Tab strip for Firefox Android now available in Firefox Nightly - check it out and share your feedback!

[Jon]

Hey all, 

Exciting news…

The tab strip feature for Firefox Android (tablets) has landed in Firefox Nightly 🎉

This has been a popular idea here on Connect—see this thread—and also requested often in app store reviews and on our support site. 

So a big thank you for sharing your feedback, which played an important role in getting the work prioritized. And speaking of feedback… 

We would love to hear your thoughts on the feature. If you have a tablet, download Nightly and check it out. 

⬇️ let us know what you think ⬇️

[jxduran]

Feedback for the team: enable for foldables. It was already working before, what is the reason to manually take this feature away? Vivaldi has a tab bar for *all* devices including regular slab phones, why can't Firefox have it for foldables at least?

[Frenchy82]

Please add this function to mobiles. It's so usefull

Thanks a lot for the work done

[firecat]

The feature should definitely be in the version for phones and for foldable devices. I also like the ability to add a vertical tab bar, as it was before.

[Contantchangesa]

Ok, now how do I disable it?

[jxduran]

I think a good place for this should be a new "Tabs bar" toggle in the Settings > Tabs screen, above or below the toggle to "Move old tabs to inactive"

[Contantchangesa]

Would be nice. It's extremely stupid that there isn't even an about:config option for this.

[hellequin967]

This is great to see finally.  Tabbed strip browsing on Android tablets.

Two feedback entries.

1.  Default view for tablets should be desktop mode or at least have a way to enable it as default for the browser rather than per tab.

2. I've noticed when in desktop mode the view is zoomed in and no way to zoom out to make the page more legible.

Examples below:

Firefox:

Vivaldi:

3.  Also when selecting desktop mode and moving away from the browser, on return it doesn't remember you've chosen desktop and defaults back mobile on refresh.  Only solution is to open a new table and re-select desktop mode.

[cpeterson]

Here is a Bugzilla bug tracking the request to default to desktop mode on tablets: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1790516

Chrome and Safari default to a desktop-like mode on tablets. Their User-Agent strings omit the word "Mobile" (so websites serve a desktop page), but they still mention "Android" or "iPad" (so websites that want to promote their native Android or iPad app can do so). TBD which approach would be best for Firefox Android.

[okay_okay]

looks great thank you!!!

[metachs]

There seriously needs to be a way to disable the tab strip. It removes useful functionality: swiping the nav bar to switch tabs (Why?), and bottom toolbar. The tabs themselves are oversized horizontally, (vertical mode stock config Galaxy Tab S9 fits 4 tabs, chrome fits >8). It takes up way to much vertical space overall. IMO not having a tab bar was one of the benefits of Firefox on android, and this is horribly disappointing.

Why did this disable swiping to switch tabs!?

[suikaz]

I'm pretty sure the tab bar popped up when scaling was set to a certain value even before and that's the main reason I opted for a slightly less dense UI, to avoid the tab bar, so it certainly needs to be easy to disable

[Emmic]

any chance we can get some kind of pinch to zoom thing in this, which lets us make each individual tab section larger so we can actually read the full title of the tabs we have open? on my screen I can currently see 8 tabs, but would rather be able to see 5 and actually see the whole page titles.

[cwh]

Can you advise when this feature will be available in the regular android version of Firefox, which I presume is the app used by the vast majority of the installed base on android?  I heard about this much needed change many months ago, but am still waiting.  Not sure how much longer I'm going to hang on before moving to another browser that already has a proper tablet layout, with tabs.  The current smartphone layout is just painful on a 10+ inch tablet. Thanks. 

[hellequin967]

I'm running the nightly build on my Xiaomi 6 with the tab strip.  All I can say is this was released to you right now I suspect it would be a disappointment.

My primary browser at the moment is Vivaldi but you can use any chromium based browser to compare and the tablet experience is still light and day apart.

[Synchro]

Thank you for working on this. This is a really must-have feature. What about the way it is realised I would like to suggest a couple of things:

1. Now the width of a tab in the tab strip is permanent, so when there is no more space the old ones go away from the strip and I have to swipe the strip to reach for them. For me it's more common the way it is realised in Firefox for Windows, when tabs become more narrow but all of them can be seen at once.

2. Now this strip and the address panel can be placed only on the top of a page, not on the bottom. If this stay in the final release, this can be inconvenient for old users.

[Seddu]

I would love to have this on mobile. Almost every other browser have it. Brave (ios), vivaldi, opera and samsung browser.

[346L3]

I am on the fence for this. I think this desktop-like "tab view" is nice on most tablet-sized devices including mine, but should be an "optional" feature (default on?) to have the ability to hide it in favor of screen space.

