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Wow, this is a fantastic feature that was heavily requested, and HN cannot stop being negative.

Great job Mozilla.

I was already using the awesome “Simple Tab Groups” extension for this but will look into switching.

> Wow, this is a fantastic feature that was heavily requested, and HN cannot stop being negative.

You’re just experiencing (and by commenting on it, being part of) the contrarian dynamic.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

odd. There's one nitpick I have where you can't move a tab group (you gotta move other tabs around it), but it otherwise is everything I wanted. It even "just works" with no issue alongside tab containers, letting you mix in groups from different containers into one group.

Make sure you have Firefox 138! From the release notes: > You can also now reposition a tab group on the tab bar by dragging it.

I upgraded mine to FF 138. After the update it even opened the tab groups blog post. 15 minutes of going through settings later, no, my browser has no tab groups feature at all. Of course then I see it's a progressive rollout. Sad.

There is an about:config setting you can turn on. I don’t have it hear but it has been widely posted so take a look. I think if you search about:config for “tab” it might show up.

I've been liking the new vertical tabs too.

How does it compare to sidebery? I use the vertical tabs on that and quite like it but only found them because of another feature, per container socks5 (one for local ip and a few to strategically placed cheap vps to override my network default mullvad vpn tunneling as needed)

Sideberry is still better since it's hierarchical, so tabs are nested. But maybe the tab groups change that? Now or in a future iteration?

Yeah vertical tabs with tab groups have replaced Sidebery's hierarchy and panels for me. Mostly because it feels slightly smoother and more performant as a built-in feature.

Sidebery is awesome but afaik it doesn't seem that it syncs the state of your tabs across browsers. TabStash is not as visually polished but it achieves that capability by using Firefox bookmarks for the tabs and groups.

I like it better than sideberry/treestyletab, but I was not using the hierarchical feature of those two. It's just simpler and better integrated

I've been using the Vertical tabs with Sideberry for a bit. The minified vertical tabs greatly declutters the top of the browser and feels pretty good, but I've got a lot of trees in Sideberry and several panels for organization structure that the built-in vertical tabs can't yet do, so for now most of my navigation is still Sideberry. Tab Groups are something to watch that may help some of what I use multiple panels for in Sideberry. I think native "tree-structure" is a lot more of what I'd particularly want, though.

Not a fan of vertical tabs as truncated titles hurts my fov aesthetics. These days I will just pin the tab when I want to go back to it later but even that has it's limits too.

After a certain number of open tabs, the titles are less truncated with vertical tabs than horizontal tabs. You also have more of the titles in your center view if you have the text distributed in a more rectangular shape than a technically-also-rectangular-but-much-more-elongated shape.

It's so much better than any of the extension-based XUL interface hacks. As soon as they can figure out when to auto-expand the sidebar it will be perfect.

Firefox moved away from XUL extensions years ago - they now use a well-defined WebExtension model that is kind of the opposite of hacky.

And yet, many of the extensions that in the XUL days could cleanly change the browser's UI now have a much more hacky user experience.

Yes, because the APIs aren't perfectly fleshed-out. And they may never be, and yet that's still completely OK because the WebExtension model is obviously better along the performance, security, portability, and API stability axes.

When’s the last time you used an extension of such kind? Sidebery for example doesn’t seem hacky at all to me.

Been using vertical tabs to avoid floating toolbar gymnastics while sharing screen on Microsoft Teams. It’s been working great and now I don’t miss the horizontal tabs.

I tried it! Didn’t stick yet but I’ll probably try it again, probably didn’t give it long enough to get used to it

I recently switched to Sidebery for this. Guess I'll have to do a comparison. I really enjoy Sidebery though, It has made my workflow at work much more organized.

I tried using vertical tabs and tab groups simultaneously, but there seems to be nothing like 'list all tabs' / Recent tab groups, so my tab groups are already lost amongst the other tabs. 'close duplicate tabs' is also missing from vertical tabs.

Since I keep having to go into that menu I just disabled vertical tabs.

When you enable vertical tabs, the main toolbar gains a List All Tabs button at the very right.

Exactly, since the 'list all tabs' is a superset of vertical tab behavior, and I have to go there anyhow for things missing in vertical tabs, I disabled vertical tabs.

Amazing timing, I just started using Simple Tab Groups yesterday and this lands. I might as well go straight for the baked in feature!

Right? I've been using the beta and I've been very happy with it. Huge props to Stefan and everybody who worked on this!

I mean I had a plugin around Firefox v1 that did this...then they broke plugins and I jumped ship to Chrome.

It's more than a requested feature it was almost needed for power users.

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I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting!

Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open.

Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

Not judging or anything, I just find how other people use tools differently than I do an interesting subject.

I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management.

> Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting?

Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time.

Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages etc. Once I'm done with the purchase, I'll close them all.

I sometimes use sideberry's ability to have tab groups, but not much.

To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar. Most of the tabs at the bottom of my sideberry tab list are ones I have not visited in many months. There's very little point having them there. However the cognitive cost and computational costs are close to zero.

> I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management.

I'm just here to report that Firefox + Sidebery continues to work perfectly well at 14571 "open" tabs.

All but a few hundred are unloaded, and I block JavaScript fairly aggressively. Currently measuring 1992 MB, explicitly allocated.

I won't argue with anyone who tells me that I have a problem, but I will say that Firefox and Sidebery make my problem not a problem!

Can report that my testing indicates 40k+ tabs is doable with unloading on a 64 GB machine, across multiple Firefox windows with tree style tab.

Since task manager has been introduced, making it easy to unload whole related tab groups its even easier to reach absurd total tab counts. ;-)

I just wanted to say thank you to all you mad tab hungry folks for making me feel both seen and comparatively sane.

It's doable with a single window on a 16 GB RAM machine as well.

As someone who has gotten to 2000 a few times, even I have to ask myself "how? why?"

Investigating some some are to decide what to buy properly could be a couple hundred tabs easily. Usually you can close those when you are done, especially if you use Tree Style Tab to have them in their own little trees - but not always you have the time or are waiting to try the thing after it arrives.

Its is more tricky with technical projects, as you might and up with a big reference tab hierarchy that ideally you should first all read before closing it (maybe, just maybe, someone in one of those forum posts you opened in a tab without looking yet solved your problem!) or get back to the interesting tabs when working on the project.

Worst of all are fiction or world building sites... Like, you end up on some page on Project RHO or Orion's Arm or a WH40K wiki somehow and that page has links to some other interesting topics. And those pages have more links - oh, interesting!

Those can get to hundreds or even thousands of tabs easily and you just can't close them - they are just so interesting and there is that one topic/megascale engineering project/story you did not read to the end yet and you can always get back to it - as long as you keep the tabs open!

And lastly, it is a sort of a diary/history log - sometimes you see a forgotten tab tree you did not touch in a while - oh, right I was researching that thing, how nostalgic! :)

tbh, ADHD meds help for that. Cut down my average tab backlog by 90%.

I appreciate this advice, but FWIW my tab habit is more a product of curiosity and time constraints, than any kind of compulsion or control issue. More of a "read-it-later-maybe" queue.

I'll open tabs for any possibly-interesting HN story, for example, and then come back later and read maybe 25% of them, often when the comment threads are still short, and almost always when only one hemisphere has had time to weigh in. Then I'll come back the next day and reload the page for new comments. Or I'll close the tab if the topic wasn't as interesting as I hoped, or if the comments are dominated by a boring tangent.

Periodicaly I sweep through the older tabs that I've never read. Some have expired in their currency. Some are reassessed for interestingness and dispatched quickly. Others are left for future sweeps.

It may not be neurotypical, but I don't think it's ADHD. :)

I should note: this is on my personal/non-sensitive browser profile. My primary work profile is usually fewer than 1000 tabs and is more actively-pruned, but generally reflects things that are still in current ongoing work. And my personal/sensitive profiles only contain a handful of tabs each, things like pending order invoices, etc.

This sort of thing sounds like a fantastic use of Firefox's bookmarks system.

Bookmarks don't retain scroll position, and must be actively managed to preserve hierarchy.

Firefox tabs are a zero-cost, and far more usable, implementation of bookmarks.

Chrome tabs are terrible -- the UI and memory demands are absurd.

Firefox (vertical) tabs are great, convenient, fast, easy, and cause no resource drama.

I have bookmarks too though. They serve three purposes: a) remember this forever but get it out of my way for now, b) put this in a managed hierarchy easily accessed from my bookmarks toolbar, or c) save out this big hierarchy of tabs that I haven't looked at in a while but were each probably the culmination of some level of manual navigation that I don't want to repeat.

I bookmark pages I want to keep on hand forever. I don't expect to ever delete them. I wouldn't bookmark product reviews that I'm just juggling while deciding on a purchase, even if I have to put off that purchase on the backburner for a week to deal with the rest of my life.

I personaly create a 'temp' bookmark folder for things like this. An advantage is that it then syncs to all my Firefox instances.

