks. Those tabs are also split across multiple workgroups between which I can switch easily with a flick of my mouse.

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A wise person once told me

Unused RAM is wasted RAM

Having tab groups is not identical to using 30 tabs simultaneously.

It's more like 2D bookmark layout, group by content, group by identity (cookies and co) and all with a website screenshot. It's faster, more visual bookmarks.

Me too! For now, check out Simple Tab Groups extension.

I love the way the Tree is automatically created. Having the ability to rename the root on the occasion where it’s not intuitive, would be perfect.

Was looking for that! Yeah, tree style tabs just makes researching so much easier. It also just feels good closing a parent tab after falling very deep in a rabbit hole.

Link for firefox if anybody is asking what we are talking about: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

Not the only way, been using the regular firefox version with multirow enabled via css mod applied.

Arc works perfectly for my workflow. Using Firefox since Netscape days, but arc is really good. Don’t love that it is chromium and not open, but the ux is incredible. And air traffic control is such a nice feature.

Firefox had tab groups in their beta 10 years ago, idk why they removed it. Was great!

I'm still confused why people are so hell bent on using a single window exclusively. It's a natural way to group the tabs and it was there from day one!

I tried that, but eventually they just all blended so that now I've got three different windows with 50 of the same tabs open. Groups can have labels so that I can see which group is which.

That's what I do on a desktop, sure. Isn't an option on mobile though.

It's nothing like that. The extension you linked is about maintaining separate browser histories and cookie sets, whereas what this post is about is just a new way to organize and manage tabs themselves.

It has had it for one or two versions now

I use multiple user profiles in the same browser for separation of logins.

There are various add-ons for this on Firefox so it's never bothered me.

And is also Chinese spyware

If you want to use Netscape all you need to do is download it...