Firefox tab groups are here

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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")

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.

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.

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/

  > No mention of whether the feature is available now on a stable release

  > Looking at some of the 20 year old bugs that still exist?

  https://gbhackers.com/google-to-patch-23-year-old-chrome-bug/

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.

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.

I'm nobody. I loved panorama. It was basically Exposé 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.

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)

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.

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)

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/

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

> 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?

Hooray, it only took them ...a decade or so?

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.

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.

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.

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.

FYI. Firefox supports vertical tabs natively now.

Very interesting plugin, I will need to review it sometime soon

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

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.