A few days ago there was a post here about "the internet in a box"...

I guess what you are attempting is "the internet in a fox"...

...fascinating!

"To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar."

That's a feature, not a bug. A system that doesn't let things fall off your radar is a taskmaster, not a servant. You have to let things fall off your radar.

Maybe not, if there's no way to differentiate between something that has fallen off the radar, and something that is currently on the radar (I mean that all the tabs are in one big flat list, no matter if they're relevant or not). Also, if additional cruft increases the search time (i.e. how long does it take me to find the right tab from among these 2000 open ones) then each unused tab is a small additional burden. I'm not arguing for or against any position that works for anybody, I'm just pointing out some possible wrinkles I see from the outside.

And here I was, thinking 200-300 tabs is a lot. Turns out these are rookie numbers.

2000 is still in the same category :)

Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks?

> computational costs are close to zero

Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?

(Not OP) Sidebery is half tab manager, half session manager. It stays in the sidebar, and if I collapse parts of my tree, I have set it to unload those folded tabs after 60 minutes. There is also an option to hide those folded tabs from the native tab bar.

Sidebery, Tree Style Tabs, and Tabs Outliner (for Chrome) all go beyond just adding a linear/flat vertical tab bar to your browser. They preserve a nested hierarchy for child tabs and allow you to restore the entire tree (or just parts of it) on another device, which is super handy if you often switch between desktop, laptop, etc.

>Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory

Firefox unloads tabs that haven't recently been used, or as memory approaches system limits. You can also manually unload your least-recently-used loaded tab.

Yes, but in practice I've experienced Firefox (at least under linux) getting killed by the OS when RAM runs low. I recently lost some low-priority reading projects after I couldn't recover the tab sets (they were opened months ago, so hard to dig back through history)

I've found myself using Sidebery and the manual 'unload' tab option quite a bit.

Interesting, because out of all the three browser Firefox should be the best at memory management, unloading tabs along with Sessions recovery.

But I have only ever used it on Windows and Mac. So no idea about Linux. You can do About:memory to check out which tabs are using more memory as well as manual memory compact.

Firefox also allows unlimited History, unlike Chrome which I believe you cant even have history for more than 90 days.

There is a memory problem on Firefox I only found out about a few months ago when it started happening to me after an upgrade, "ghost windows" that use memory and never get deallocated. Restarting Firefox is the only way to clear them.

FF memory management on Linux is usually outpaced by oom_killer.

Not my experience at all with 16 GB RAM. Perhaps a configuration issue? zswap and mglru do their job well here and the only issue with reaching tens of thousands open tabs in Firefox is that it tends to become noticeably slower at that point.

Firefox with any number of open tabs is stable on memory usage because it has a target budget for it, most of the oom situations come either from external processes or a spike from FF's own.

I suggest using the session manager extension & having it do periodic snapshots.

Haven't heard of that one, thanks!

Its supper useful if you really want to make sure not to loose your session, as its serializes everything into files, which you can then even backup somewhere if you want. :)

Not sufficiently in my experience.

Is this a user setting / tunable for aggressiveness?

There are various extensions that use the native "discard" API that is enabled by default, but give you more knobs to tweak. If you search for "discard tab" in the add-ons store, you'll find a bunch.

I use this one: https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html

> Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks?

Sidebery offers a hierarchy of tabs, supports group-tabs inside the hierarchy and also has panels, which are basically groups outside/parallel to the hierarchy. With this, you can have very diversified organization-tools.

I also oscillate between 1k to 3k tabs, and I see them more as a process-state. I use tabs for my working-memory, and bookmarks for permanent memory. So any projects, I organize into groups, for every area I have a panel where I collect the corresponding groups. And if the project is over, I close them.

With bookmarks on the other side, I collect links to websites I might visit at some random time, but not necessarily because of a specific project, or with multiple projects. For example, I have bookmarks for my bank, my provider, video-sites (Youtube, Netflix...), Social Media, but also resources like Wikipedia, or self-hosted apps, etc. Those are links I never want to delete, unless the service itself shuts down, or I switch to a different one. So in that sense, they are "stateless".

The tabs don't get loaded until I revisit them after restarting firefox.

So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.

Well not exactly. Tab suspenders (at least the ones I use) dump the current DOM state, etc to disk so when you reload the tab, it reloads it in mostly the same state it was in when you left it. Of course some pages don't like that and force a full refresh but generally I find when I get a tab reload on a documentation page when it loads back up I end up at roughly the same part of the page I was on when I left off.

That's a big reason why I prefer tabs to bookmarks. Unloaded tabs have their state saved, bookmarks don't.

Don’t believe that continues through a restart by default.

It seems to work across restarts from what I can tell. I just tried to verify it.

I have a tab group in Simple Tab Groups for a perl project I've been working on. The group is basically just a bunch of perl docs (metacpan, etc). I haven't touched the project or the group in a few weeks and I've in that time restarted both FF and my PC several times as well as having updated my FF install several times.

I just switched to that tab group and opened up a random cpan docs tab and it loaded it back in half way down the page. The scroll moved a little bit (only a few lines of text worth of scroll) but that was it.

Of course this doesn't work consistently for all pages. I know for a fact that social apps like bluesky don't tolerate suspends all that well and force a reload but most "vanilla" web pages like docs sites tolerate suspends quite well.

Sorry, "by default" I was trying to point to default firefox behavior. Not what an extension does.

They don't consume anything, at my peak I closed 2736 tabs (I have a photo to commemorate). Firefox somehow didn't care

If you don't mind to share it, I'd love to see it. I want to prove to my coworkers I've not got a problem!

I use instead the bookmarks toolbar, where you create a folder by topic, select the open tabs with Ctrl, and do a drag&drop into the folder to store such urls. You can then press "Open all tabs" from within the folder when you need to, or individually.

When you have many folders in the bookmarks toolbar, an ">>" icon will appear at the end to the right of the bar, which will expand the rest of the folders vertically, that I scroll with the mouse wheel. So I have my at first sight folders of common use, and also the other ones by pressing ">>". I like much such dynamic (first sight horizontal, and ">>").

I do not like the folder-icon on such first sight bar with folders, I find it a bit distracting and takes up valuable space, so I have a css in userChrome.css to hide such icons (only there, not in the ones unfolded by ">>") leaving this way only the folder name, where I use short names.

This in combination with another css to show only icons for some bookmarks placed at such first sight (bookmarks with no name was the easier way for this). I also had to reduce the separation between such first sight bookmarks.

In addition, I also have the bookmarks button to the left of the url bar, which unfolds another group of different bookmarks vertically.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people are using tabs for what bookmarks were designed for, which is why the number of tabs open is so high.

About the OP, I often search several topics at once, and/or a topic with several sub-topics where the open tabs of different topics sometimes get visually mixed up or I lose the track/focus, for what this new tabs groups sounds ideal.

Have you checked out Arc? I switched the other day and their approach to somewhat-permanent "tabs" is interesting. At first I missed bookmarks but then I realized that what they were doing is actually closer to how I want to use the browser.

If you like Arc but would prefer if it was open source and/or non-Blink/Chromium, Zen is based on Firefox but with an Arc-like interface.

https://zen-browser.app/

It copies a lot of Arc, but the core tab organisation features from Arc are significantly lacking. Last I checked (a few weeks ago), Zen didn't even have a keybind for pinning a tab. It fully keeps the Firefox bookmarks and prioritises those all over the UI. The Arc tab system is meant to entirely replace all of that. It just makes Zen feel very shallow in comparison. It's just firefox with some goofy Arc features mashed into the front without care.

Arc (macOS) is ridiculously good though. It's become difficult/impossible for me to use another browser happily the past few years. I wish they were focused on it instead of their mediocre AI browser project. They decided to claim Arc windows was out of beta when it's still vastly worse than the mac version in just about every sense. But at least they got the core tab management features locked down (from what I've heard, I don't have a windows machine to try it on.)

What are you going to do now that Arc development has stopped and The Browser Company is pivoting? (I'm also a big fan of Arc, especially the Air Traffic Control feature to keep certain sites organized into Spaces.)

Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't know that. However, at least

> Miller said that Arc "isn't going anywhere" and would continue to receive stability updates and bug fixes

https://www.androidauthority.com/the-browser-company-plannin...

Poor UI, judging by the screenshots on that page. Another piece of software that treats users as imbeciles in dire need of being saved from "clutter".

It's pretty much a 1:1 copy of arc, which IMO has the best browser UI/UX I have used.

I think you missed the "If you like Arc" at the very beginning of my post. If you don't like Arc, then Zen is absolutely not for you. And that's fine.

What are you using to unload tabs?

I've got to confess that my FF memory management is a run-as-needed-or-think-it-should-be-needed shell script which arbitrarily kills the top 10 Firefox processes by memory utilisation. If I'm leaving my desktop for a while I'll run that several times.

Tree-style Tabs keeps the slots open, and can reload tabs as needed.

