topic Re: Organizing Information in Discussions

Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 23:23:58 GMT

Hi!

We know that organizing all the information and tasks we need to juggle with just tabs and bookmarks can get overwhelming quickly. Over time, the Firefox team received many practical feature requests that asked us to tackle this problem – tab collections, groups, and a native solution to vertical tabs.

We would like to return to talking about your goals and needs when organizing information, though. What problems and challenges do you have with keeping ahead of your tabs and bookmarks? Perhaps, you need to switch context often and return to “moments in time” that can be quickly retrieved from one Firefox window? Or maybe the challenge you face is getting reminded about important tabs you opened or saved?

We would love to hear from you, and we will be checking this thread multiple times a day in the next two weeks!

Re: Organizing Information

ali1234 — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 20:04:47 GMT

The best way to improve organization of bookmarks would be to add a Web Extension API that allows associating custom metadata such as icons and general key:data values with bookmarks. Then (and only then) extensions will be able to manage them properly, and people can pick and choose how they want them to work.

The RSS handling extension Livemarks did not exist before Mozilla decided to retire live bookmarks. It is now the second most popular RSS reader for Firefox, and it literally has a list of things that cannot be implemented due to limitations in Firefox. That list would be a good place to start.

Re: Organizing Information

CT — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 20:21:05 GMT

For me, my main issue is I often have a lot of tabs open and the current horizontal tab strip makes it difficult to read, at a glance, tab titles in order to find the tab I need.

I have found that vertical tabs alleviate this because it's less "distance" for my eyes to travel (looking down a list versus looking across the width of a tab), plus I am able to see more of the tab title text due to the increased width (compared to a cramped tab strip).

The scrolling aspect of the horizontal tab strip doesn't help me because it sorta 'hides' tabs from my view, where as with vertical tabs I can easily display 25 tabs without needing to scroll.

So to sum up my problem:

Hard to easily locate tabs when many are open, even more so if they share the same favicon (ie, a lot of Youtube or Twitter thread tabs)

Re: Organizing Information

steel835 — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 22:18:10 GMT

For me, sometimes open a lot of tabs to work on one thing, then suddenly I open a lot of tabs to do the other thing, and when the tab strip becomes scrollable - it becomes hard to remember where that on particular tab was opened (because usually they these groups contain tabs with similar favicon - imagine working on several tasks during development).

Having groups would help a bit with that:

you can see groups and distinguish one from another
a separate + button for each group would also greatly improve convenience (judging by experience with chrome - it opens "Open in a new tab" in the same group, sure, but if you need a new tab, you need to drag it in the group after.
Collapsing tabs in a group would help with clutter
I personally use Tab Stash extension to save tabs that I will not use today, but they will be useful some time later. Would be nice if this extension could work with groups (it's actively maintained, so I think, if integration with groups will be possible, the dev will make it someday)

Also, as I'm working with different SSO accounts, I use tab containers quite a lot (some microsoft apps don't understand the concept of multiple accounts in their own SSO, so I solve the problem with containers instead of logging out). Some domains are autoassigned to a container, but the list of them isn't full. I thought that the idea of autoassigning urls to certain groups or integration of groups with containers would be cool, but honestly, I didn't thought about it that much. Maybe if container was assigned to a group, the + button would help with opening certain urls unknown to containers.

Re: Organizing Information

mozarella — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 03:05:26 GMT

I keep 20+ tabs open when at my computer. One group is news, one group is genealogy, and one group is odds and ends like Google Advanced Search, Health site, etc. I MISS the version where I could refresh ALL open tabs with a single click. Now it takes two clicks.

Not bad unless you update tabs around 2-dozen times a day (like me). PLEASE RETURN SINGLE CLICK TO REFRESH ALL TABS. Or, auto-update tabs every ___ minutes, hours or each day (as selected by user)?

Re: Organizing Information

lolrepeatlol — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 07:29:17 GMT

First, thanks for creating this platform! This is awesome and I love all the work you people do at Mozilla ❤️

I have to use Edge because the laptop I'm mandated to use only has Chrome and Edge, and Firefox won't install there, unfortunately. One thing I found myself hooked onto, though, was Edge's vertical tabs feature with tab grouping. I found myself being more productive when I group tabs together and then can view them all in a list. I can then collapse a tab group when I don't need it, and come back to it later -- losing no progress.

In an attempt to sort of keep my productivity when I'm on my personal computer, using Firefox, though, I downloaded the Simple Tab Groups extension. While I miss the vertical tabs, I will say that I do prefer the Simple Tab Groups mechanism since it actually hides the tabs not in the group you're currently in. I don't like that browsers like Edge keep the group there visible forever.

In an ideal world, I'd love for native vertical tabs, with a STG-like tab grouping mechanism. (But I'd be happy with any implementation!)

Re: Organizing Information

ollie — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 07:40:39 GMT

Tab groups would massively help with my productivity.
I'm coming from Chromebook and I was used to them, also the all other browsers have them. So I think it would help Firefox compete with them, making it productivity-focused more.

