Help shape the future of Tab Groups in Firefox!

[dsandoz]

Hello everyone,

My name is Devin Sandoz and I’m a product marketing manager at Mozilla. @ssmagula is the product manager. I'm posting on behalf of the Tab Groups team who are working to help you be more productive and happy when using Firefox. We want to thank you for all your helpful feedback in Mozilla Connect and invite you to help us improve Tab Groups before a wider release. 

What are Tab Groups?

Tab Groups will help you organize your tabs. Whether you keep your tab bar tidy with just a few tabs or you hoard thousands of tabs, Tab Groups will make it easier than ever to switch between and re-find tabs and tasks—all while maintaining the privacy of Firefox. Say you’re planning a vacation over spring break. A group will help you to keep all your flight searches, lodging options, local restaurants in one easy to re-find place.

Join the Firefox Tab Groups Preview

1. Download Firefox Beta — Tap the Download button, follow the instructions to install, and then launch Firefox Beta. If you already have Beta installed, update to the latest version
2. Use tab groups for all your browser tasks
3. Share your feedback, comments, questions, possible bugs, and ideas for the future in this thread. Your feedback will be valuable as we work through known issues and discover new issues.

Tab groups in action

Tab groups help you stay organized and focused

Creating groups

Once fully released, there will be a helpful call-out explaining how to create groups. To create a group drag a tab on top of another tab and pause until you see a highlighted drop area, then release it. Or right-click any tab and select Add tab to group. Next you can name it. For example, you might want to create a group called News. Add news sites by dragging them into any expanded group. When you’re done catching up on the news, select “Save and close group” so you can remove it from your tab bar and re-open the group the next day. All your groups—open and closed—are always available via the “list all tabs menu” (a downward-facing caret at the right of the tab bar)—even if you close a window or restart, no account needed. 

Known issues

Our team is working hard to make Firefox Tab Groups the best they can be, and we thank you for your help and patience as we discover and smooth out any rough edges.

Faster, better, easier

At Firefox Tab Groups are just part of a larger effort to improve browser productivity. Our designers and developers are creating new tools to improve productivity and efficiency including a sidebar with vertical tabs, better profiles. Our goal is to help you achieve more with less effort so that you can focus on your spring break vacation, and not on your tabs or the browser.

We can't wait for you to try Tab Groups so you can tell us what you think!

[2mustange]

4. Native Workspaces

If integrating Multi-Account Containers proves too complex or introduces technical debt, perhaps a new native implementation—something like Workspaces—could be a better long-term solution. Having a built-in way to fully separate data (e.g., work vs. personal) would be invaluable. While I recognize this would take time to develop, I believe it’s an essential feature that should be part of Firefox natively rather than relying on extensions.

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FYI Profiles is what handles your description of Workspaces and is in Nightly/Beta and I assume will be in main release any month now

[cjones]

That’s interesting. At first glance, it appears that the profiles create a separate browser instance. I was hoping to have a single browser window that “containerizes” and separates data based on use (e.g., work or personal). This way, I wouldn’t have to bounce around to different browser instances and just use keyboard shortcuts to navigate between containers/profiles.

[Bushibot]

Coming from Edge and using tab groups vertically has been a mixed bag. 

I can’t move or sort the group only individual tabs. Frustrating.

I don’t see a way to tie groups to my account so I can open tabs but not tab groups when I move between different computers.

Bookmarks are imported from edge but not tab groups (maybe ms doesn’t expose them?). Few things are more frustrating than have to rebuild from scratch. It’s a real deterrent to switching.

[Windows_Vista]

Does Mozilla know about Zen Browser does the Firefox Team use the Zen Browser and than use some of what it has as a refence to build future versions of it like Nightly and what not?

I have a couple of screenshots showing how tab groups work in Chrome and Edge. I think Mozilla should take notes from these browsers and keep refining the tab grouping feature in future Firefox updates.

Tab Groups in Chrome

Tab Groups in Edge (1)

Tab Groups in Edge (2)

I think these features would be a great introduction when they hit Firefox Stable. You can refine them later in the Nightly and Beta/Dev builds. Maybe we could do something like Vivaldi in the future, but right now, the tab groups feature in Nightly feels underwhelming compared to what we have in Chromium browsers.

[Knogobert]

Love this addition peeps, great work! Feels like the implementation is at a great level with just creating a group on the fly with a simple color diff and naming. Would love to see a better styling for when it is open or not somehow tho, as it is a bit hard to grasp at it is.

I got a weird fun bug popping up when I try to drag in a pinned tab into a tab group. Hell breaks loose on FF Dev 137.0b10 (aarch64). The bar grows vertically and positioning system gets really screwed up. See attached video gif.

[Windows_Vista]

Wow that is just terrible how is Mozilla doing such a terrible job with this feature 🤨

Anywho did you see my response above? Firefox Team needs to be putting in more effort and quality into these features.