I'd really like to have the capacity to unload all tabs other than, say, a specifically-specified set. Though on balance, the tabs that are likely to be most usefully kept open also tend to be the worst memory offenders.

If I fail to prune, MacOS falls over early and often, which is somewhat unpleasant.

I personally have been using "Auto Tab Discard" for years. It works perfectly for me, and you can set a group of tabs to not unload. It has a ton of options. I have ~320 tabs open right now, for multiple projects and only ~5 are loaded.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Thanks!

This approach has made me wonder about the utility of a pin board style bookmark managing service where browser history and bookmarking amount to the same thing. As a way of kind of serving that process that's served by having all kinds of tabs. And maybe it could even overlap with tab management. Like if you name a tab group something, it gets named that as part of a persistent history. Like a tag for your bookmark or something.

Browser history gets rotated. I've lost a beautiful song that way, forgetting to like/bookmark it properly, thinking I'd just find it in history...

Safari tends to do a good job at that too.

I currently have 867 tabs on Firefox desktop, and 495 in Safari mobile on my phone (I need to start cleaning safari, because weird things happen at 500 when a new tabs is opened).

Safari on desktop also keeps tabs unloaded when re-opening a window.

I just wish safari would allow me to hide the top tab bar when I open the vertical sidebar (if someone knows how to do that, let me know!).

Wow! My total bookmarks in raindrops are much less than that. The moment I reach 30ish tabs I start experiencing micro panic attacks.

can you describe that in more detail???

If relaxamist still exists and is in your region check them out. I have been using my 2.5kw steam generator daily with zero maintenance for 11 years now. Been very happy.

Hello fellow 1k+ tab hoarder.

[dead]

I'm not consistent about going back and closing tabs. By the time I've browsed on a couple topics, I have enough tabs open I can't see the titles any more, and it's downhill from there. Some of them, I think "this is good, I'll come back to this when I get a chance" so I don't want to mass-close them. Eventually I'm opening new tabs of tabs I already have open, because it's faster than finding the original.

Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something important), and close them all.

I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this way, looked at any of the bookmarks.

[EDIT] I guess the main issue is that deciding to close tabs I'm not currently looking at takes time, because I have to evaluate each one, and when I'm down to just favicons on the tab itself, that means actually looking at each page. Just periodically mass-bookmarking and closing is less work. It's a UI issue. Plus, if I'm looking at my browser, it's because I'm doing something, and that something is basically never "playing tab-gardener". My very first action is gonna be "new tab" and go from there.

> By the time I've browsed on a couple topics, I have enough tabs open I can't see the titles any more

Sidebery or TreeStyleTabs lets you see the titles no matter how many you have. ... Well, you have to scroll, but it's so much better than having to go through tab-by-tab with a typical horizontal tab bar.

> Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something important), and close them all.

> I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this way, looked at any of the bookmarks.

Even though I can see the tab titles, this is exactly what I do(n't). I threw together a couple scripts to extract all the tabs (including which window they're in), and export that all to an org-mode file.

Any one else favorite hackernews articles knowing they will never actually take the time to go back and read them and their comments? I feel like this is not too dissimilar to hoarding your tabs there. Tsundoku for the digital world.

I'm essentially the same way, with the caveat that I do occasionally go back and find something from one of those archived bookmarks. Maybe a couple times a year at most, which is all the validation my lizard brain needs to consider this a critical practice that I will continue doing without questioning for the rest of my life.

I liked the term tab bankruptcy. I'm using tab stash[1] to stash them aside with a timestamp (or a descriptive name if you want to). So, it does not clutter my bookmarks.

Then, I can search or clear the list, or bring back from the stash whenever I want.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/

I used to be the same and it drove me nuts. Eventually I looked for a solution and ended up installing Limit Tabs[0] to limit the number of my tabs[1] to 10-15. I couldn't be happier!

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rudolf-fernan...

[1]: On my desktop. Unfortunately, the extension is not available for Firefox for Android, so on mobile I tell Firefox to discard tabs that I haven't used for a day.

Tree-style tabs lets you close an entire (sub)tree of tabs at once, should you choose to do so.

It's also useful to start new projects in a new window, and let the tree structure build up in that as you progress. You can close parts or all of that window as you've concluded with them.

I operate this way, but I didn't used to bookmark them. Until one day I needed to find a website that I had not bookmarked and had closed. I even remembered where the tab was supposed to be but I had mass closed my tabs. It took a long time until I found the page again.

Good lord! If you mass bookmark, aren't you just turning your bookmarks into your history? In that case why not just use browser history instead?

- History gets cleared sometimes. Bookmarks are (basically) forever.

- History includes tons of ephemeral shit, like search result pages (useless, will be different the next time you load it) and redirect pages, or things I've actively decided not to care about. If I looked at 20 shirts on a store-site but only had 3 still open, odds are good I already firmly rejected the other 17. Straight history loses the information of which ones I cared about the most.

I don't do this, but it appeals to me, as History seems to be pretty spotty, I've a couple of times recently tried to find something in my history, and it ended up as if it was never there.

Ya history isn't forever, at least in default Firefox.

I was quite annoyed when I realized that since I was hoping to find something from many years ago.

History is comprehensive, bookmarking is curated.

It's possible to edit history, but it's easier and more useful to edit bookmarks: removing (as with history), but also tagging, annotating, and/or organising.

Heap'o'clothes on the floor vs. a well-organised bureau or closet.

Not the person you're replying to, but I clear history on close. I don't clear bookmarks on close.

Cue David Attenborough voice:

And here we find the Tab Hoarder ...

How about I try a metaphor: Imagine you work in a building. Inside the building, there are multiple rooms. Each room has a different project going on inside it. In one room, you are building a canoe. In another, you are restoring a motorcycle. Another is a music production studio. And so on. Every day, you enter this hypothetical building to get some work done in one or more of the rooms.

Now imagine every night while you're asleep, a cleaning crew comes into your building and tidies up. But they don't just sweep the floor and take out the garbage, they also put away all the tools, pick up any open books and put them back on the bookshelf, re-assemble the motorcycle, and put the music equipment back in its retail boxes.

When you come back in the morning, you have to dedicate minutes to hours just getting things back to where they were when you left. And because you're ADHD as fuck, you probably don't remember exactly where you left off and frequently end up skipping some major step or accidentally redoing work that you did before.

That is what my life feels like without tab groups.

i feel exactly like you, but i managed to solve that problem with windows, each room/project is a window with tabs. since the UI makes switching windows easy, that makes switching projects easy. eventually i discovered the winger extension which allows me to give windows a name, its important feature, because it makes finding the right window easier. it also makes it easy to move tabs from one window to another.

Windows are a good solution, except, MS Windows (my home desktop) makes it not a good solution.

I'm pretty sure the ordering of my 4 firefox windows used to stay fixed (i.e when clicking the tray icon, and seeing the 4), but this stopped being the case a few years ago for me.

So I live with 3-4 windows; I don't think having 10 windows would help me because their arrangement is not consistent.

(I hover between about 600-1100 tabs open; I do cleanup when I notice I'm near or above 1000; I don't reliably do cleanup after e.g. opening 5 ebay tabs and deciding what to buy; nor do I reliably finish using those ebay tabs in one sitting; multiply that by the dozens of things I might be researching/comparing, going back many months :) )

(I keep my work Linux laptop Chrome browser to under 50 tabs, and often don't bother restoring tabs after my laptop is rebooted)

A perfect metaphor for Windows auto-update!

This many tabs are a temporary todo list, basically. Bookmarks are permanent and the interface is worse for cleaning them up when you're done with them.

Also, some sites, and especially app-like sites, are terrible at preserving your state if you close and navigate back. This could be something as simple as highlighted text in a document, or as advanced as the settings for the piano practice app session I'm in.

> Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

I think tabs are just the better user interface.

It's not that I'm afraid I won't find the page in my history and bookmarks, it's that I don't want to have to do that because it's painful. History is full of irrelevant pages. Bookmarks make me lose my flow constantly wondering if I should bookmark a page or it's not needed (and in which directory!).

Tabs have a very simple workflow with low cognitive overhead. Everything is preserved by default (middle click/ctrl click is my default click in a browser), unless I'm clearly in a linear workflow where I don't want to keep the page (left click). Self-organizing due to the way they open, but very easy to manually reorder (or close) if needed. Kept in memory so going back to a (recent) tab is instantaneous.

They just... get out of the way and let me work. Tabs make browsing feel like one continuous task, where history/bookmarks feel like constant interruptions.

I think an interesting feature might be tabs that turn into bookmarks automatically after a week/month of being open but not interacted with.

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Any task that can't be accomplished in one sitting is left to return to later (Note: If this isn't a given - for example, "I simply don't do things I don't have time for" - then you may not have enough in common with the people you're asking about to be able to relate).

Step two: You just need a little discipline to audit your tasks and admit when something has fallen off the top layer of your priority list and take the couple minutes to archive it into a folder of bookmarks or text file or other format of your choice.