Re: Organizing Information

nbp — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 14:59:16 GMT

One thing I noticed after thinking too much about this topic is that: tabs, history, bookmarks, and even suggestions are only different way to manage the lifetime of Web Page Instances, whether they are live-cached, recalled, stared, discovered.

My intuition suggest me that all of these are lacking a single view with query-able system which can be used to centralized all these collections.

In the past, I attempted to answer this as a short question: “What if tabs were like emails?” and came up with a minimal prototype: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DeKOJarXLHCIgS3y4YoWscE4rmDv6Glx/view (use about:debugging to load the temporary addon from source)

Re: Organizing Information

Mte90 — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 15:30:51 GMT

I remember an issue I have that firefox remember the folder where I saved the last bookmark but is not possible to disable that behaviour.

So right now I save all of them in the default bookmark folder and when I have time move to the various folders.

Re: Organizing Information

vincentj — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 07:22:18 GMT

You are probably sick of hearing this, but nonetheless it bears repeating: most of the tab/bookmark issues I have are a result of the latest UI redesign.

Tabs/title bar:

The biggest problem is the total lack of contrast: I can't see which window is active, and I can't see which tab is active. Of somewhat lesser importance, there is no visible separation between tabs, and everything (tab bar, toolbar, URL bar, web page) blends together because there is no contrast between anything: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/accessibility-issues-and-features/idi-p/53
Related to that: the "system theme" color scheme used to follow the OS color theme, and that no longer works. I don't want customizable browser themes; I want it to look like the rest of my OS which I have already tuned for visibility. The previous design made active/inactive windows visible and the active tab was obvious: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/default-theme-should-respect-system-accent-color/idi-p/214
The tab audio/mute indicator is now hidden by default, and the clickable target to mute a tab is smaller than it was before and more difficult to click. The text that replaced the icon is too small to read: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/better-accessible-tab-un-mute-controls/idi-p/123

Bookmarks:

My work computer has some large bookmark folders that no longer fit on the screen because of all the extra padding. This created extra work for me, because I needed to reorganize my bookmarks to make them fit on the screen: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/tiresome-bookmark-gaps/idi-p/43

The latest design introduced so many accessibility and usability problems that I am forced to continue using an old version that still supports the previous design, which has the unfortunate side effect of putting my security at risk because I'm no longer getting updates. My current browser, version 90 with Proton disabled:

Here's a visualization of how the current design appears to me; nothing is legible or distinguishable:

Again, I know you don't want to hear this feedback, and you closed a bunch of issues related to this on the previous Ideas site, but it's extremely important to people with visual impairments. I cannot beg you enough, please give us a way to restore the previous tab design. I don't need vertical tabs or stash/reminders, and I might use tab groups; but you really need to get the fundamentals fixed first before you start adding new capabilities.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 13:56:33 GMT

Thanks for the feedback @ali1234 ! It's helpful to hear that an acceptable solution to organizing information could potentially be resolved with a Web Extension. Can you elaborate on your comment about icons as they relate to custom metadata? Is the ultimate desire here to have a highly customizable way to organize/group related bookmarks based on a variable such as an icon?

Identifying elements that we would be restricted around is a good starting point and I agree that it is helpful to have as a reference for Livemarks. I will take this information back to the team for discussion and see where we land!

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 14:18:16 GMT

Thank you for this thorough breakdown @CT ! This really helps us to understand what the root of the concern is and how it could inhibiting the user experience. Could you personally see a need for both formats (vertical and horizontal) within the context of how you use the browser? Maybe based on your activity, you could switch between formats?

Do you currently use any extensions like Tree Style Tab, to mitigate this problem? If the horizontal tabs were delineated differently, would you potentially find them useful (i.e. wider tabs to restrict content from being cut off, more defined tab separation, etc.)?

You mentioned recurring favicons as well. Would a way to "auto-group" tabs from the same website be helpful? Tab wayfinding is a shared concern that comes up often from our community base. So thank you for your suggestion and comments! We will consider this when we relook at tab management.

Re: Organizing Information

CT — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 17:29:48 GMT

Hi @rayf, thank you for the reply!

To start, I do use Tree Style Tab as my vertical tab solution. I usually activate it once I have 6-7 tabs because until that point the horizontal tab strip is fine for navigation. (Side note: I disable the 'tree' aspect of this extension, as I don't have a use for it.)

If the horizontal tabs were delineated differently, would you potentially find them useful (i.e. wider tabs to restrict content from being cut off, more defined tab separation, etc.)?

I don't believe this would help me, because although the increased width would make more text visible, it would also cause the tab strip to overflow and scroll sooner, increasing the amount of tabs "hidden" from my immediate view and distance I'd have to scroll.

You mentioned recurring favicons as well. Would a way to "auto-group" tabs from the same website be helpful?

Personally, I'm not sure I'd use this feature or if it'd help me. In the case of YouTube tabs, my issue comes from only being able to see 5-6 characters of the tab title in horizontal mode, combined with the favicon being the same. With vertical tabs, I'm able to see up 3-4 words usually which is enough to know at a glance which is which .

