If any Firefox devs or PMs are reading, PLEASE build even a simple tab grouper into the browser natively.
Regardless how recommended a given extension is, all tab manager extensions require access to all web content which is too much. I’d rather use something built in but barebones rather than an addon
My concern with this is I’ve seen for a while now that these user chrome features are deprecated. I depend on them a lot and I dread the day they actually go away.
My killer ask for any browser, on Windows is the option to have groups create different taskbar icons, so I can treat some sites like a seperate “app”. For example youtube music.
Yes a million times. Please go vote for issue https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350 (and please add to the discussion, but do refrain from pure-noise "me too" comments :). If no one comments there today, tomorrow I'll post a summary of stuff discussed here in this HN thread, I see are a couple things worth surfacing.
As to why a "simple native tab group" is important even when there are umpteen extensions offering some version of it (in addition to OP's legit point about addon permissions), my take is in comment 40, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350#c40 .
TL;DR: 1. Feature parity with a Chrome feature that is actually visibly used a lot (from direct observation at work), 2. Shipping a simple high-quality "baseline".
Pleaaaaase, Moz PMs & devs, some attention to this!
This is legitimately the only thing I've been asking for from Firefox the last <many> years, I don't really care about webgpu, usb device access would be nice as would fine grained user-controllable permissions for extensions - but all I really want every single day is a better way to group tabs. Hell - just being able to group them by colour like you can in Chrome would be a huge leap forward. I've tried all the well known extensions and I'm not a fan of any of them.
If you use Mac and haven't looked outside Firefox, note that vertical tabs are in Safari, with groups, and group sync.
Vertical tabs (plus tree tabs) are also in Kagi Orion. Which unlike Safari also runs (a subset of) Firefox (and Chrome) extensions, about 70% as of their last FAQ update:
Most importantly, it lets you collapse/expand groups with just a click. Makes for a fluid built-in no-frills "putting project A tabs aside to work on project B while keeping tabs ordering and grouping, without the extra friction of bookmarks or profiles" workflow.
Sidebery is wonderful, but the real gem is Tab Stash. Lets me organize tabs into topic-related groups, with the added bonus that not all of these are "living" tabs. Some are archived/hibernated. By default, live tabs are in an unorganized/unnamed group. The only issue I had was I couldn't tell which tab was playing audio. Tab Stash doesn't have indicators for this, so I installed the Sound Control extension to list tabs playing audio and switch to them.
I got: vertical tabs, tab grouping by topic/label, tab archival (low memory use)
In grasshopper you can organize through tags, and colors, which create profiles mapped to urls, so they also apply for instance if you are in History view. The profile can be set to match the root, or the exact url. You can also filter different kinds of tabs, like unloaded, or playing. There's also a button that appears when a tab is playing, to go back to that tab (focus it).
I am a huge fan of Sidebery, but it really highlights how messed up Mozilla is. Not only have they failed to provide a native vertical tab solution, but then you go to turn off the damn horizontal ones and you have to jump through convoluted hoops by enabling the userChrome.css and then figuring out where the hell to put the file and all of this for one edit. Yeah sure, I have figured it out (and have to re figure every time I install FF), but there is no way that I could ever tell a random user to switch to vertical. I cannot fathom how Mozilla could not add a checkbox to their anemic settings menu.
It’s really surprising how hard it is to customize Firefox considering its image. Wanna change a shortcut, tough luck. Wanna change the UI? Hope you’re a web developer. Wanna build a native app with it? We’re the only browser that no one is working with.
In grasshopper you can filter by domain, but also can add tags, and colors, to any tab, and filter through this. There's a profile editor accessible when you right click the items.
... and that ridiculous kluge is why the vast majority of users will never experience vertical tabs - which would be a better experience for the vast majority of users...
... and also a great reason for keeping notes! As a linux user modifying a text file is par for the course, yet I totally agree in substance with your point.