And then you need the discipline to occasionally take the time to audit your archives for things that have fallen even lower and delete them (or archive them more deeply...).

For many, it's difficult to justify spending time you already clearly don't have enough of doing such audits. Same psychology behind procrastination. Hence a self-perpetuating problem.

Logically if your task income is greater than your available time, this pattern occurs.

Task income increases both with curiosity/goals and obligation, and most people have an abundance of those. Time is necessarily scarce. So, logically, many people have a lot of tabs.

Note that learning or researching is one of the most common tasks, is an active task, and usually requires multiple concurrent tabs. I.e. it's not simply one article you want to read later.

I don't have more than 5-6 tabs in my personal life, but in my professional life I regularly have 15-20 open. By all means a low number compared to some maniacs rocking hundreds or even thousands of open tabs. My case is like: 3-5 tabs for secretary duties: email, calendar, Jira, maybe a google doc, then 2-3 random tabs then multiple tabs for grouped tasks.

E.g if I want to review a PR I need to have the jira ticket, the figma designs, the API dashboard, the PR link and the actual app open. That's 5 tabs for a single PR review + more if I need to go over some documentation.

And since a review takes its time and I often have to context switch a lot, being able to quickly collapse 5-7 tabs under a "Foo PR review" group is super helpful.

- "Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?"

Why are you qualifying "normal" there? I have thousands of tabs open because I have infinite curiosity and a psychological deficit of attention span.

An open tab is earnest expression of a curiosity one is unlikely to actualize in this short life.

> "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

So, suppose you have 2200 tabs open right now. Under what circumstances would you open, say, the 330th tab from the left? How would you access it?

It's a different question to ask "how will you access it?" and "have you abandoned the hope of accessing it again?"

Sometimes they come up in my search results in the Omnibar. Open tabs are in the top rank of results.

The omnibar feature also searches your bookmarks and history, so they are recoverable using the same method if you closed the tab.

But that depends on you thinking to bookmark the page; or accepting that some things will age out of the browser history. So I guess it's kind of like a fragile bookmark: probably reliable, but not the end of the world if tab restoration failed for some reason.

Also, (I assume) tabs retain their Previous Page list, which also has some value.

Interesting. Thanks for the discussion!

The tab will also have the context around it (in form of other tabs). When you often switch between various tech stacks/frameworks and open 30 pages of documentation for each one, it's useful to be able to restore all of it easily without messing with bookmarks (that haven't improved in the slightest over the past two decades).

I haven't regularly bookmarked sites in a decade or more. The bookmarks are in my head, and I can live with the Omnibar mostly reliably surfacing the things I didn't finish, and later recall and want to pick up.

That said, I'm pretty sure the Omnibar is buggy at finding tabs. I inevitably have several tabs to gmail "open". It ought to be a lot easier than it is to find /return to the last-used gmail tab, and not one of the several from previous browsing sessions. :)

The only stuff I tend to bookmark are things I want to use as a keyword search, everything else is a tab in a certain window. There's not enough of them that I have to search to find, maybe a fifty in total?

There is the rare bookmark in my toolbar tabs for undetermined future stuff.

I realised that ChatGPT with o3 has been a great solution to much of this problem for me. When I previously read or heard something that piqued my interest, I would often easily spend over an hour researching through sites, reddit, HN, to find the info I wanted.

Now, I open o3, write a clearly specified question and let o3 do the research for me. More often than not, it comes back with a perfect answer that satisfies my curiosity. Sometimes, it makes me dig a little deeper, but te time spent is a lot less and I can spend that on more 'physical' interests.

the problem is that bookmarks are to static.

remember where the term "bookmark" came from. a strip of paper or string that you lay in the pages of a book to remember where you are reading. when you read further you move the bookmark to the new position.

browser bookmarks don't do that. instead every time you remember a location you get a new bookmark. and then you have to go around and search for the old one to remove it.

a tab always remembers the latest state and gets updated automatically as i move forward or backward. the state is also cached as long as the tab is open. that matters for hackernews for example which tells me which messages are new since i last loaded the page. when i go to a tab the page doesn't get automatically reloaded so i get back to the old state, whereas with bookmarks that state is lost.

if bookmarks could keep the state (that means permanently cache the old version until i force a reload) and allow me to update them when that state changes while using the page, then i could use them instead of tabs.

I use tree style tabs and typically have anywhere from 20 to hundreds of tabs open. My workflow is basically opening anything I find interesting for further review which naturally opens in a tree so the main task grouped together. I use them as soft bookmarks to come back to where I am, generally closing the sub tabs when I'm done with them or closing the whole tree if I'm done with the main topic.

I use bookmarks for infrequently used items that I know I will come back to at some point, the tab groups are more transient.

As I type this, I have about 20 HN tabs open. Why do I have so many tabs open? Many of them are 200 plus comment posts about stuff I really care about. HN has lots of quality content and I actively consume it. I don't use bookmarks because I plan to consume the content, derive insights and discard the tab. While I use bookmarks for stuff I plan to check regularly.

> Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?

Because book marking sucks as there's no associated metadata on the site behind the link. You have to insert that data yourself by changing the page description. How do I search my links for battery charging if the link that leads to battery charging is joe6pack.com/foo?bla=foiuewyrocv9yetn75y9087wn7y9ewsygbatmobile? History is similar and something I dont want to bother with.

It's easier to just leave the tabs open and come back to them later. I do this all the time with sites like bandcamp, shopping sites, and so on - open a bunch of tabs and slowly work through them. I might have upwards of 50+ tabs open at times but they are mostly short lived, lasting a few days until I get frustrated and go on a tab nuking spree.

These days I manually maintain my own bookmarks in flat text files arranged by subject with my own metadata and just use grep. The link goes on one line, the next lines are "meta data" followed by a blank line. The list is mainly filled with stuff I really want to find again in the future so I put in the effort.

Mainly because the interfaces for tabs, bookmarks, and history are all quite disparate instead of being unified like they should be. None of them are good, but the interface for tabs is more manageable.

Also search in the history should also involve the content of the cache and not just the page title.

This is such an obvious one.

It might have been an unreasonable request in 1995 when these concepts were coming into form but maybe we can move on...

The UX for bokmarks is terrible in Firefox, almost useless fir ny needs.

Arc browser unifies the tabs and bookmarks in a very clever way.

Being able to navigate back within the page history of a tab is the major reason I keep them open

This is the primary reason I keep so many tabs open instead of just bookmarking things or copying URLs into my project notes.

Primary use cases for me:

1. Organizing threads of research into context groups. Usually doing heavy deep dives where it’s uncertain if I need to revisit a previous branch, so rather than closing, it’s much more beneficial to group and collapse. It’s also easier to reopen and glance at the topics you looked at.

2. Similarly, grouping tabs by purpose while developing. It lets me organize tabs in a way that makes it so they I don’t need multiple browser windows open. It makes for a much more zen-like development environment.

3. Testing across dev, staging, and prod. Want the same tabs open but grouped so that I don’t accidentally do something destructive on prod that I meant to do locally. Now that this is in Firefox, I can also combine it with multi-account containers for more workflows.

I don't use an excessive tab count I don't think, but still find it useful to simply organize tabs by "topic". Eg. research question, what github issue I'm working on and so on. Since they can be temporarily hidden it allows a less cluttered tab bar and improves focus when context switching.

I use Vivaldi which has had excellent support for tab groups (as "Workspaces") for quite a while now.

At work and at home, I always have multiple projects ongoing at the same time. I use one tab group per project. I typically have my notes for that project in the first tab and then other tabs contain documentation, reference material, forum threads, search engine queries, and whatever else that I want OPEN and AVAILABLE while I'm working so that I'm not always wasting time closing and opening tabs that I keep coming back to.

This way, when I switch between projects, I just select the tab group for that project and everything is exactly the way I left it last time. Didn't have to remember to manually save anything beforehand last time, or manually restore a folder of bookmarks or whatever.

Why not use bookmarks? For me, bookmarks are only ever used for links that I go to semi-regularly to regularly. I will NEVER add a bookmark to a site that I visit once, or might want to go back to again, because eventually you have to dedicate time to sorting, cleaning up, reorganizing, deleting them. And I HATE curating things.

Why not use browser history? Because it's full of all kinds of garbage which can hard to sort through and because my browser history only goes back about 6 months. I don't need (or want) to keep my history forever because it just needlessly fills up the disk and becomes a liability if my computer ever gets compromised. And sometimes my projects go longer than that.

From what I gather from someone close to me that does this they just open things and are afraid that if they ever close it they will not find it again. Ironically if I ask her about something she kitterally has to hunt for 10 minutes or more to find the one tab out of the hundreds open.

In a similar vein these people also postpone system updates and restarts as long as possible, never shut down their machine (always hibernate) always click keep all in office apps for recovered files from the machine over months of this abuse getting some resource exhausted leading to an inevitable forced reboot.