In my other example of Twitter tabs, I'm usually opening them in succession, so they're already 'grouped' together so to speak.

To sum up:

I do have a need to switch between horizontal/vertical tabs depending on how many tabs I have open
Better defined/wider tabs wouldn't help me in the case of having many tabs
Would likely not use auto-group by website as it doesn't alleviate my issue

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 17:59:50 GMT

Thank you for your response @mozarella ! May I ask what method are you currently using to create the groups that you mentioned? So that I'm clear, are all of your tabs open within the same window? How are you liking your current wayfinding journey through your misc open tabs at the moment (other than the pain point with single-click refresh)?

Are you currently perceiving single-click tab refresh and information organization as two separate issues? Or are they intertwined?

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:11:12 GMT

Thank you for your feedback @lolrepeatlol ! And so happy to hear that you have a deep appreciation for Mozilla. This goes a long way for us and we are grateful for your continued support!

This is great feedback around vertical tabs usability. It sounds like grouping is key for you and honing in on that even more specifically...isolated grouping would be even more ideal (what Simple Tab Groups is offering)? With the focus behavior you'd be able to interact with the active group only, which I'm sure alleviates some cognitive load.

Thank you for your suggestions and comments! We will consider this when we relook at tab management.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 19:55:15 GMT

Thank you for the feedback @ollie ! It's great to hear that introducing this concept would improve your productivity. These are the kinds of helpful enhancements that we are looking to bring to our users as much as possible. We will consider a tab grouping concept when we relook at tab management.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 20:05:53 GMT

Thanks for sharing @nbp ! We can never spend too much time thinking about ways to make the internet a better (and less stressful) place! This is an interesting concept -- an all encompassing system that could be set up with queries. The email analogy is a helpful comparison! Just curious here...if you had to call out the biggest pain point for you around information organization, what would it be? It sounds like retrieval ability is one concern that would be helpful for us to address.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 20:09:42 GMT

Thanks for your reply @Mte90 ! Can you elaborate a bit more on the pain point? Is this issue specifically related to when you try to save a new bookmark only? It sounds like instead of a default folder suggestion, you'd prefer a menu of all of your existing folders without one being preselected? Would this make saving bookmarks a quicker and less tedious process?

Re: Organizing Information

ali1234 — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 20:31:04 GMT

No, we can already organize the bookmarks exactly how we want using the folders API, and indeed that is the whole point of Livemarks.

We want to set a custom icon so that the bookmark or folder is displayed with a custom icon. No other reason.

Custom metadata is a completely unrelated concept where there would be an API for attaching arbitrary keys and values to a bookmark. The browser itself would never touch this data. It would be entirely up to extensions to decide how they want to use it. For example, Livemarks could use it to store the source RSS URL and update frequency instead of storing that information in a separate database. This would fix several bugs where the bookmark database and the extension database get out of sync (one of which ironically involves Firefox Sync).

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 22:02:39 GMT

Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback @vincentj !

In this new Mozilla Connect community format, we will be focusing on having discussion around a few different topics every couple of weeks. With that being said, I will try to address most of the concerns that you've surfaced here around tab and/or bookmark information organization first and foremost.

To ensure that I am understanding the pain points around bookmarks, can you clarify a couple of things for me? Is the extra padding a concern for the bookmark menu/folders? For the browser tabs? Or for both? You mentioned that you need to make adjustments to fit more bookmarks on the screen, should I assume that having more content density here would be helpful when searching for specific bookmarks?

I'll try to hit some of the points made around decreased usability and accessibility related to the Proton redesign now. All of these issues are valid concerns and worth considering. We will take this feedback and surface it with our Design and Accessibility teams respectively (re: contrast issues, tab spacing/delineation and tab muting).

I am also excited to report that we are currently looking at a solution that could resolve the system theme vs color scheme pain point! Stay tuned for updates on this.

Re: Organizing Information

steel835 — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 22:29:43 GMT

I personally like that new design looks cleaner, for me tabs favicons as separators are enough (though for tabs without them some default icon is needed for sure). I think if a pronounced system colored theme was a default, with an option to choose a clean theme, people would be less upset - familiar for conservative people by default, fresh for progressive people as an option

Re: Organizing Information

steel835 — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 23:00:38 GMT

Maybe automatic groups based on parent tabs would be a good thing:

all new tabs automatically create a group without a name, if they open children tabs
all children tabs are most likely subject related, and if not - they can be dragged out of a group and these tabs can also make groups if they open children tabs.

Most common example - you search for something and get carried away opening new tabs. At the end you can either

give this group a name
collapse it temporarily
or even close all redundant tabs at once.

I'm sure tree tab extension users use it the similar way

How unnamed implicit group could look like

Re: Organizing Information

vincentj — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 01:55:13 GMT

@rayf wrote:
Is the extra padding a concern for the bookmark menu/folders? For the browser tabs? Or for both? You mentioned that you need to make adjustments to fit more bookmarks on the screen, should I assume that having more content density here would be helpful when searching for specific bookmarks?