But 2 new changes that came with this are absolute no-gos for me:

a) Swiping left/right on the addressbar did move left/right in the open tabs before - and still does on smartphones. This seems no longer possible in the tablet version. I have no idea why this would be removed as it was the fastest and most efficient way to move through tabs. Now you have to look up, determine which tab (not always center/same position, as the tabs scroll horizontally) is the active one and tap the left/right tab next to it. Even worse, if the active tab is - for example - the leftmost of the ones it displays but you want the tab further left, you have to scroll sideways and THEN select the tab you want. It's utterly weird - and of course a lot slower, if only navigating "neighboring tasks" - if you are used to an elegant swipe gesture to navigate. Also, I think the old behavior does not conflict with the new tab view in any way - and introducing different ways of interacting with firefox, depending on device size, seems like a bad idea. (Smartphone: Swiping works, Tablet: No Gestures anymore?)

b) Closing a Tab now jumps back to the Tab I originally opened this tab from - regardless of how many tabs seperate them horizontally. This differs both from the Firefox desktop version AND old behavior (jumping to tab left of the one closed) and using this system feels just weird (wild jumps through LOADS of tabs and having to scroll back)

Common browsing behavior for me: I open - for example - 10 news stories of interest from a hub page and want to read through them and close each one I read in order - "work through them", basically. In the past, that was easy: starting at the last opened (rightmost) tab and closing it jumps to the tab directly left of it and so forth - until i came back to the Hub page.

Now I'm immediately forced back to the (uninteresting) hub page, have to scroll right/sideways through multiple "pages" (sets of 4 tabs) to search the tab left of the one I closed. Which often ist next-to-impossible if all tabs come from the same page and shortened tab titles are not very "telling" of the content. I then have to resort to trial-and-error and step through all tabs until I've gone to far (other page). This new behavior is - at least for me - extremely frustrating.

If there is a usecase for it, at least make this "hierarchy" of tabs optional, please. In my case, neighboring tabs contents are far more "related" than the tab they originated from.

[bfayers]

This definitely needs to be enabled on foldables; the earlier version of this could be force enabled in the "Secret settings" menu and was great on my fold.

[Synchro]

One more idea: to make "back" and "forward" arrows visible on a panel all time. Now they pop up only when I go from blank page to a website and this makes the panel blink.

[WillW]

Please support foldable devices with this, having the existing stretched out Phone UI is a deal breaker for fully moving back to Firefox right now.

[Seddu]

I made a quick mock up of how it could potentially look like on mobile.

 

[SabtainSaleem]

Great news! The tab strip feature is now available in Firefox Nightly for Android tablets 🎉. This was a highly requested feature, and we appreciate your input in making it happen.

[lexa000]

Adding to the chorus of voices calling out for:

1. Allowing at least foldables (Samsung Galaxy Z Fold, Google Pixel Fold, etc.) to have the Tablet Layout with the Tab Strip.

2. Making this an optional feature so that functionality is not lost for existing users who prefer to have their Address Bar at the bottom of the screen (or alternatively a way to have the Tab Strip appear at the bottom of the screen for those users).

[Pheux]

+1. Please make it available for foldables!

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[Pheux]

Still not available for foldables. I’m running 127.0 version because it is the only version with foldables support. 

Please check this out. Many people with foldables are asking for tab strip support. 🙏

[momostain]

Hey, that's awesome news! The tab strip feature for Firefox Android sounds like a great addition, especially for tablet users. I'll definitely check it out on Nightly.

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[michaljack]

Hey, this is fantastic news! The tab strip feature for Firefox Android on tablets has been a long-awaited addition. Kudos to the team for making it happen, and to the community for pushing it forward! I'll definitely try it out on Nightly and share my thoughts.

By the way, if you're into gaming, you should also check out geometrydashapp. It's a super fun rhythm-based platformer that's perfect for quick breaks between browsing sessions. Looking forward to testing both.

[maicaljack]

Hey, that’s awesome! 🎉 The tab strip feature for Firefox Android on tablets sounds like a great addition. I'll definitely check it out on Nightly. Also, exciting to hear Madfut 25 mentioned—been having fun with that too! Looking forward to trying out both.

Thanks for the update!

[Toupee]

Really enjoying the tab strip - finally makes Firefox worth using on an Android tablet. (Please, please add this to foldables!)

There's a few things I've found that would make it even beter - mostly to bring it up to parity with the desktop FF.

- Using mainly a keyboard and mouse, there's no way I can see to scroll the tab strip without touch input.

- Would love a right-click context menu (duplicate tab, undo close tab, etc).

- Don't like the behavior of the New Tab button NOT creating a, well, new tab in the strip. It's like being in a weird limbo and I find it kind of disorienting.

- Others have mentioned this, but page scaling seems whack. It's pretty okay if my window is resized a certain way, and absolutely not other times. I don't know why this even has any bearing on the scaling. Why is this behavior so different from desktop?

- Not tab strip related, but since this really leveled up Firefox on Android from a mouse+keyboard pov - I'd really like to see some common keyboard shortcuts activated, like Control+F to find in page!

[Kaoxt]

@Jon It appears Android 15 made this regress. The colors are odd now above the tab strip row. I posted about this as well in the big report for tab strip.

[sagebind]

Echoing here that I am still waiting for this feature for my foldable as that is where it would get the most use. I understand perhaps wanting to first implement a more seamless foldable experience first, but why isn't there at least an about:config option on Nightly to allow me to at least try it out? Frustrating.

[PocketRocket]

How can I turn "Desktop-like" Tab Strips off on Firefox Beta for my Android Tablet?

[sagebind]

Haha, can we trade? Disable on your tablet and enable on my phone?

Seems like the simple solution here is just add a setting to let the user decide if they want the tabbed interface or not, instead of forcing one or the other.

[suikaz]

yeah, now the tablet experience is much worse than it was before

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