I am not a tab hoarder, but I have been using Tab Groups as a way to collect (and hide) YouTube videos for future viewing.

I had previously used the Pin Tab feature to collapse them, but Tab Groups allows you to have essentially unlimited videos that only take up a single favicon-sized space when collapsed.

As someone who somewhat does the same thing, I'd recommend just adding the youtube videos to playlists so that you can just close out the youtube tab and only keep the one with your playlist up. Like I slap all my interesting podcasts, tech videos, hobby related videos, conference talks etc in a "currently watching" playlist and it greatly cuts down on decision fatigue to just have it all thrown into a queue that you can just sit down and consume (with occasional reordering).

Pinning tabs is very bad for YouTube because they are always rendered and thus always leaking.

Can you elaborate on this? What does "always rendered" mean?

Basically they have a higher priority than regular tabs, mentioned here [0] in context of unloading and the same applies to execution scheduling.

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/10/tab-unloading-in-firefox-9...

Interesting. Does this mean I should tell users to avoid pinning tabs when browsing in the Tor Browser Bundle? (Assuming they have set the slider to "safest" to disallow JS)

With JS disabled only media files could cause a memory leak, so the "safest" option covers that.

It's not uncommon to work on multiple things over a certain period of time. So I have a bunch of tabs with all the information needed open for every topic. From time to time I close a 'group' of tabs when I'm done. This workflow seems very natural to me.

Using bookmarks would not fit here, because I have no intention to access the tabs in future (e.g. a year from now) again.

I tend to cull tabs a lot myself, but I still find groups useful. Sometimes it's nice for focus to group together a few tabs from research but "minimize" it for later while I look at some other topics.

>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

If you want to put it in hardware terminology.

- Tabs I am immediately interested in: registers

- Tab groups minimized: RAM

- Bookmarks: Hard Drive

- Pocket: cloud storage

- History: My attempt to restore something I put in the recycle bin

Tab groups are a good intermediate to store knowledge I don't need immediately but still need quick access to, likely within the day. It's often some tangential research that I won't need to save or lok at long term, but not my immediate attention.

In my head, bookmarks are more for items I know I want to reference for weeks, months, years. Stuff I know I would want to pluck out and share as popular/general knowledge if others fall down a similar line of research as me. I only tend to refer to the history tab when desperate and my judgement failed to realize something was bookmarkable.

as a current example, I have this tab and a few open researching work stuff. I have a tab group collapsed regarding career advice and job app stuff.

I have 53 tabs open on Firefox Android. They are a dump of what I'm reading or wish to read or what I want to come back to. Sometimes I send a tab to my desktop using the KDE Connect app. I have Gnome with GS Connect on my Linux laptop.

I've got 113 tabs on that machine (about:telemetry#scalars-tab_search=tab). I'm using 5 virtual desktop, 2 for me and one for each of my customers. One Firefox window per desktop (maybe my workaround for tab groups), one editor window per desktop, one terminal per desktop. The Slack app on the desktop I'm currently using. My password manager on all desktops. I switch using an hotkey, Windows + the first letter of the customer. No animations, no Activities, nothing. I was OK with Gnome 2.

It's nice to have 32 GB of RAM. 113

Does it need really that much RAM? RAM you don't use tend to get swapped out, and browsers themselves are pretty good working with a large amount of tabs opened, sometimes by unloading those that are currently unused. Note: swap is good!

I think what kill memory more than having dozens of windows on many desktops is self contained apps and VMs. For example, if you have a browser with 1000 tabs open, you will only have one instance of the engine, and the browser can manage the memory associated with tabs effectively. Now if you have 10 distinct browsers opened with all their dependencies, which can happen if you are running electron apps and you are actually using them, you are going to need a lot of RAM. Also if they all come with their dependencies instead of using what's on the system, you also multiply RAM usage.

Running many instances of the same apps running the same libraries tend to not cost that much, as they only need to be loaded once and are shared. There are a reason we call .so and .dll files shared libraries.

VMs are even worse, as they need a whole fixed chunk of memory that is mostly opaque to the host OS, meaning there isn't much it can do.

I checked. htop reports 22.7 GB. I do have one VM with 4 GB RAM. Having 32 GB I disabled swap. It's been maybe 8 years since the last time I had swap on. No problems at all.

Tabs can be better than bookmarks for "project"/"workspace" type groups because they preserve (and maintain) actual working order of pages in the same primary browser interface. Bookmarks require a separate one and are not synced to the actual working order

The internet as a knowledge base is a large part of my daily tasks. Both professionally and privately. Maybe because I'm a millennial, I grew up reading books but early realized that it's much easier to read websites and docs. So I'm kinda on the border between two generations, where I remember having tech books in my shelves, but last time I moved I got rid of most of my old tech books because I never opened them. I exclusively use the web these days.

Looking at my FF right now I have 7 tabs open from something I've been working on all week, and 3 more tabs open for something I'm doing just this morning. Soon I'll close those 3 tabs and return to the 7 to continue working.

And that's how it goes for me, every day, every week. 7 is a mild example. During more hectic periods I might be pulled away and end up having several groups of tabs, related to different tasks that I had to pause.

My impression is that the history for web browsers is excellent and it's usually pretty easy to find things, even in cases where I looked at maybe 100 images and have to actually look at the pages and not just the titles. I think though there are a lot of people who don't know the history is there, or don't use it, or don't psychologically want to accept that it exists or something.

I wish browsers had better APIs to get history and bookmarks out, so if I did decide I had to find one of out 100 images I looked at on a particular site yesterday I could write some script to download those images and show all of them on one page.

The problem with Firefox is that the history feature doesn’t store duplicate entries. If you go to google.com on 2025-04-28, it creates an entry reflecting that:

ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28 10:35 google.com - 2025-04-28 10:30 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25

If you go to google.com again the next day, it just reorders the list:

google.com - 2025-04-29 11:30 ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28 10:35 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25

This can make it hard to reconstruct groupings of tabs from the history alone if two or more groups shared a given link. It’s not an issue for most users, but it is the reason some users prefer to hoard tabs.

I use tab groups for work projects. I am a project manager. I usually have somewhere around 200 long term tabs open at a time with several other transient tabs.

I typically am working on 4-5 projects at a time with some other non-project work categories like status reporting. A lot of my work involves reading and editing multiple web pages or writing updates on web pages based on communications in other channels. I reuse the same web pages multiple times a day and it is not feasible to close and reopen them constantly. Tab groups let me switch between the web pages for projects, read or update the pages, and then switch to another project. If nothing else, it means that I can actually see the titles of most tabs within a project rather than having them all collapse into identical icons. Tab groups helps keep this sane.

I am currently using Firefox-based Zen because its Tab Workspaces gives me the project separation I need. Chrome's tab groups don't offer enough separate between groups for me. I'll have to checkout this Firefox implementation but from what I saw earlier they may be adopting Chrome's minimal separation method of grouping so that may not work. I was using Arc for a while as they have a similar grouping to what Zen does.

Yeah, I'm using them as soft bookmarks. Turn them into hard bookmarks every month or so, not to actively look at them, but the firefox address bar searches in bookmarks as well and offers them up first when typing, so I have a repository of things I've declared interesting / cool / good before that I can refer back to when typing keywords into the address bar. Messy, but it works! I must have a couple tens of thousands of bookmarks by now...

> It seems to be super common

I've always wondered if this kind of thing is just embarassing to talk about.

Sort of like admitting "the trunk of my car is full of unresolved stuff" or "my refrigerator is where things go to die"

it's just recently that lots of tabs has become normalized and people talk about it.

Maybe telemetry normalized it ("lots of people use 100's of tabs")

I mostly use tab groups to keep and hide the context for a task I'm going to return to later. For a given task I might have design docs, Jira tickets, meeting notes, technical documentation, and a dashboard open. I can group all of those into a tab group, collapse it, and then they're out of sight, out of mind until I return to that task.

I could use windows the same way, but my personal preference is to use tab groups so I can keep fewer windows open.

Right now I also have several tab groups that are each a collection of current documentation and historical context for a particular internal system at my company. I always intend to turn a tab group like that into a list of links in a note, and sometimes I do, but a lot of them are still sitting around. Chrome is reliable enough at restoring them that I have tab groups I've kept for over a year.

I also have groups of documents I intend to read and digest better. They are 90% aspirational, but they serve a psychological purpose. I frequently scan through them, so anything that gets ignored for very long probably isn't important.

I only have 10-20 tabs open at a time, generally, but I still use tab groups to reduce the cognitive load of remembering which tabs relate to which projects/tasks. Previously, I would separate groups of tabs using a blank "New Tab" tab, so this update effectively just gave me a good way to name the groups and organize them more compactly.

> Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting?

Reading queue. Unfortunately, every app becomes its own sort of todo list: email, browser tabs, social feeds, RSS feed.

Maybe someone will be smart enough to make an AI agent that collects, cleans (ad removal, de-sensationalizing, summarization), and prioritizes information from disparate sources.