It's just the bookmark menus/folders where the extra padding created issues for me, so yes, more density in the bookmarks would be preferable. The extra padding in the hamburger menu or other places seemed fine.

I don't speak for everyone though; your own hardware data shows that around 40% of people have a vertical resolution of 900p or less, with over 26% at only 768p. It's quite possible that other people encounter problems with the extra padding, especially if they have display scaling over 100% set in the OS.

Glad to hear that the other issues are being investigated, thanks!

Re: Organizing Information

vincentj — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 02:16:11 GMT

For sure, certain aspects of the new design are nice. The missing tab separators are most problematic for pinned tabs; I have half a dozen pinned tabs and the lack of visual separation introduces a lot of uncertainty when clicking.

Re: Organizing Information

mozarella — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 09:31:00 GMT

I simply leave about 20 tabs open. Some genealogy, some news, some science, some health.

I refresh the tabs at least once an hour when working at the computer. Sometimes this means 10-20 X per day.

Two steps. First, select all tabs. Second refresh. About 3 years ago, FF had a single click to do the same. It went away.

Did this answer your question?

I have another problem with disappearing Cyrillic to English translation for family trees on my genealogy pages. Should I mention it separately?

Re: Organizing Information

Mte90 — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 10:14:40 GMT

Both the solution to me are fine, a multipicker that remember the lasts used or that I can turn off the save of the last folder used.

I can achieve in both the solution so this on what is better on the Firefox UX.

Re: Organizing Information

alias — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 14:45:48 GMT

I switch between my phone and desktop a lot. It would be really helpful if I could check tabs on my phone from my desktop and then delete them. I know I can check them, but it would be really helpful to be able to delete them from my desktop.

Personally, I think that's the main use case for being able to see tabs on other devices. Often I might open a tab on my phone for later. When I'm back at my computer, I want to be able to open it on my desktop and close it on my phone. Right now it stays on my phone, which causes clutter. Safari has this feature and it's the one thing I miss.

Re: Organizing Information

nbp — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 16:20:24 GMT

First of all, one thing to note is that “being organized” is not why people want to use the web. This is a mere annoyance to help future you at retrieving information. Thus, from my point of view, the biggest pain point are to do it manually and to do it repeatedly.

The reason I was interested in an email view was that, like containers and bookmark folders, tabs could be organized by topics. Either with matching keywords, browsing history relations or pre-programmed filters. Thus helping at avoiding the repeated aspect of staying organized. The temporal relation of browsing history can also be helpful to find keyword of interest, to avoid doing things manually.

Another aspect, which appeared to me after building this prototype, like new incoming email, suggestions could appear as unread tabs, like any ordinary tab. While this could be a problem for privacy reasons, this is also the best way to assist users with content discovery, better than whatever one could type in a search engine. Suggestions could either come as a passive watch for RSS feeds, or an active indexing of already visited web page in order to find similar pages, or sharing pages between peers.

Re: Organizing Information

mlp63 — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 14:17:31 GMT

here is a simple, (somewhat), request. implement all the best features of "speed dial FVD". All the custom, personal set-up options that that extension provided. It, (speed dial), was a good personal customization extension. A speed dial style custom option would greatly improve fire foxes appeal.

Re: Organizing Information

KERR — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 03:54:31 GMT

Somewhat related idea:

Some improvements to the Bookmarks/Library view

Re: Organizing Information

KERR — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 04:06:27 GMT

Some thoughts:

Vertical tabs (with the ability to hide the tab strip at top to maximise vertical space)
Tabs that launch from parent tabs can be nested (like Tree Style Tab) - makes it easy to expand/hide/close a bunch of related tabs at once, and keeps browsing organised. Eg if I'm researching something and open 10 tabs.
A tab search feature (currently I use Tabby extension), with preview and close button:
More details about the tab when hovering, eg URL and thumbnail. Some sites like Facebook give their page titles only "Facebook" so you don't know what the page actually is
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/more-tab-detail-eg-preview-url/idi-p/154
Easier way to see identify which tab is playing audio
Duplicate tab detection - there are addons for this, but perhaps if you're about to click a link (that you already have open in another tab), FF could prompt you

Thanks!

Re: Organizing Information

Sheila — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 15:33:37 GMT

What I would like is that when we pin the tabs we want.. They should remain pinned when we close Firefox.. often I have to re pin.. As of now I don't close my browser so I don't lose my pinned tabs.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 19:53:33 GMT

Thank you for elaborating on this idea further @ali1234 ! This is definitely not something that we've considering before, so it's refreshing to see an idea like this come into the suggestion bucket. We will take this idea into account once we revisit solutions for improving bookmark management.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 19:57:28 GMT

@CT- This is great! And we appreciate the clear summary in your response here as well. This use case seems very common and it's helpful for us to understand exactly where this kind of a solution could prove to be beneficial. We will consider this approach once we revisit our exploration of tab management!

