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.

[fraggedy_andy]

@Jon 

Vivaldi has at least three different ways to see grouped tabs. I personally like having a second row under the main one that has all of the tabs in a particular group.

The advantage for me is in keeping things tidy. With Chromium-based browsers, it's important so that your icons don't get so small that you can't find a particular tab. In Firefox, it's nice not to have to scroll back and forth across a long row of tabs that don't all fit on one screen.

I use tabs to keep similar tabs together. I'll queue up a bunch of Youtube videos, for example, or research a topic and keep all of the pages in a single group to save space and keep my thoughts together. It makes the tab bar look less cluttered and make it easier to find a group of pages I want to use for a specific task.

[powerFFUser]

@JonWatch this reply which demonstrates Yandex Browser tab grouping feature which is the one of best realisations in my opinion.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-tab-grouping-more-customizable-tab-bar/idc-p/21954#M1163...

[MrLion28]

I second @fraggedy_andy on the use case.

I disagree a bit with @Steeltent example. I don't like the idea of grouping tabs and the label is one "main tab". I like Chromium implementation where you name the group and label it with a color.

@powerFFUserThe link doesn't seem to work for me, I click on it but nothing happens.

[WhenGryphonsFly]

Use case: I often have multiple projects that I switch between every few days or so, roughly 5-7 tabs each. Sometimes these projects overlap and I need tabs from more than one project. I also have roughly ten or so pinned tabs that I need to check once daily or as needed, but otherwise are just taking up space in the tab bar. Many of my tabs have wide tables, slowly updating progress bars, or other features that depend more on the width of the window rather than the height - vertical tabs and/or the sidebar do not work well for my use case.

When I used Chrome, I found the tab groups to be perfect. I could have more than one group expanded at a single time. Tab groups could be named a single character to make them as small as possible when collapsed. When collapsed, the bold colors still made it possible to differentiate tab groups; even expanded I found the colors quite useful for determining what tabs would be hidden if I collapsed a group.

The current extensions for Firefox all lack some characteristic I relied upon. Simple Tab Groups does not appear to allow more than one group to be active. Sideberry does not hide tabs in collapsed groups, so the sidebar vertical tabs are required (rather than using an extension tab or whatever they are called). Tab Stash allows for multiple tab groups to be expanded, but attempting to collapse/"stash" one group without affecting the other expanded groups is effectively impossible. None of them have color. The lesser known Sidebar Tabs does have color, but like Sideberry requires the use of the sidebar. It is also buggy with regards to creating groups; it is correctly labeled "experimental".

Vivaldi's three tab stack options don't appeal to me either. Accordion tab stacks are like Chrome's, except you can't name them or make them take less space than a normal tab except by pinning them. If you do decide to pin them, you don't see the title of each tab when you expand the stack. The two-level stack is nice, but only works because Vivaldi's top bar is so short; it would not work well in Firefox in my opinion. Also, it can't have more than one stack expanded. Finally, the compact tab stack is actively harmful to my use case, as it's actually harder to access tabs of the "expanded" tab stack than tabs belonging to other stacks. (There's also no colors to separate groups.)

While I could use bookmarks for my pinned tabs at least, I feel that there's a disconnect between bookmarks and tabs. For me, bookmarks are effectively tabs that I want to save for much later but I don't trust myself not to delete my history in the mean time. Plus, after trying out Vivaldi for this comment, I've actually removed the bookmarks bar from Firefox. While I need the horizontal space, the additional vertical space of Vivaldi was noticable, and I can see why people like vertical tabs.

[Vinci480]

Sorry for the double post, thought my Message died in transit 😄

[powerFFUser]

@MrLion28Hm-m, the link really not works…

All right let me post it in simpliphied way.

My post about Yandex Browser Tab feature: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-tab-grouping-more-customizable-tab-bar/idc-p/21954#M1163...

[Steeltent]

@MrLion28 

They can of course add the option to name stacks for people who like that. Let the users change the accent colors, add tags to stacks or whatever idea you can come up with. Add all the bells and whistles for all I care, as long as they are optional.