More or less what you written + sometimes toxic multitasking I would leave one work half done and start something different. Also sometimes I open new tab is tead of working in the already opened one (that could be solved by some kind of tab dedup). Fun Fact IOS Safari has a limit of 500 pages per group then you have to open a new one.

I hit the 500 limit a couple times a year. Bookmark all, close all.

I use groups when I'm really deep in a topic, but the rest of the time I forget which groups I have and that I ought to use them, just end up putting it all on the default group until it hits 500.

> Fun Fact IOS Safari has a limit of 500 pages per group then you have to open a new one.

I just use the “Bookmark All” feature and save it to a folder with the date that I made the bookmarks, then I copy the folder to Joplin and export it as plain text to my computer. I never review these bookmarks, it’s just a compulsion that allows me to feel like the information is still there if I need it.

I also rarely have many things open, but now I have a bunch, and it's very useful to have them in group (in Edge). I am working on three services at once, because we need a change that impacts all three, and they depend on each other as well. I have my ticket open, and its parent ticket as well for context. I have the pull request, the build pipeline, and the deployment settings open for each service. I have an AI open, an API reference open, and I have 1-2 random internet searches open. All in all, this is 14-15 tabs.

I can imagine that other people who have different contexts, and some web apps like mail, im and socials, that can easily make use of tab groups. Grouping and coloring them makes it really easy to not get lost in the bunch that is open at the same time.

I don’t have many tabs open, but use tab groups in Safari. For example, I have a tab group with a group of weather forecast pages that I visit frequently but not that frequently.

That moves them out of sight, yet within easy reach. Psychologically it feels different from a group of bookmarks.

Bookmarks are more permanent. Open tabs for me are a physical representation of a task in process. Tabs for a purchase show what needs consideration. Could be options, reviews, learning materials. For a project, tabs might include specific documentation pages, spreadsheets, etc.

Generally, it's tracking the in progress process.

Keeping tabs open for me is a physical token of a path not complete.

Sometimes I go through email, open a bunch of links as things to follow up on. I keep the tabs open until I've finished with them. I also keep tabs open per doc I need to review, code review still pending completion, etc. For a given project I keep a host of tabs open for things like documentation and research. Organizing these ephemeral tabs into groups (docs, code reviews, project abc, etc) keeps me organized. It's far more lightweight than bookmarks and works great with tab search. It keeps me from losing track of things while also being able to focus better.

Think of it like organizing papers on your desk vs putting them in the filing cabinet.

Like garbage collection, closing tabs isn't a job that should have to be performed by humans.

Browsers are basically designed wrong. Sort of like how after you learn about the write ahead log (WAL), you wonder how databases could have ever worked before. Or reducers, or Firebase, or anything like that.

Browsers should record everything, including a cache of all data received or sent, so that the user can rewind to any time in history, a bit like Apple's Time Machine. Then pruning history should be a task for heuristics.

I've given up hope that browsers will ever improve now. Although I've dreamed of taking something like WebKit and building a real browser where every tab is truly an isolated process, then attacking it like a video game and getting rendering performance up to multiple thousands of frames per second. With something like Russian doll caching or a hash tree to cache renderings for gigabyte per second throughput. So that page loads are measured in milliseconds and restoring 1000 tabs could happen in 1 second or be skipped entirely since they aren't visible.

I grew up in the 80s with 1 MHz computers, so consider computers today as running thousands of times slower than they should. The web runs millions of times slower. That collective waste puts the onus on the user to be self-sufficient. A bit like how capitalism can only reach low single digits of efficiency because it forces every consumer to own a copy of everything. Alternatives like socialism are little better, because the real problem is that artificial scarcity isn't being addressed through automation, so we can't see beyond economic systems and think they're fundamental.

"Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?" is asking the wrong question. The question should be: what's wrong with browsers that causes people to have so many tabs open?

I am not sure if your proposed solution is the right one or not but you are certainly asking the right questions. What is wrong with browsers?

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I used to have 200+ tabs open all the time, but it's just noise. Now I close tabs asap. If the page contents are of any interest I save the contents first using the Single File extension. If the page address is for some reason interesting (that is far less common) I save a bookmark. I started having the bookmarks bar enabled again and it pretty much serves the purpose that the tabs used to serve for me, but in a more organized way.

I don't think I ever need even ten, but I inevitably end up with 30+ spread across two browsers because I just don't close. Then I close all in CTRL+W rage* and rely on history + memory to find anything I'd like to return to.

*Thanks for your post. It reminded me to go into firefox and unset "Open previous windows and tabs," which I accidentally turned on and has ruined my ability to rage X out of firefox everytime I have too many tabs.

Personally, I find myself working on multiple tasks/projects across a day and the easiest way to decompartmentalize it all in my head is to move tabs related to a project into it's own group, that way I can click around Project A, Project B et cetera

I do project work, which generally requires dozens of tabs, sometimes across multiple browsers, depending up on the project (usually a browser-based software project).

In some cases, I'll have 6 or so tabs open about different steps of a woodworking project, for example. Not bookmarked, because it's unlikely I'll need those tabs again; either for never working on a similar project, or for being outdated by the time I need to circle back. So I just leave the tabs open, and when I finish the project, I go through and close all the tabs.

In my head, it's understood as: this is my garage/workbench/workspace; it'll be messy DURING project work, and it'll get cleaned up as much as I can as I go, but it'll be a bit unruly until the project is done. Then it'll get wound down.

Multiply that by the 3-6 projects I'm working on at any given time, and then add in the utility tabs (task manager, email, note app, git repos, npm, cloudflare, etc), the social tabs (only bluesky, discord, and soundcloud), the news tabs (a tab for "news" like CNN/Fox/NBC/etc that I cycle through, and then others like HackerNews and hobbyist news sites like video gaming or hunting or whatever), and the experiment tabs (searches and likely dead-ends that I'm using to try and figure stuff out), and you've already got dozens of tabs. But on top of that, I also tend to curate "entertainment" tabs, like YouTube videos that I'll probably find interesting, or whatever. Things that I will consume and then close the tab.

I've been told it's a lot of tabs to have open, but it's always between around 10 and 100. I've definitely seen worse. /shrug

ETA: regarding the thread topic, I would find groups useful because I can dump all of the project tabs into a single group and that would help me navigate faster. But, I'm not really happy with Mozilla and I don't find Firefox to be particularly good (pages with custom elements are too slow for my taste; too slow on web standards, too - it's well past time for WebGPU to be working), so I doubt I'll use the feature much because I'm jumping ship to the next best thing as soon as anyone puts something out (looking forward to Servo for this; still not sold on the mac-focused Ladybird and everything else - Chrome, Brave, Arc, etc - are either badly built or badly managed). If I'm going to have to go back to non-grouping, anyway, I'm not sure I'll be keen to start doing it in the first place.

I just don't close them, that's all. If I search something, I open a new tab. After hours or days, there's a lot of them, at which point I go "whoops," close all the windows, and start fresh.

Maybe that's not typical tab use though, idk

Related easter egg in Android Chrome: after 100 (or 1000?) tabs it just prints ":D" instead of a number.

I use the simple tab groups plugin and I normally have quite a few tabs open (but only a few visible at a time).

I group my tabs by project/topic so I can just send them to the background when I'm not working on that project and bring them back up when I context switch back to that project. So I'll have like 20 different groups, each dedicated to a specific personal project, some upstream project I'm contributing to, to an academic topic I'm studying (ex: PL theory, abstract algebra, topology, cryptography, etc), a group dedicated to looking into job opportunities, and then also some entertainment groups that have the youtube playlists I'm currently working through (some just fun, some niche topics, some tech) as well as other "third monitor content".

Each group acts less like bookmarks and more like a workspace you can quickly send to the background, pull back up to the foreground, or rotate between windows/monitors (without also moving pinned tabs which stay fixed to the window they are in).

It makes multitasking easier and you don't really get much memory overhead since the tabs generally all suspend automatically after a certain amount of inactivity anyways (might be due to the tab group plugin or another autosuspend plugin I have).

To give a TLDR: I use it to context switch quickly between projects without having to manually reopen stuff in the order it was in and at the spots on the pages where I was when I left off. So when I tab over on tmux to the workspace for a project that I haven't touched in a while, I can pull up the firefox tab group on my documentation window/monitor and immediately see where I left off and I can pick right back up again.

Yes, soft bookmark for ongoing threads. Bookmark folders are fine for other things, but generally bookmarks end up out of sight, and out of mind.

i used to use groups heavily as i have the work flow of research -> pause -> maybe work on something else to clear my mind -> implementation.

> I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time

Me neither, and I find groups very helpful to me!

>Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?

Basically, bookmarking webpages has been broken since the 1990s. It was (still is?) too difficult to bookmark something with a meaningful name so that you can find it again. Bookmarking is (without extensions... there's one that saves them to Nextcloud) local, so you have them stranded on a work computer or a home computer or your phone. And, they go stale (likely, a proper bookmarking system could check that Wayback saved it at least once, and also save a link to that just in case).