As someone who keeps tabs open forever (as better bookmarks), resulting in tens of windows with each tens of tabs, I finally settled on Tab Session Manager [1] which allows me to "stash" these Windows and restore them later.
It seems this add-on manages and AllTabsHelper open tabs only and does not have a separate session manger (the one built into Firefox is a joke, sadly).
I don't want to piss on the OP effort, some people will find it useful.
For me, I don't understand the problem. Why do so many people need a tab manager in say Firefox, but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?
> Why do so many people need a tab manager in say Firefox, but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander
I guess you could call me a "tab hoarder", I commonly have 50+ tabs open for the various topics and contexts I'm browsing and switching between. I usually also always restore my previous session from the day before, so some of the tabs are 2 weeks old but I have yet to finish the thing they're related to, so they stay up.
Compared to other applications that I close/open without restoring the previous context. I guess the terminal/tmux is the one that has the most context, and there I usually have 5-10 tabs open at any given time, for the same reason as above. And then I do use a manager of sorts (tmux), but for all the rest, I'm just opening/closing things as needed.
That's fine, everyone works differently, both in our heads and with our workflows, and that's why we have different solutions, no silver bullets and yadda yadda :)
For myself at least vertical tabs can be easily grouped to visually show task or subject. If I’m doing ticket work for example,each ticket gets a main tab with their related child tabs indented underneath. I’ve even written a small web app that creates custom tab titles which I use for organizing tabs.
I think it's largely a solution for bad UI, both in the web and in the browser.
I have a window open just with YouTube tabs of videos that interest me and that I intend to watch in the near future. As an OS-level window, it has weight and presence. Inside the window I have vertical and nested tabs. So I have videos grouped by topic or just by the rabbit hole I used. I can collapse them, move them around, etc. It's tactile. If I put all those videos into a YouTube playlist, it becomes static. It's a link in a list. It becomes less convenient and natural to add things to the list or even interact with them. There's no nesting, no grouping. Have you tried working with a YouTube playlist? It's abysmal. I'd rather keep them in a more concrete state as a tab which is integrated into my browser's tabs system (or whatever extension I use for it, in this case Sidebery) as part of a window that's a natural part of my OS.
This is all before considering how incredibly bad and basic Chrome and Firefox's history tabs are, which we also end up replacing with hundreds of tabs. I wish I had a vim-like undotree or anything like it to navigate my past tabs. There's a whole spatial component that's missing, whole dimensions missing, and I've never understood why.
You don't manage your Word documents in Word. You use the OS for that. That's pretty much why nobody needs tabs in Word.
> I think it's largely a solution for bad UI, both in the web and in the browser.
Agreed, several of my friends hoard tabs instead of using the "bookmark" feature. I suppose it is because bookmarking is one more step and organizing bookmarks takes further effort.
> but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?
Because they rarely open so many tabs there? I routinely open dozens of tabs in web browsers as I navigate to other pages wanting to keep the previous while I explore the web (I hardly ever left-click links - I almost always wheel-click) but I rarely ever open more than 6 folders in Total Commander or more than 6 documents in an Office.
Start day on task A. Open Task, Open Subtask, Open git PR to check comments, Open Azure portal to check something, check Kibana Logs. Do a seperate second Kibana query.
Get asked about task B
Open Task, Open OneNote docs on that task, open a chatgpt session for that task
This is a mild example
Why not close tabs as they are used? Because if I need them again the load time of many sites is atrocious and then I also need to remember how I got there. I would need to save my kibana query or make a note of how I got to that Azure blade. Neither of these update the URL to capture the state (they are not HATEOAS) or I donn’t trust them to.
Yeah. I don't understand why modern browsers don't allow disabling tabs. I already have a window manager that's quite good at managing windows. I don't need another level for that with its own rules.
Don't know which of you or the sibling is right. But even assuming you are, maybe display a warning or something, but let me disable the tabs. They're an absolute PITA. I would gladly buy more RAM to accommodate that.
