Here I’m still waiting for an official vertical tabs feature.
In the meantime, Floorp has it built-in to the browser.
I was aware of Floorp and had no particular interest in trying it until now. On my way to install it now!
Last time I looked at Floorp was when it was first announced and it seemed to just be hardened Firefox, similar to Librewolf. It’s gained a ton of features since then!
Please work on tab grouping instead!
Now this would be useful.
It was useful 8 years ago when they removed it, that’s for sure.
Tab groups where natively implemented?
Yes, they worked differently than the way Edge or Chrome do now and were in many ways superior for tab management, much more like Vivaldi’s sessions but more intuitive. I was a heavy user and so am biased. They said “just use an extension!” but it would crash and lose your session (and imo the extension works even worse today). It was really ahead of its time.
Few people used it because they didn’t advertise it or make it easily discoverable. You had to know the shortcut already through osmosis or drag the button out of the customize menu.
Simple tab groups works better tbh. It uses the features to hide, list and manage tabs.
But a native in-line implementation would be best.
I actually prefer Chrome’s tab groups, preferring to have groups visible and one click away. Ideally the user would be able to choose whether to show or hide inactive groups.
Except it’s still not available on mobile
Over there! In the past!
Closest thing to that feature is this add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/
Very laggy and overcomplicated, but found that too!
Yeah it’s kinda laggy but does its job. I guess that was the reason why did they remove it from Firefox, it was slowing things down.
Afaik Epiphany has this.
Or vertical icon-only tabs!
Genuinely the only good thing about Microsoft Edge. I wish other browsers had this.
Or tabs not crashing when you want to move them between different windows.
This is not even close to the worst thing they have ever done, but stuff like this is a waste of resources. People mostly want official vertical tabs and more than anything engine performance improvements. (and the ability to pretend to be Chrome in Youtube)
engine performance improvements
Absolutely. Firefox is so slow compared to Chrome. Switching tabs, scrolling, video calls, … sure. Sure, Chrome/Chromium is a memory hog, but come on Mozilla, just invest in Servo already and stop adding useless features.
Good morning, babe! Servo ended ages ago, and a lot of the performance improvements from it got absorbed into Quantum as l10n and Rust code. I was alpha testing Servo back in the day.
Firefox desktop performance is on par with Chromium. Also Servo is now a project under the Linux Foundation, and likely Mozilla Corp doesn’t have enough employees to contribute to external projects.
Firefox desktop performance is on par with Chromium.
Mate, I don’t know what kind of beast or toaster you have as a machine, but my experience tells me otherwise.
Also Servo is now a project under the Linux Foundation, and likely Mozilla Corp doesn’t have enough employees to contribute to external projects.
Yes, Mozilla fired the entire Servo team and gave their previous CEO a raise during the pandemic. They can still pivot and focus on Firefox instead of whatever other stuff they have been doing.
Same. Install Firefox on a ChromeBook, which are almost all universally low powered, then watch it chug.
I don’t care how long the former CEO has been involved with the foundation, she has not been good for Mozilla.
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From the article:
To control how fast/slow tooltips appear modify
browser.tabs.cardPreview.delayMs. This is set to 1000 (milliseconds) by default, meaning tooltips only appear once you’ve hovered over a tab for at least a second.deleted by creator
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My phone has this problem. It’s RAM.
My phone is literally never not using the full 8 GB it has, and it’s constantly juggling. Even when I have next to nothing open.
What’s eating it all? Fuck if I know. My phone also has a system memory leak that has eaten up 90% of the onboard storage with modem crash dumps I can’t delete without root, and this phone has no custom firmware to do that. Got what I paid for, I guess…
I don’t see this behavior on android. Is it impossible that there is some kind of phone battery or memory usage process that’s causing the sessions to be discarded?
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Does discord happen to have similar behavior? Your phone may just be underpowered, I mean, so is mine.
I had that with my old phone, it’s gone with more RAM
When the OS tells Android Firefox that the phone is running out of ram, it murders any tabs it thinks you might not be looking at, to avoid being murdered by Android for its ram.
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Catching up to Opera circa 2006. Opera added this feature in Opera 9, released June 2006.
I still miss the old Opera. The Chromium-based version just isn’t the same.
I still have a copy of Opera 12 on one of my old machines. Good times. Presto!
I wish it still worked well on modern sites. I used Opera from around 2000 until when they switched to Chromium in 2012ish. The first version I ever used predated the Presto engine. I used it for everything except web development (which I did using Firefox and Firebug) and sites that needed ActiveX (where I had to use IE).
These days I usually use Firefox, except I use Chrome for web development since its dev tools are a bit more responsive on complex sites compared to Firefox’s.
Tab groups dying in a ditch
I really hope you can turn this off
why? It’s objectively better?
it also shows the url of the page, super convinientIt’s objectively worse. Fancier but objectively worse.
Another big, distracting pop-up that has no benefit over the existing tool tip which is still distracting when it pops up unintentionally. Also the preview will use more system resources.
Not objectively worse or objectively better, but subjectively worse.
It’s objectively worse. Fancier but objectively worse.
It isn’t though, Firefox stock tab management is awful, when you pile up a decent number of tabs you can’t even see the name of the tab properly, this happens in all the browsers ofc, but at least you can have more tabs opened without this being an obstacle.
You really need 3rd party add-ons to manage your tabs with Firefox, unlike in Chrome, Vivaldi, or even Safari.
With this feature at least you can have a quick look at your tabs easily, just like with the aforementioned browsers… Now I really hope they could add a button like Safari where you can see all your tabs too…
It’s not objectively better or worse. Some people will prefer it and some people won’t.
your gpu is actually much slower at text rendering than rendering images
Indeed. I get there are people who probably like this feature, but not me.