Many of the tabs I open could be closed soon after, certainly a few days on. Perhaps even most. But they're mixed in with tabs that I would like to keep that content longer-term (weeks or months), and it's tedious to go back through closing them. Giving me tools to have ever-more-complicated schemes to arrange them would only make the problem worse, not better.

>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

History is even more fucked up than bookmarking, which is saying something. If I do start closing tabs carelessly, they'll end up in the closed tabs list, which is so full of junk (all with similar page titles, more often than not) that finding them again will be impossible. If we use full history, then it's so spammed up with hundreds of pages per day that I'll never find anything in that. I don't have a team of forensic data technicians on staff to help me find that one doodad I saw while searching for something else on Amazon last week. Bookmarking is salvageable as a concept, if someone were to truly nail the implementation, but history hasn't been useful since 1995 when Grandma would browse the web for 10 minutes per week.

>Not judging or anything,

It's ok. Judge me. I know I have a problem.

PS It occurs to me that at least some of this problem has been that I've never found a good note-taking app that could be used long-term. If I had that, then I could jot down notes that would be superior to bookmarking pages... often times there's just a trick to writing a one-liner on the command line that I can't keep clear in my head. I don't need the link to the stack overflow page for that, I need an example with a comment. But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking. I need to be able to access it from anywhere, but not be held hostage by some corporate cloud. I need rich text, but something around the level of markdown, not Evernote's "paste a pdf into it" crud. I am subscription-averse. And so on.

> But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking.

Joplin? I’m a happy user. There are several (mostly-free) competitors.

You’re going to have to pay for your OwnCloud instance to host the info one way or the other, unless you’re hoping to leech as a free user for an essential part of your workflow.

> ou’re going to have to pay for your OwnCloud instance to host the info one way or the other,

I have fiber internet at home, and an Intel nuc with docker. I wasn't happy with Joplin. Over the years, I've checked out half a dozen or so note apps that did webdav (and could be hooked up to Nextcloud), but never found one that quite worked. Joplin's notes aren't really markdown, he spams them up with metadata... I think I know how I'd fix that if I were writing it, but I'm too lazy I guess. Keep hoping someone else will do it. Oh well.

>unless you’re hoping to leech as a free user

If I'm not going to trust iCloud for stuff like this, I'm not going to trust some smaller fly-by-night company or someone hosting for free. Nah, I have that part covered.

I discovered the feature accidentally a few days ago while I was trying to simultaneously write a presentation, book accommodations, submit travel paperwork, and brief my colleagues on what they should do while I'm away. And for the last day or so it was very useful.

Basically, though, it's a sign of toxic multitasking, as some others have said. I'm not happy that this feature was useful but it was useful.

I don't get it.

To me a browser tab is like an Emacs buffer: although I need the ability to have more than one Emacs buffer open at a time and to switch between them, if some process ran at random times and deleted all the buffers I haven't looked at in the last 2 minutes, I probably wouldn't be significantly annoyed or hindered.

Most common scenario. RSS Reading.

I often wonder how other people read their RSS feeds. I open them as new tab for all my interested links. My Subscribed list mostly generate about 400 - 500 links per day. Most of them are news. And scanning through all of them I mostly open about 30 - 40 tabs. Sometimes it could be up to 100s depending on topics. Then I just run through them one by one. The same goes with HN. Normally I get about 10 - 20 tabs opened on HN per day. All Together this could be 50 - 60 Tabs opened. And if you dont have time to read through them all they stayed there. Another day another reading cycle.

Another category which happens to have lots of tabs is Shopping and comparing. Trying to look for the best tools for the best price and where I could buy them. This normally includes opening 5 - 10 Tabs form the like of Reddit or some other specific forums.

Or Researching about a Topic where it leads to 5 other sub topic and every sub topic has 5 - 8 tabs.

I currently have different "Groups" of tabs, MBA, Jobs Searching, People I follow, Surgery operation comparison, Insurance, Youtube [1], AI, Electric Toothbrush and Water and Water Floss ( Any Recommendation from HN ? ), HN, Twitter.

I used to do 1000s of tabs but Nowadays I tend to limit to within a few hundred at most. Although that is also partly because Safari is the worst browser for multiple tabs and Firefox on iOS dont work as well.

[1] I increasingly think Youtube should have a Desktop App because the web simply does not provide good enough experience.

I'm actually really curious what the experience is like having not more than 10 tabs at a time, like what thing causes you to close a tab? 10 seems sort of wild to me, it's enough that you are clearly not just monotasking, somehow bounded. Probably in contrast, if you could imagine just forgetting to do that whole closing tabs thing, eventually you have hundreds or thousands of tabs.

Some context, for starters, I have about 10 tabs pinned, discord, 3 slack instances, my fastmail, my gmail, my work mail, spotify, my task list.

Then, there is the things I left open because I am going to read it, a stack of documentation I'm working on. A few random products I'm researching as procrastination. Any search I'm on, and a tree of tabs from different results that I'm working through.

There are the various layers of those things for the things I was working on 30 minutes or a day ago, that I haven't worked back to yet.

And most importantly, there are all the tabs that used to fall in the prior categories, that I just forgot to close, or haven't gotten around to closing yet.

Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open

Doing some EE work last week, I hit my personal worst-case scenario for tab usage. A certain chip manufacturer whose name will not be cited here except by the initials T and I has a particularly nice part that outperforms its peers from other manufacturers. Its data sheet is unfortunately among the worst I've ever seen. Lots of missing and wrong information that is absolutely required to write and debug firmware for the chip.

The only way to succeed with this particular chip if you don't have an FAE on speed-dial is to comb through their customer forum and read every post related to the chip, where one or two hapless employees are actually doing a great job filling in where the data sheet falls short. And the quickest way to do that is to go through the list of search results and middle-click the link to every message thread that looks like it might be important.

I didn't count the number of tabs I had open, but it was easily over 50 and probably close to 100. Rookie numbers compared to some, as has been pointed out, but it's certainly necessary to be able to juggle more than a dozen tabs or so.

I use it as a queue of things to read or watch. Also a few are soft bookmarks, yeah. These days I try to keep a lot fewer tabs though because I noticed that it actually stressed me out to have so many open. Right now, just 17.

I use them for work. Usually I have multiple efforts going on at once, so I put jira tickets, documents, deployment tools, etc for each effort in a group.

I had a meeting, so I opened 5/6 relevant pages to quickly show something. I thought the meeting was postponed, so I created a chrome tab group and close the group and continue working with 1 or 2 tab in my browser.

Suddenly, meeting was scheduled again, I simply clicked on the group, and got all the tabs open again.

Likewise - very very rare for me to have more than 10 or so open.

I assume people who have many tabs open are the same sort of people who have 100s or 1000s of unread emails in their inbox too.

I was trying to help someone debug and issue at their desk the other day and they were a tab hoarder too. Literally 75% of the time spent debugging was them trying to find the right tab. I prefer to work with organized people (...who also read their emails!) - to me, someone with hundreds and hundreds of tabs open is a sign of someone who is easily distracted and disorganised and doesn't complete tasks before moving on to the next shiny thing.

Glad thousands of users who managed to find their feature voting site pushed Mozilla to do a few baby steps

Though the current interface isn't good - mandatory group names (which also waste space in the precious tab bar by default) and inability to ungroup with a single key (due to naming conflict) - adds too much friction. Also drag&drop to group is too precise, but also can't be disable, so now you can't reliably move tabs around with a mouse without risking triggering the grouping

And, of course, one other top-10 request - to have custom keybinds to group/ungroup - is still too far from the minimum 4500 required to implement it after a few years...

Mozilla can’t win. They implement a feature and this is one of the top comments from the community that should be its target audience,

Why would you expect a poor implementation of a feature available in competing browsers to have any chance of winning?

Do you use Firefox as a daily driver?

It would be preferable, as a life-long user, NOT to have a "vote for your feature" website that no one really cares about, where proposal go to die. Like many petitions websites, they exist only to delude you into thinking your voice matters, or for Mozilla to delude themselves they care about what users are vocal about.

I'd love to be able to use an icon instead of names - maybe it could let you select a favicon from one of the member tabs.

You can use a single emoji as a group name

Glad to hear this works. My bookmark folders are sometimes just a single emoji - takes up less space but still hints at the contents.

>mandatory group names

I'm on 137.0.2 and I just made a nameless tab group just fine. Real estate of a square.

When you combine tabs, focus shifts to an input field, requiring extra action to dismiss or accept. That's the friction, even if you type nothing.

Also in horizontal tab layout every square matters

>that's the friction

It seems to be entirely preferential. If you prefer naming tabs it's extra friction to access the input field. Options are always nice, but you will rarely cover 100% user cases on a first release.

>every square matters

If you want zero real estate, you close the tab, optionally bookmarking it.

I don't know if some 5 pixel strip really helps anyone. that sounds like functionality deferred more towards a minor extention.