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:12:00 GMT

Super helpful @steel835 ! We are seeing recurring themes around legibility, grouping and wayfinding when it comes to tab management. This definitely gives us good grounds for focus areas and proof of concept when we revisit solutions for this.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 20:08:08 GMT

Thanks for the clarification @mozarella ! I can definitely understand the potential frustration that could come when you are used to doing something one way and then an additional step gets introduced to the process. We are committed to identifying more ways to get our users to the things that they want to get to quicker and easier....so this feedback is helpful to hear.

Your other problem sounds like more of a functional bug? It would be great if you could file this for us in Bugzilla so that we can ensure that it gets tracked properly.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 20:45:39 GMT

Thanks for your feedback on this @Sheila ! It sounds like you'd like to maintain your pinned tabs without selecting "open previous windows and tabs" in about:preferences, correct? You don't want to save anything from the last session, other than the pinned tabs?

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:26:12 GMT

This is wonderful feedback @KERR ! There seems to be many different ways we could potentially build up tab management in general -- even aside from developing a vertical format, there's merit in providing ways to find and read information more quickly within a group of any given tabs.

We are getting good feedback in our video discussion thread on the issues that users are experiencing with audio + tabs, so thank you for surfacing this here as well! We will take all of this feedback into consideration once we revisit this browser area.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 21:06:15 GMT

Thanks for the feedback @mlp63 ! One really interesting thing that an extension like this provides outside of the customization features, is the ability to have a visual snapshot of the tab/page content. We will keep this in consideration once we revisit this area of exploration.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 21:09:33 GMT

Thanks for providing further context here @nbp ! The granularity of your solution suggestion is very helpful and appreciated as well. We will keep this approach in mind once we revisit this topic area.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 21:12:15 GMT

Wonderful! Thanks for clarifying this for me @Mte90 ! We'll take a closer look at some of the collective ideas coming in about bookmark improvements and adjust our approach here accordingly.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 21:14:44 GMT

Thanks for adding this post reference @KERR ! Definitely helps to contextualize more about ways we can improve bookmark management.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 21:18:56 GMT

Thanks for this suggestion @steel835 . Providing a separate theme to address some of these issues is certainly one potential way to mitigate the problem. We are in the process of gathering as much feedback as we can around this particular topic, as accessibility concerns are very important for our organization and for our community.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 21:22:16 GMT

Thanks for adding this additional context @vincentj . It's helpful for us to understand that there may be different levels of experience pain as it relates to tabs vs pinned tabs. We will take time to look at both when we revisit this area.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 21:23:08 GMT

Thanks for clarifying!

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 21:25:26 GMT

Great feedback here @alias ! Is the concern to keep clutter under control more important for you on your mobile device than on your desktop?

Re: Organizing Information

Sheila — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 22:49:07 GMT

YES.. Keep tabs pinned.. but tabs that are not , can be restored from last session

Re: Organizing Information

alias — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 23:05:26 GMT

I suppose. It's a lot harder to manage clutter on a smaller screen I think. But I think what I said about tabs applies both ways. I do usually go from mobile to desktop, but I also go from desktop to mobile when looking up directions, for example. Mainly, I just don't think it makes much sense to grab a tab from a different device and then have it on both devices (whether it's going from mobile to desktop or desktop to mobile).

Re: Organizing Information

ikpjr — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 18:37:46 GMT

I'm posting this in part because I think it will be of interest to all of us who use tabs extensively and who need tab management solutions. Particularly in this thread discussion, @lolrepeatlol and @CT who have expressed interest in tab management and vertical tab solutions.

In terms of tab management, there is in my view an existing addon combo that comes close to the ideal of fulfilling that purpose for the most general use cases and needs, that is, satisfying both more casual and heavy tab users alike(the former possibly satisfied with "Chrome"-like collapsible stacks on the tabbar and the latter with additional need to manage "windows" of such stacks).

Before talking about such addons I'll justify the need for them with an example workflow(a web developer's one) but that would be easily transferable to other use case scenarios(like shopping, family, research, travel):

Imagine that he has several websites in development, each with a deadline.
Each of these would map to a project and in turn each of those would have different stacks("Stacks" = "Chrome tab groups"):

"Stacks"=>
- one for accessibility, test tools and performance.
- another one for searches and documentation/reference material and Q&A, etc.
-etc.(any other web developer and client specific/unique (per project) stuff that you can imagine).

With a multi-column full page view project manager he would be able to put projects with closest deadline at the top along with auxiliary, depended on and/or next projects in his pipeline following in rows below.
Each column is same height with project title and tab list(scrollable) allowing tab movement between projects.

Choosing a project to work, he would further refine his workflow by sorting "tasks"(stacks) (on the tabbar) for the work to be done or focused in the next work session.
Dependent, successive or related tasks would be in sequence at the top/bottom of the tabbar/list/queue saving him time in not having to search/locate as much or at all for tabs and tasks.

