Native Tab Grouping / More Customizable Tab bar

[Vinci480]

I'm personally a heavy tab user but have always wondered why there is almost no support for tab grouping or customization in the native tab bar in Firefox.

I think making it able to group like Google Chrome does for example or at least giving more access for extensions and add-ons would significantly improve the UI in that regard.

[00prometheus]

I have had a look at the nightly version of tab groups. I must also mention that I currently have "Simple Tab Groups" installed, and it follows a long line of similar tab group extensions or built-in features that I have used in the past. I am aware of the Chrome idea of grouping tabs directly in the tab bar. To me that doesn't solve anything. The method does let you have multiple tab groups open side-by-side, but I often have more than a hundred tabs in a group; having several such tab groups side-by-side is pointless and just costs immense mouse scrolling. I usually have many dozens of tab groups as well. So I need to keep all tab groups I don't use fully closed and having 50 grouping tabs in the tab bar will just take all my space where I could have had actual tabs instead. I would much rather see a drop-down that lets me switch tab groups for the current window.

When it comes to switching tab groups, the main issues are speed, resource consumption and recognisability. To me it is essential that the tab group I switch to has all titles, favicons and thumbnails cached. I want as clear as possible an understanding of the contents of the tabs I see with just a mouse hover, I don't want to reload all tabs in the tab group. I need to be able to quickly flip through tab groups to look for any particular tab without loading in all the pages in the groups, so speed is essential too. And obviously, page unloading is important to keep resource usage sane.

As I have mentioned before, I think that using the bookmark system as a backing store for tabgroups would be very sensible. It gives backups of tab groups (extremely important to me!), synchronization between devices, and moving tabs between groups for free.

[sgeymsbak]

In my opinion, the most convenient tab grouping is implemented in Opera.

[Jon]

(Note: similar ideas have been merged into this thread)

[Narobix]

Thanks for working on this feature guys, hope you can appease the various view points toward this feature, but I thought i'd comment and share what I find to be the current most flexible and suited deployment, and will digress into other features I know you also have in dev.

I use Edge at work for its MS platform integrations, but the trifecta for me is:

• Tab groups - easy drag and drop creation/add/move/remove tabs, name and colour selection (only really missing a thumbnail selection)
• Vertical Tabs - seamless group integration to this, and ability to collaps to thumnails or expose tab names and expand and shrink screen real estate that it takes.
• Profiles - segregation of projects/personas/clients needs, easy to create, set a logo, name, custom browser settings.

I hope to receive at least the first 2 in Firefox soon since you have containers - but I also find containers buggy sometimes with not being able to stop a site opening in a container, having had a set of tabs become permanent in a container and being unable to delete containers. It seems I can reorder containers now which I don't recall so maybe a recent development 🙂

[Narobix]

Thanks for working on this feature guys, hope you can appease the various view points toward this feature, but I thought i'd comment and share what I find to be the current most flexible and suited deployment, and will digress into other features I know you also have in dev.

I use Edge at work for its MS platform integrations, but the trifecta for me is:

• Tab groups - easy drag and drop creation/add/move/remove tabs, name and colour selection (only really missing a thumbnail selection)
• Vertical Tabs - seamless group integration to this, and ability to collaps to thumnails or expose tab names and expand and shrink screen real estate that it takes.
• Profiles - segregation of projects/personas/clients needs, easy to create, set a logo, name, custom browser settings.

I'd love to see at least the first two implemented pretty soon.

I also see containers as having shared purpose with profiles  room for improvement if it could somehow be elevated with tab groups allowing selection of either one container per group or allow mixing of container use per group. I've had some buggy experiences with containers like being unable to edit their names, have permanent set of tabs stuck in one even when deleted and recreated they would come back 😄

[00prometheus]

Maybe we could have a setting that lets us turn tab groups in the tab bar on or off (for those that have really many tab groups and need the space), then the ability to add a toolbar widget that gives us the tab groups in a drop-down menu as well? If you use the drop-down menu you can only select a single tab-group to be open, but I think that is useful functionality (close all tab groups except the one you select).

[00prometheus]

Sorry that I forgot to mention this: For those who want to see the progress of tab groups, you need to install Firefox Nightly, go to about:config and toggle browser.tabs.groups.enabled to "true". Obviously, this is just where the development happens to be from the latest day of work, so it is very much a work in progress.

[phoenixsoap]

I sadly just made my default browser safari because I have a major tab bloat problem, and I just had too many tabs causing performance issues.

I miss using FireFox, I hope tab grouping is added soon.

[XD]

Me personally, I prefer the idea of Tab Containers, having one tab at the top of the screen, when clicked it has multiple tabs open one level below the current tab level, lots of browsers are implementing the same idea and it has honestly been the main reason I haven't used firefox.

It's been a while now and still have not seen any progress on the idea of tab groups and I would love to know if firefox are still working on the idea or at least see what type of solution they are coming up with.

[Vinci480]

Okay I have had a my try with the current Tab Grouping Build in Nightly.

First of all, to finally see anything after over 2 years since I opened this topic its really exciting.
Though I also understand this is not the final form.
I have a few critique points that need change and some suggestions that I think could make it better in my opinion.

1. Moving tabs right now is like moving magnets covered in honey.
Its suuper difficult to properly move tabs in and out of groups and especially out of a group BUT NOT into a new group.
Compared directly to Chromes Grouping for example, it feels like everything is just stuck like glue until you rip it apart, meaning also ripping your tabs all over the place.

2. Tab Group Color needs to have more diversity, there are currently 9 colours.
All of which aren't even that distinctly different, or look different in the box than on the Tab bar and as someone who often juggles more than 9 different things, it would definitely help to be able to set colours yourself, maybe with HEX Codes in a little circle or bar sliders.

3. Tab Group Names Limits.
I think Tab groups generally should have a longer limit when extended, but fold down a bit more small when closed.
I feel right now its right in the middle of too long for a closed group and too short for an open group, so having it a bit adjusted would probably look nicer.

Now to suggestions:

Personally what @XD said sounds like an amazing Idea to have the Tabs be able to drop below the current tab bar and extend there, though I can definitely see how people also dislike it.
So having an option to switch between the two would definitely cover a lot of people and help with making it more useable for many users.
Possibly in the Settings Tab there could be a little section for "Tab Group Settings" giving Users a little more freedom to set up tab groups in a more specific way, without cluttering the Right Click menu when actually using the browser.

Furthermore, it would be really cool to have a native build in function to be able to unload Tab Groups, so that they can free up RAM.
It definitely shouldn't happen automatically but it would be cool to have the option to right click on the group and below the other group settings to have something like "Unload this Tab Group".
Currently I use "UnloadTabs" from NiklasG for unloading tabs manually, but it would be cool to have something natively for Groups, as Groups already hint at having a lot of tabs.

Besides that Im quite curious to see where the next Iterations go and improve, but I also can't wait to have it finally hit the Stable Release.
I think a big part of the success of this Feature and helping it reach many people is a solid good first introduction and making many people aware of the feature when updating.
Especially after I personally complained to a lot of my friends about the lack of Tab Groups in Firefox, I think it could be nice to let everyone know "HEY THEY ARE BACK AND BETTER!" or something like that.


Curious to see what other useful features people here think could be attached to Tab Groups and what they think of the current implementation.

[AnFire]

Came here to say that, indeed, this was direly needed. Glad to see from the latest post that this just hit Nightly. Can't wait to see it in Beta! Go guys, this is a great feature.