Firefox releases tab groups for nightly

(bugzilla.mozilla.org)

68 points | by jack-bodine a day ago ago

23 comments

  • sunaookami 19 hours ago ago

    It can also be enabled in Firefox Beta with "browser.tabs.groups.enabled" but it's still a bit buggy there. Ironically, Firefox was the first browser to have tab groups with Firefox 4 until they removed it because "nobody used it".

    • Paianni 16 hours ago ago

      Opera 11 (Dec 2010) had 'tab stacking'.

      • sunaookami 14 hours ago ago

        Didn't knew that, interesting! Really miss the old Opera.

    • hcs 9 hours ago ago

      It's still a bit buggy in Nightly, it seems, over the last few days I keep triggering it on accident.

    • ksec 12 hours ago ago

      >with Firefox 4 until they removed it because "nobody used it".

      Tab Groups remains a good idea on paper but no one has done a useful implementation of it. I remember during the Firefox 4 Tab Group era I purposed that Tabs from site ( Say HN ) and any Tabs opened from that site, for example I have another tab from this submitted links bugzilla.mozilla.org. All To be moved together into a tab group instead of just moving site to a tab group.

      It was rejected for whatever reason.

      • Cpoll 11 hours ago ago

        This sounds a bit like an extension that nests tabs in a tree structure (I can't remember the name).

      • coffeeling 11 hours ago ago

        Huh? I use tab groups heavily in Brave. They're very useful, even if they're not nestable.

  • wlesieutre 17 hours ago ago

    Exciting! Firefox used to support tab groups and removed them in 2016 because they weren’t used enough.

    Now that Safari has them, I guess there’s pressure to have feature parity?

    • infensus 7 hours ago ago

      They took the most upvoted ideas from the community forum and started implementing them. Maybe to win some users over, but I think it might be too late for this to have any impact on market share.

      I'm also kinda disappointed they just copied the UI from Chrome instead of releasing a refreshed version of the previous implementation. Old Firefox tab groups were like Safari tab groups (or "workspaces" in Edge, Vivaldi, Zen and maybe others), and I think they are way better for organisation. Yeah, STG extension still exists, but having it built-in would be nice.

  • AAAAaccountAAAA 21 hours ago ago

    Hopefully they won't make it mandatorily enabled like on Android Chrome.

    • danpalmer 20 hours ago ago

      What does it mean for tab groups to be enforced? Is it popping up messages to shame you into sorting your tabs better?

      Assuming not, what’s the harm?

      • sunaookami 19 hours ago ago

        Have you used Chrome for Android? It's absolutely awful and forced me to switch to another browser. All tabs are opened in a tab group, sometimes they will open a new tab group. Very confusing behaviour. The desktop implementation is good though.

        • kgeist 11 hours ago ago

          >All tabs are opened in a tab group, sometimes they will open a new tab group. Very confusing behaviour.

          So I'm not the only one. I never figured out why sometimes tabs open in an existing group, and sometimes in a new group. Curious to find the spec which explains the behavior...

        • KTibow 3 hours ago ago

          When clicking or using "open in new tab" from the long press menu (not "open in new tab in group")?

        • coffeeling 11 hours ago ago

          Brave has a setting to enable/disable the feature, idk if standard Chrome has it.

  • e40 16 hours ago ago

    How long does it take to get from nightly to release?

    • glandium 31 minutes ago ago

      This specific change will not automatically make progress from nightly to release. Specifically, this is enabling tab groups by default in nightly only, for however long it will take for the feature to be stabilized.

    • throwaway74354 14 hours ago ago

      Firefox 135 is expected to be released on February 4.

  • johnea 7 hours ago ago

    A word was left out of the title: Again... Firefox releases tab groups

    Tabs (including all kinds of groupings and UIs) were the best when they were dealt with in NPAPI plugins.

    Mozilla foundation has been screwing them up ever since.

    Of course, always for the betterment of humanity, totally not just because goggle told them to...

  • imcritic 16 hours ago ago

    I want tab groups in Chromium :-(

    • coffeeling 11 hours ago ago

      Chromium has had tab groups for ages, both on desktop and mobile.