Furthermore, thinking that this person has a house, family, hobbies and likes to travel, he needs to have those aspects and activities of his life represented as well.
So, instead of having different Firefox profiles for each type of activity(each with a set of "projects") and/or needing to scroll through multiple projects in the manager to reach those other projects when switching activities, the project manager view should have tags(or categories) for filtering projects(with that tag) that belong to an activity(e.g. tag(s) web development, home, professional, family, research, travel, health).
This would allow for more straightforward switching between activities, similar to the concept of virtual desktops but without hogging resources(only one project(or "window") in one activity is active at a time).

All of the above can effectively aid in burning down and focusing in "tasks" in a "project".

Now what are the addons that enable in part this workflow today and that I've been using for many years?

Tab Sidebar(TS) for "Chrome tab groups"/tasks and Simple Tab Groups(STG) for providing "project-groups" management view.

However, STG doesn't currently have project filtering and I can't say for sure if it preserves per-page scroll and history(don't remember).

Also TS is supposed to be a vertical addon and there are people that would prefer to have traditional horizontal tabbar but with "Chrome tab groups" support or even be able to switch between the two modes.

With the additional help of another addon - Manage My Tabs, a view of URL domain-grouped tabs in which such groups can be sorted by tab count, one can more easily group tabs that are meant to be closer together and be able to be managed and put into groups and stacks by the other mentioned addons or natively(if "stacks" are a native feature).

Note 1:

It is conceivable that STG could be used with other vertical addons, however I have not tested any such other combination and so can't vouch for them because there could be potential conflicts, I guess.

Note 2:

Here I present my take on another tab-management related aspect: tree hierarchies and auto-grouping.

Tree hierarchies(such as provided by Tree Style Tab ) can be IMO at times a bit clunky because of indentation caused by the multiple nesting, wasting space that way and making illegible the tab titles.

I know that one can have such hierarchies be flat indented if such option is chosen, but perhaps that is not an option for some users.

Auto-grouping could be an alternative without need for indentation and I'll give an example of how that can be achieved:

Related tabs(same domain and direct links) are auto-reassigned to a new tab stack as per the following example.

From tab TA opening tabs TB and TC would form stack S1 with tabs TA, TB, TC.

Short Version: (TA=>(TB,TC))=>S(TA,TB,TC).

Opening TD and TE from TC(both on a different domain from TA) would make S1 (TA, TB) and S2(TC,TD,TE).

(Not so short) Version: (TA, TB, TC=>(TD,TE))=>(S1(TA,TB), S2(TC,TD,TE)) , TD!=TA, TE!=TA.

I wrote this note with some users in mind, like @steel835's reply with input on "automatic groups based on parent tabs" and @KERR's "Tabs that launch from parent tabs can be nested (like Tree Style Tab)" who have replies on this matter of auto-grouping and hierarchies.

I have addressed in this note both auto-grouping and nesting(@steel835's and @KERR's concerns/suggestions, respectively), so I'd like that they will notice it (and say something about it).

Re: Organizing Information

ikpjr — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 19:20:17 GMT

Firefox's address bar already provides tab search(there is an icon in the autocompletion popup to search in tabs specifically) and duplication detection(it suggests "Switch To" that tab in the autocompletion).

On your 2nd bullet point(nested hierarchies of tabs), I'll suggest that you please look at the 2nd and final note at the bottom of my other post(on tab management) in this thread(at this point in time you can find it simply by sorting the thread to display most recent posts - it should be at or near the top).

Re: Organizing Information

ikpjr — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 19:36:46 GMT

I have a concrete example on auto-grouping that details the specific operations and tabs involved.

If you're interested, you can find my post(a reply to this discussion thread that can you can find by sorting it by most recent posts) - that talks about tab management.

The bit of potential interest to you is within Note 2 a the end of the post.

Re: Organizing Information

ikpjr — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 22:33:24 GMT

You can have the cake and eat it too(with Firefox):

In the meantime, while we wait for a "perfect" solution, just do like I did and install a vertical addon alongside STG(in my case Tab Sidebar(TS) - but I can't assure that other addons will be conflict-free with STG because I have'nt tested such combinations despite trying many vertical addons in isolation).

With TS, besides having vertical tabs you have the ability to "join" tabs in a "task" and as many tasks needed.

By "task" I mean a unit of what you're trying to accomplish in a moment, but that you've not to and be able to switch for another "task" or even unassigned tabs.

In this sense, a "task" can be for example a set of tabs, including tabs for search, authoritative-subject sites and commerce sites. Examples of such tasks can be "Shopping for a product" or "Learning a Subject" or even mixes of these if needed.

Now, how does this integrate with STG?(the answer follows).

If one thinks of the current "session"(or window) as grouping similar "tasks"(such grouping/sorting is for the user to do), one then has a "project session".

STG, as you are familiar, presents a management of such "projects" but now with TS you have per "project" tasks - so they are proper projects now.

If you want a more detailed look on this that includes additional suggestions for improvements towards a "perfect" solution(like filtering projects) - and an example workflow, please have a look at my other post on this discussion thread that talks about tab management.