The feature needs to work without forcing people to use these bells and whistles. The default should be quick and intuitive, if you want people to use the feature. Having to name every single stack is way too cumbersome. Few people will use the feature if it takes a few seconds every time you want to create a simple stack.

I LOVE tab stacks but I don't used them in Chrome because they are a pain in the ass to use. I would prefer for Firefox to not follow Chrome's example on this one. 

[MrLion28]

@SteeltentDisagree again. Look at what you've said:

1) "Having to name every single stack is way too cumbersome. Few people will use the feature if it takes a few seconds every time you want to create a simple stack." - This doesn't sound right to me, considering almost every other browser is Chromium and for the most part implemented this the same way and a lot of us who have started to use FF or came back to it are asking for the feature. A TON of people in this thread mentioned Chrome in fact, as the "great choice to copy".
2) "LOVE tab stacks but I don't used them in Chrome because they are a pain in the ass to use." This sounds more like you personally don't want to deal with the feature the way they have implemented it. Which is totally fine since each one of us has a use case and different tastes. But I would say you are more the outlier in this case rather than the norm. Considering you would take "a few more seconds" to save you time scrolling afterwards since you have tabs organized into groups, most people wouldn't mind spending extra seconds if it makes things better afterwards.


I do agree, however, on the user choice. I would love it if they could have a "toggle" option in settings for "when creating a group" so it defaults to either name the group or show "first tab as label", so for people that like it that way like you can also have the option.

[MdPhoenix]

So now we have the new release with a list of "fixes".  At the bottom is this:

"OneTab

This is like an emergency escape hatch when you find yourself overwhelmed with open browser tabs. Click the toolbar button and OneTab grabs all of your open links and lists them on a single scrollable page. You’ll save a lot of CPU and memory once your previously open tabs go dormant on a listing page.

OneTab is a simple and effective way of dealing with sudden tab overload. But if you need more robust tab management tools, you might be interested to check out these other great tab manager extensions.

We hope some of these extensions help you achieve a less cluttered, more serene online experience. If you’d like to keep exploring, you can find thousands of extensions on addons.mozilla.org."

You guys in bed with the maker of this add-on?  Is that the deal?  Leaving Firefox.  Yes, I'm sacrificing privacy over convenience.  I use a browser too much all day long for work. 

[jf]

What? Is this serious? I just see a great idea to become reallity: "List all Tabs - add a close button or X icon next to a highlighted tab under "list all tabs". Congratulations for that! Don't say to community to use addons... This is not good. Make the magic and become ideas into reallity. This is what we want 🙂

[photodiode]

As a developer of one of the many tab groups like add-ons, what I want the most is just an API for tab grouping. Every add-on having to hack their own solution and none of them working together is the biggest draw back, I think.

And on that note, having a session store for each group, like with tabs and windows, would be invaluable. I'd love to be able to do something like this for a Panorama style add-on:

browser.sessions.setGroupValue(group.id, 'rect', {x: 0, y: 0, w: 0.5, h: 0.5});

[narazamsa]

This has been such a big issue, I have seen so many people leave Firefox because of this lack of feature. Please implement this, this is so basic. Browsers are coming with tab management with multiple profiles for work and personal, and we are stuck here for just basic tab management.

For such a basic feature, users are forced to use the inconvenient tab managers that are buggy and don't work with Firefox sync.

[snoozerio]

> you are more the outlier in this case rather than the norm

@MrLion28Surprisingly, the "majority" prefers the implementation of groups from Chrome. In browsers such as Safari, Vivaldi, Yandex and, possibly, Arc, this is implemented better, imho. For some reason, it seems to me that because of the popularity of Chrome, the commenters simply did not try other versions of the groups.

[haskonashi]

Please enable this feature. For work im only using chrome, just because of this feature. Really, please don't wait with this.

[Azn9]

> @Jon "how users use tab grouping"

I use Chrome only for tab grouping. I always have a lot of them opened at the same time (60 atm by example, and sometimes more than 200). It's easier for me to group these tabs by projects with colors so I can pause a project and come back later to it without having to save then reopen all the tabs every time. I also use a "tab suspender" extension so that these tabs don't use ram/cpu. I just put the tab on a group and if I don't use it for 30min, it'll be frozen.