For Firefox, I've found an extension that moves tabs to a new window. It mostly works, but there are rough edges. I apparently have enough resources for all my browser windows in my shaggy laptop for it to never swap. The overhead doesn't seem huge enough to warrant the removal of the possibility of disabling tabs.
Meh, window management is optimized to the hilt. The real expense is the web view, which you're going to have anyway, as these days all browsers use separate processes.
> but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?
How do you know? Those apps have no way to customize on the same level that Firefox allows. But they also have their ways to handle masses of documents and windows, they are just not very good.
What's so hard about understanding that easily accessible groups of documents is a useful concept in organizing your digital life?
And why do you think they don't? I'd love to have a consistently great tab management experience in all the apps that have tabs (and all the apps that don't). It's just they are more closed, so it's harder to do that with some extension
And it's a bigger issue for the browser since you'd usually have more pages opened there
Could you please also add a button to sort the tabs by domain? I don't want hierarchical grouping like some competing extensions offer (to me such UX feels like additional complexity), only sorting.
By the way, does anyone happen to know how to overcome the sidebar width limit in the current Firefox versions? I want the tab titles to be less truncated but Firefox won't let me expand the sidebar more than 432 px in width.
An alternative (maybe even better) idea which came into my mind is make item title display multi-line (word-wrap). Is there a Grasshopper configuration option for this? I already enabled URL display so it already is two-line effectively but I feel like probably making both parts (the title and the URL) two-line each.
>I already enabled URL display so it already is two-line effectively but I feel like probably making both parts (the title and the URL) two-line each.
So apart from having URL + Title shown at the same time, I take it you mean to reserve two lines for those to have some room to wrap? I'll add a note to try it as a setting.
This worked (with Firefox 118.0b2). Thank you very much. I already had almost proper userChrome.css there I apparently created previously but I never knew sidebar should be replaced with sidebar-box.
I already forgot the details, but I tried some solutions like this I could google up. Yes, I remember changing some numbers in some files in the profiles. Nothing worked. Apparently these were only meant to work with older versions.
This reminds me of a sabbatical project i ran with during the pandemic. ended up sputtering out due to lack of time and motivation, but i did end up pushing out an initial alpha for some friends
>Is this manager advanced enough to replicate Vivaldi's tab tiling and stacking functionality?
No, but it can do a bunch of stuff, which you can try.
>also not sure why the screenshots devote 80% of space to non-addon functionality like page with some distracting chip images and colored tables
Was easier to take screenshots like this. But maybe I'll try cropping next time. I guess the idea was to show how it looks as a sidebar, or as a popup.
Grasshoppers are cool. And a platform has been created to add more features if they make sense. It already can do a bunch of stuff, I advice you to give it a try.
Went ahead and played around some with it. Pretty smooth, handled the 600 or so tabs I had like a champ. The myriad of filtering options are great, surprised I had so many duplicate tabs. Combination of tags and colors is an interesting approach but I found it a bit lacking in ergonomics and I really can't see it being better than Sideberry's tab panels/groups approach (the killer feature for tab hoarders imo). Good extension though, will be keeping an eye on it.
Yes the theme is very customizable, check the Settings. There's also commands you can use if you double tap Ctrl twice. You can open the command palette and select Light Theme.
I know I am going to sound stupid, but I failed to find where the settings for this extension are. Neither the toolbar icon, nor the sidebar, nor the Firefox's extensions management page seem exposing any.
Main menu is the top left button inside the extension. In that menu you can enter Settings. Then in settings you can click the category to see a list of other categories, or use the arrows.
I see. Thanks. It just says "Tabs" so I couldn't guess it's there intuitively. Perhaps you might want to add a downward arrow to the button right side to hint it's a drop-down menu.
Regardless how recommended a given extension is, all tab manager extensions require access to all web content which is too much. I’d rather use something built in but barebones rather than an addon