Re: Organizing Information

Christian75 — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 14:43:26 GMT

For my part I am satisfied with the current organization, with the help of an extension that simply manages the groups of side tabs (Tree Tabs): moving with the mouse a tab in the group or between groups, usual tabs pinned as small buttons, etc. I don't even use the "folders" in the tab groups.
I already tend to leave too many tabs open, which surely slows down the opening of Firefox 🙄

In addition, the personal bar tool does the trick to conveniently organize bookmarks (with subfolders of course). I put it on the right side of the menu bar to save space in height.

Happy 😁

Re: Organizing Information

pg_78 — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 23:37:19 GMT

A better History feature would help a lot. Two particular suggestions:

- Advanced Search (so you can search on a combination of visited date, domain name, title etc).

- Option to have links clicked from the History panel open in a new tab, rather than stomp on the currently open tab.

Re: Organizing Information

lovelyjubbly — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 05:52:44 GMT

I use the address bar as the primary way of searching. On desktop and mobile.

It searches across existing tabs, history, and bookmarks. I don't actually open and look at the bookmarks,or history. I just type a part of the title of the page from history, or part of the bookmark name or tag, and expect the search to find it for me.

I think it mostly works well. I like that clicking some entries can switch me to an already open tab. There are times when I feel that it's missing some history, or my memory was a bit fuzzy or I made a typo, and thought, it would be nice if the search could do fuzzy searching or synonym searching. But never felt this strongly. Overall quite satisfied with how the address bar search works. Thanks, great feature.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:10:21 GMT

Thank you @ikpjr !

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:18:17 GMT

Really appreciate the thorough response you've provided here @ikpjr. The task scenarios with an example workflow is helpful to understand the significant impact that such a feature could have to the user experience. Thanks!

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:25:26 GMT

Thanks for clarifying @alias . You make an interesting point in that one may only need or want to have a single device at a time with any given tab for information retrieval. We'll take a look at this more as we are currently working on optimal solutions for tab sharing across devices.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:28:40 GMT

Thanks for clarifying your suggestion on pinned tabs behavior @Sheila . We'll take this into consideration as revisit tab management in general.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:33:53 GMT

Thanks @pg_78 ! Can you further explain your second suggestion to me? If you right click on a link from the History panel currently, you can choose to open it in a New Tab. Are you suggesting a different behavior than what exists today?

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:37:39 GMT

Really glad to hear that you are enjoying the Firefox Suggest feature @lovelyjubbly ! This is a feature that we are particularly proud of and look forward to taking feedback like this to continue improving it where helpful 🙂.

Re: Organizing Information

pg_78 — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:45:49 GMT

Good question, let me clarify. What I'd like is for History to work like Bookmarks here.

For bookmarks, I can (and do) set "browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInTabs" to True in about:config. That means a single left-click on a bookmark will open it in a new tab.

But there's no corresponding preference for History. I wish there was! (Personally I'm fine with this living in about:config, but some users might like it to be exposed in the friendlier about:preferences UI too.)

If you right click on a link from the History panel currently, you can choose to open it in a New Tab.

That's better than nothing, for sure. But the current UX is too clunky really: (right-click + move pointer to correct menu option + left-click) takes much longer than a single left-click.

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:48:39 GMT

Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback here @Christian75 -- and really appreciative that you are a happy Firefox user! It sounds like we can definitely stand to take a closer look at some of the existing extensions and add-ons offerings and consider ways that we can integrate some of these behaviors directly into Firefox.

Re: Organizing Information

BelFox — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:38:27 GMT

Want to chime in on this one. I use the Feedbro add-on to open RSS feeds in a separate tab. The add-on provides a moz-extension://<GUID>/reader.html page, and I usually pin this tab for quick access. However, every time Firefox updates, this tab is unpinned, which is rather inconvenient. Other pinned tabs just stay in place after the update.

Is there some configuration that unpins tabs associated with add-ons after Firefox updates? Thx!

Re: Organizing Information

BelFox — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:29:41 GMT

@rayf @vincentj

I found a CSS hack on the web that gives inactive tabs a dimmed background. I think this could be a nice solution to better separate tabs visually, without the need to reintroduce line separators. The effect is very subtle (but maybe too subtle for people who are visually impaired - for them, a more contrasting background could be used).

EDIT: this the hack, for anyone interested:

.tabbrowser-tab:hover>.tab-stack>.tab-background:not([selected], [multiselected]) {
background-color: color-mix(in srgb, currentColor 12%, transparent);
}
.tabbrowser-tab>.tab-stack>.tab-background:not([selected], [multiselected]) {
background-color: color-mix(in srgb, currentColor 6%, transparent);

Re: Organizing Information

pg_78 — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:10:44 GMT

That does look nice. One thing to bear in mind: not only is it important to distinguish the active tab from inactive tabs, but it's also important to distinguish different inactive tabs from each other. (The use case is that you want to go back to a tab you previously opened - how do you quickly find it visually?)

For my eyes and brain, line separators make that much easier, so I configured that in my userChrome.css.