[poktr]

First of all, thank you for working on this feature, Firefox has been my main browser since forever and it is one of the modern features that it was missing the most.

What i would suggest based on my testing (mostly horizontal tab related):
1- Be able to drag to move the whole tab group in the tabs bar
2- Be able to drag a tab into a tab group when the tab group is collapsed

Again, thank you for your efforts and amazing work !

[anotgrass]

I'd like the option to be able to switch to a group, rather than having all groups show on the toolbar and manually closing and saving groups to hide them.

So, instead of right clicking and choosing "Save and Close group" for all groups I don't want to see, I would select a group to display from the drop-down icon (or even a Groups tool icon I could drag to the toolbar) and switch to that group. Ideally this would close the current group I have open, (save it), and switch to the group I just selected.

[Bushibot]

I think one odd behavior compared to edge is how the groups expand and contract. Everything kind of jiggles. The whole thing needs to be hard pinned left (or right if mirrored). There should t be any kind of effect on side car open/close/resize. 

[ssmagula]

Thanks to all your feedback, we’re gearing up for our release of Tab Groups. Our progressive rollout begins next week and soon more users will be able to stay organized and manage their tab overload.

This groups’ contributions were instrumental to these these key areas:

• Validating how important it is to reposition tab groups along the tab bar
• Understanding the importance of signaling where to retrieve closed groups
• Several insights and ideas that will be useful for future iterations of Tab Groups

As a reminder for What are Tab Groups?

Tab Groups will help you organize your tabs. Whether you keep your tab bar tidy with just a few tabs or you hoard thousands of tabs, Tab Groups will make it easier than ever to switch between and re-find tabs and tasks—all while maintaining the privacy of Firefox. Say you’re planning a vacation over spring break. A group will help you to keep all your flight searches, lodging options, local restaurants in one easy to re-find place.

In addition, Tab Groups can be named, color-coded, and are always saved. Create a new Tab Group with a few simple steps like dragging a tab onto another, pausing momentarily until the highlight appears, then dropping to create a group, or by right-clicking on any tab and selecting “Add tab to group.”

We hope this helps you stay productive and organized, getting more things done while you browse. Please keep the feedback coming!

[Windows_Vista]

Yeah alot of Chromium browsers does it alot better just look at my other Reponses and maybe you could make the feature to Vivaldi in the future but for now why not try to get to how Chrome/Edge does it.

[rtanglao]

Love it! WOULD BE NICE: 1. Wish I could have custom colours and or custom PNGs like favicons for each tab group! 2. Drag tab groups from Firefox Release to Firefox Nightly (I try and use Release for Work and Nightly for non work stuff)

[Enginerd]

First, I love that tab groups are persistent.  However, I'd love to see a feature that will allow me to toggle between the groups auto-saving the last sites it was on vs the original set of sites.

i.e. if I add in Site A to Group, then from Site A, I click on links and such and eventually end up on Site G, Site G is what shows up the next time I open this group.  I'd like the option to instead not "auto-update", but always open a persistent set of bookmarks or sites.

[aliakbar-m]

I'd love to see these features implemented:

1. Having Tab Groups saved and synced in my Mozilla Account.
2. Having them show up in the "Firefox View" tab with an overview similar to the Tab Stash addon.
3. Being able to pick icons/emojis for the group name.

[Steeltent]

My biggest wish is that you keep working on the feature. Keep improving it.Make it the best tab management of any browser. 

The MVP release is good - you have a chance to make it fantastic.  

[Windows_Vista]

What is MVP?

[Steeltent]

Minimum viable product. Something that works which you can release to your users/customers but that does not have all the bells and whistles you have in mind for the feature. 

I see this first public release as a test balloon. As Version 1.0. 

That's why I really hope they keep working on it to add all the things people are asking for and that make sense. 

[vincentj]

I installed the latest update and enabled tab groups this morning and used it throughout the day.  So far, I really like it!  Nice work!!

[falolaf]

I have noticed a tab switching inconsistency. I have setup Ctrl+tab to swith between tabs in most recently used order.

If I have two tab groups in the same window. One tab group with two tabs and one tab group with > 2 tabs.
If the tab group with two tabs is expanded and the other tab group is collapsed, Ctrl+tab will only switch between the two tabs in the expanded group. If I, on the other hand, have the tab group with > 2 tabs expanded and the other tab group collapsed, Ctrl+tab will switch between all 5 tabs.

I would prefer that Ctrl+tab only switches between tabs in the expanded tab groups.

This is also inconsistent with what it look like in the "List all tabs" drop down where it is reflected what groups are collapsed and not. I.e., only tabs in expanded groups are visible.

[benwaffle]

1. I hope it'll be very easy to organize my existing tabs into groups. Ideally just one click or drag per tab. The old tab groups UI had this:

2. It'd be really nice to use AI to automatically group all my tabs, because I have a lot and don't even know what categories would be good.

[Windows_Vista]

We should also be able to use custom colors for Tab Groups and what about Icons so we can mark them?