I’m tired of Mozilla pushing UI changes on people just for the sake of “progress”.
…especially when they don’t bother to fix years (sometimes decades) old bugs.
There’ll be a setting in about:config no doubt.
I don’t care about any new tab features except making Tab Mix Plus work effortlessly in the current Firefox.
Right now it’s a game of restriction-whack-a-mole in trying to canopener Firefox into making TMP work again.
TMP is one of the main reasons why I still use any variant of Firefox.
I think this is a good idea, not because I’d use it but because it’s the sort of thing people will want if we are to expect them to migrate from Ch***e (which already has this feature). It’s just the sort of thing Mozilla should be introducing.
I think many people in the comments suffer from some version of curse of knowledge.
Sure, this feature us quite irrelevant for a power user who is quick to navigate the browser and needs a split second to remember what tab it is simply by reading the header and seeing the icon.
However, many less proficient people can benefit from this feature. Not once I saw how someone who has 10 tabs open and needs to go to a different webpage, starts meticulously clicking through every single one of them because they have no idea how the page they are looking for is called, they are too overwhelmed by using web as a whole to take notice.
I don’t understand how someone can have 10 or more tabs open. The times when I have “many” tabs open is when I’m looking for references while doing art, and that still hardly ever surpasses 5 tabs! XD
I think it’s much easier to have more than to have less. Most people I encounter have such a mess of pages in their browser, makes my hair stand on end. If we continue to approach this as an accessibility feature, it starts to make even more sense since tons of users have so many tabs they only see icons, not page names
Currently have 23 tabs open, 7 are youtube, 3 lemmies, and i guess the rest are docs I cant tell I’d greatly benefit from the tab previewer
Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”
Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.
There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.
Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.
How is hovering over a tab and waiting for a preview faster than clicking it?
Again, in my opinion you approach the problem like a power user. Using a browser is not a speedrun where every millisecond matters. Here is why I think it provides more comfort to an average user:
- No need to divert attention and look around the monitor. When you’re not well versed with a mouse, it’s easier to click and look at the same place
- Nothing distracts you unlike when you click through pages. Imagine going from dark theme page to a light theme page, the entire screen suddenly lights up
- Depending on the way it is implemented (perhaps by keeping compressed page screenshots?), it might be faster to show a preview than to render the page again on a weak machine
I’m not sure how clicking can be considered “power user”… Had I said “just install tree style tabs, it’s much better”, you might’ve had a point, but you’re arguing that clicking is worse than hovering. Really can’t agree with you.
But hey, I don’t give money to Mozilla and the chance is very low that I ever will, so they can do what they want. If they think this is how they want to spend the 500 million they get from Google, that’s their prerogative.
Oh great. As if my life doesn’t have enough curses on it.
Agreed. As a Netscape/Phoenix stan since late 90s, I sometimes do like the peeking feature on Ungoogled Chromium. Yes, I am a power user, but often I have one trillion tabs open with just the webpage tab icon barely visible, and need to check roughly what the tab is showing.
I would even propose there should be a very faint 1-2 pixel thick scrollbar so you can see how far you scroll on your hundreds of tabs left/right, similar to vertical tabs having a scrollbar for Tree Style Tabs.
I miss the days with Opera. Not only could it group tabs, but it had previews too. Mouse gestures. Keyword searches. Page link filters and batch operations. RSS-reader. Chrome didn’t even exist back then, and IE and Firefox are still playing catch up. Kinda amazing to think about it.
Vivaldi is the spiritual successor, but having to use chromium rendering engine, it’s so many concessions and steps back. Has the mouse gestures, tho.
The gestures were amazing. Some are ingrained in my muscle memory after all these years.
Same here. And the single-key shortcuts for switching tabs. Modern browsers don’t even come close.
Brave has configurable keybinds, you can set any key you want to do anything.
However I still need to use the vimium extension to have proper keyboard only web navigation, because with the exception of qutebrowser none of the “popular” web browsers have the select link mode with the f key.
Missing the days when developing a new browser was possible.
Yeah I always turn off that previi crap immediately as it usually gets in my way of doing things. Please don’t even spend time on this feature, I don’t really see the use
Tab. Groups.
Yes
Not a fan of Edge, but absolutely love the tab groups. Use them at work all the time.
Tab groups, vertical tabs, synced Workspaces. I’ve hacked together most of it, but being able to have separated pages of tabs synced through my account would be a godsend. Only thing keeping me on MS Edge.
I don’t know why I never vibed with vertical tabs, but I’ve just never been able to make it work mentally. And I could see a double-edged sword with synced workspaces (I think having a button to click and see open tabs on other devices is a perfect middle ground). Personally, tab groups is the only thing I miss from Chromium. I used the feature for grouping, but also for labeling tabs: “Check back Tuesday,” or “Don’t forget to follow up,” or whatever. If they gave us tab groups and then never updated Firefox again, I think I would be pretty happy.
EDIT: well okay not happy, but I would be satisfied with the browser we ended up with.
Do you mean never updated, or never adding new features? Because Firefox would be unusuable within 6 months because of how the web works if it stopped being updated
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Yes, I was speaking hyperbolically.
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My hyperbole also presumes that Gecko continues to be updated, though the browser would get no further updates.
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This hyperbolic hypothetical is truly impossible, since Firefox is open-source. It would continue to be maintained by SOMEone.
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Six months might be a bit pessimistic. It might start being less reliable within six months, but the pace of WHATWG RFCs has been dwindling gradually since the mid-2000s. Honestly, I think operating system changes would be more likely to render Firefox’s codebase obsolete before web standards do.
I get that you were being hyperbolic, I’m honestly not sure why I left my previous comment, you’re absolutely right
If nothing else, you have given me the gift of “hyperbolic hypothetical,” so thank you for that
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