Re: Organizing Information

BelFox — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:20:16 GMT

Hi there,

Excited you guys are tackling the tab management/organizing information challenge and are reaching out to the community! I am someone who likes to keep things organized and tidy, but over the past few years I tend to have more and more tabs opened at the same time. A browser that helps me find my way in the tens of tabs I have opened, could make a big difference.

To have my tabs organized today, I mainly use the wonderful Simple Tab Groups (STG) add-on. I manually create tab groups, and move tabs into these groups to view them at a later time. The add-on allows for a nice, visual overview of all tabs (similar to the old Panorama function in Firefox), has a good search function and works well. Most important drawback is the active group name that isn't visible in the tab strip, probably because changes to the interface are severely limited by the WebExtensions API.

I also installed Tree Style Tabs (TST), another great add-on which allows for (automatically) nesting tabs, but I use it less frequently because the horizontal tab bar can't be hidden when using TST (something the WebExtensions API should allow, IMHO) and having both a vertical and horizontal tab strip is too much clutter for me.

My main wishlist:

Whatever changes you introduce to improve tab management, make sure they don't irreversibly break great and popular add-ons like STG and TST. Instead, further extend the possibilities of the WebExtensions API to allow add-on developers to improve their add-ons (see limitation in bold above). Get into contact with (a few of) them!
Some form of (manual or automatic) tab stacking would be a great addition to Firefox's functionality! Named and stacked tab groups wouldn't necessarily be incompatible with Simple Tab Groups or container tabs. I can imagine a scenario where I move a set of individual tabs, container tabs AND stacked tab groups to a STG group. Use cases:
a) When automatic stacking is enabled, or when using a modifier key, Firefox groups tabs that were initiated from a particular web page (clicking links) into a single group. Comparable to the nesting that TST offers. This way, related pages are manually/automatically grouped, the tab strip uncluttered, and the user can go through his/her search stack.
b) Manually created or automatically nested tab stacks/groups can be given a name very easily. A named stack/group can be moved over the tab strip just like an individual tab. Unstacking/ungrouping should be really easy as well.
Searching within tab groups/stacks is a nice to have IMO, because Firefox already offers to search for tabs using the address bar, which works OK.

Thanks for reading!

Re: Organizing Information

BelFox — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:32:03 GMT

Hi pg_78, if you look closely, you can see that the background of the inactive tabs makes them look more 'separate' as well, without using line separators. See cyan arrow on the attached file.

Re: Organizing Information

vincentj — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 14:20:04 GMT

I am aware of Lepton and other CSS fixes for addressing the issues introduced with Proton. But I'm currently managing 4 different computers (down from 5) and don't really want to spend all my time updating UI styles on all of them.

Whenever Mozilla introduces a significant change like this that requires users to fix it ourselves, particularly those of us with multiple machines, that's really inconsiderate and disrespectful of our time. It also excludes people without the technical skills to apply such changes. It's even worse when the workaround itself becomes unsupported and removed in a later version.

Look at all the posts about the new download manager for another example... Mozilla introduced a change, and expects everyone to toggle an about:config setting to restore the old behavior. Why should we? And how long will that even be supported?

The lack of respect, disregard of user's time, and removal of choice is driving people away from Firefox just as much (or more) than the frequent changes themselves.

Re: Organizing Information

pg_78 — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 14:32:57 GMT

Thanks, I see. With a greater level of contrast between the tab bar and the inactive tab backgrounds, that would certainly help.

Overall I prefer square tabs with line separators rather than round tabs with gaps, but for me that's less about accessibility, more about subjective taste (I like angularity and flatness, I don't really like rounding and shadows!).

Re: Organizing Information

rayf — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 21:26:24 GMT

Hello all! I just to express how grateful we are as an organization to have such amazing contributors. Your feedback is essential to giving us the ammunition we need to inform meaningful products.

We've learned so much over the course of the last couple of weeks around understanding your user needs, desires, and pain points as it relates to information organization in the browser. Some of the more common idea suggestions fall into the realm of:

Tab management
Information density within the tab UI
Organizing tabs based on things like website and/or related content
Pinned tab functionality
Accessibility concerns within the tab UI

I especially want to acknowledge the recurring request for a vertical tab format option. This is something that we hear and want continue to research and investigate!

Although I cannot share any specifics around what we will commit to at this moment, I can assure you that all of your feedback is being considered and discussed with the internal team. We look forward to providing more updates in the future!

Best,

Ray

Re: Organizing Information

Jon — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 00:55:36 GMT

Hey all,

Thanks so much for participating in such a productive discussion about tabs, tab management, and more. It was great seeing so many valuable insights shared both ways! We are closing out this discussion, but want to encourage you to continue sharing your feedback and ideas about this particular topic (and more, of course) in new posts—just be sure to use the necessary labels and tags, so your posts are easily searched for and discovered by our teams.

Also, we are excited to announce that more of these discussions hosted by Mozilla employees are headed this way next week, including one focused on accessibility and another on credential management and form autofill. This will be an ongoing series here in the Mozilla Connect community, so we look forward to continuing to collaborate with you all 😀

-The Community Team