> It seems to be entirely preferential

Having this whole functionality is entirely preferential, so?

> If you prefer naming tabs it's extra friction to access the input field.

It's not, you can have different commands/mouse gestures for different workflows with customizable defaults to avoid most of the friction

> Options are always nice, but you will rarely cover 100% user cases on a first release.

That's a bad, though universal (can say exactly the same thing on 100th release) excuse

> If you want zero real estate, you close the tab, optionally bookmarking it.

Or close the browser. That's nonsense, why would I want absolute zero??? I want zero waste

> I don't know if some 5 pixel strip really helps anyone

Gladly there are ways to get knowledge! You can start by measuring actual width instead of making up tiny numbers. And then go on estimate the % of users who have more tabs that fit the screen width - that's the number is anyones no waste will be helping

>Having this whole functionality is entirely preferential, so?

Sure. No feature will please everyone and some may actively oppose a few individuals

https://xkcd.com/1172/

That's why options to customize the experience is the best of both worlds. But focusing on solid defaults and then opening up with options seems to make sense.

>>That's a bad, though universal (can say exactly the same thing on 100th release) excuse

Okay. This feature had 2 updates thus far. As the kids say, "let them cook". I sure prefer an iterative release over even more delay on such a widely requested feature

> want zero waste

You need to define "waste" first. What does "zero waste" even mean in terms of UI real estate? These paradigms vary from culture to culture (e.g. Check out how utterly dense Japanese website UI is), and then person to person.

> You can start by measuring actual width instead of making up tiny numbers.

And you don't think the designers and engineers at Mozilla did this and simply interpret a different benchmark from you? I'm sure like the rest of the base UI the scaling is responsive and the size chosen balanced visual ease of perception, average user precision, and compactness.

>And then go on estimate the % of users who have more tabs that fit the screen width - that's the number is anyones no waste will be helping

Given reports in this comment section of people with 2000+ tabs and people apprehensive about more than a few tabs open, I hope you can imagine the challenge trying to accommodate such a range.

I also imagine the designers did that work already. If it fits what some quick research I did suggests, the average tab count maintained is on the lower side.

> But focusing on solid defaults and then opening up with options seems to make sense.

Since everything is entirely preferential, you can't claim the current defaults are solid

> As the kids say, "let them cook".

They had decades to cook

> I sure prefer an iterative release over even more delay on such a widely requested feature

This is just another bad excuse (and also universal), especially since the current design is more complicated (due to the extra UI element), so likely took more time to implement. Sometimes better is faster.

> You can start by measuring actual width instead of making up tiny numbers.

> And you don't think the designers and engineers at Mozilla did this and simply interpret a different benchmark from you?

How is this relevant to you making up 5px?

> challenge trying to accommodate such a range

There is no challenge here, waste becomes apparent as soon as you reach 100% width, 100 or 40k tabs doesn't matter.

> average tab count maintained is on the lower side.

You've said nothing specific here. What % of users have tabs that don't fit tab bar width? And which % counts as "anyone" from your perspective?

No friction, just proceed with what you planned on doing after making the group. The naming popup is ephemeral, it will go away if you do anything else.

Yeah, right

- press arrow down to scroll on a page: works

- invoke the group command: now input field has focus

- press arrow down to let the "ephemereal go away". Oops, it doesn't since input field actually intercepts ... input!

> Also drag&drop to group is too precise

FWIW, you can also highlight multiple tabs and right-click "Add tabs to group".

What a roller coaster ride of a post. Great job guys. No mention of whether the feature is available now on a stable release. What release version that is. How to enable it. How to actually use it. Where to go for documentation or bugs. And congratulations on concentrating on the one top feature request. What's next? Looking at some of the 20 year old bugs that still exist?

  > No mention of whether the feature is available now on a stable release

  > Looking at some of the 20 year old bugs that still exist?

  https://gbhackers.com/google-to-patch-23-year-old-chrome-bug/

I've updated (Firefox 138.0) and the feature doesn't seem to exist in my browser, even when carefully reproducing the steps in the video / tutorial.

From the support page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups

> This feature is experimental and is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout. It may not yet be available to all users.

I'll wait a few more days then I guess?

In about:config, set browser.tabs.groups.enabled to true. (I am on 137)

Maybe browsers should be wholly rewritten in Javascript to give a modern refresh ...wait.

This is a better link for the actual feature, as opposed to the process that led to its prioritization:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-tab-groups/

Apparently, they've also released a new profile manager that's finally simpler than the clunky earlier one. This is the last feature I really need for my workflow to completely ditch Chrome. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management

It's great this is finally seeing some love! There seems to be some limitations in Firefox 138 that leaves it feeling like it's landed a bit short:

- Missing the context menu "Open in <profile>" on URLs or pages. There's often links I want to open in different profile, and I've missed this option from Chrome.

- Existing about:profile profiles aren't importable, other than the initial profile. It looks like adding other profiles manually to the "Profiles" table of the new sqlite database in the "Profile Groups" directory works to add it to the list, but it's still somewhat broken.

- Not documented how to open links from other applications in specific profiles. Passing the profile name (obtained from about:support) to "-P" no longer works, but passing the full path to the profile to "--profile" does. It would be nice to pass just the friendly profile name.

Well, at least it's a start. It can only get better. The important bit was getting the new profile management skeleton in a stable shape. Hopefully everything else will follow. It's only a bit infuriating that they do gradual rollout :-(

> Firefox prevents syncing multiple profiles with the same Mozilla account on the same device. If you create a new Firefox profile and then try to sign in to Sync with the same Mozilla account used in the other profile on that device, Firefox will block the sign-in to keep profiles separate.

Is this just a temporary technical limitation / anybody know if there are plans to fix this? Why should the user need to remember which profile is synced on a given device?

It's probably not broken but just works that way. Profiles are separate in more ways. Syncing all profiles could be counterproductive and unwanted. (for example, profiles which might just belong to different people - though it may be unlikely on a same pc but nonetheless. or syncing profiles that are intentionally kept separate, like work and personal stuff). It's not how it worked before in firefox, and it's not how it works on chrome or other browsers, and it's probably not in users expectations, when they expect separate things to be actually separate. (which seems to utterly confuse people who mix up container tabs and profiles functionality.) Conversely, why should someone remember, or rather, suddenly find out, that every profile in some firefox install is syncing to a same account, even though it is "intended" to be a separate, brand new, start from scratch kinda thing?

Hooray, it only took them ...a decade or so?

The weird thing is that Firefox has been quick at developing and introducing some features while others did not land for a very long time. If their aim is gaining more Chrome users, I hope a gap analysis was done as well as feature prioritization

Why did it take so long? It was their number one request for 3 years and chrome pushed this feature nearly 5 years ago. The design looks like a straight copy of chrome so it's not like there was a large design process to work out. It feels like it was finally prioritized so that they could "improve" it with ai, similar to what chrome is doing.

I think it was just stubbornness, pure and simple.

Firefox actually had a feature like tab groups a long time ago. It was removed for "low usage" and ever since then they have been resisting reimplementing it.

Anyways it still needs improvement but I am very happy to see this finally land. At work we have been moving everyone off of chrome after the manifest v3 shenanigans and the lack of tabs groups was a long standing sticking point for some users.

This sums up my experience with everything Firefox. It's why it slowly fell behind in UX and stopped being my primary browser ages ago. I keep giving it a try every year, but the gap between FF and other browsers just keeps getting wider and wider. This is a nice small step, but FF has a long way to go to catchup.

Same. Related example is Chrome and Safari have profiles while Firefox is still stuck in the tab groups era.

Profiles and tab groups serve different purposes.

Yeah, but they're closely related.

FF having a real Adblock solution closes the gap dramatically for me.

Probably a mix of layoffs (multiple handoffs from people who was working on it), typical beauracracy of a large company, and company politics for personal gain (a requested feature but not some impactful technical feat that would get you promoted). Typical acts of a large tech company

Yea crazy how long it took. Zen browser users have been waiting for them to ship this so it can be used in Zen. Of course they announce this the day I switch to Orion.

These HN threads with people that have 20K tabs living for years are so wild! I guess I'm the only savage in the world who closes my browser window and quits the browser application whenever I'm done with my computer for the day. I occasionally use tabs to temporarily have one or two web pages open at a time, usually because I need to browse/compare both of them actively, but when I'm not actively reading a page, I see no reason to keep a tab around.

I´m pretty much the same now.

I tried bookmarking everything in a dated folder "just in case" blabla but I always ended up either forgetting the site or if I really need it find and reopen it the normal way.

Since I transitioned to Obsidian recently I wrote a few simple macros to put the link into my "daily note". Add a few tags or even a comment if I am so inclined and boom, so far when I really want to find sth back I can actually search for it in my own notes.

Much better than a bunch of tabs!

(It helps that I´m currently on a really small machine (8 GB RAM) so that gives some discipline)

This is very much a tangent, but I blinked a few times here:

> I'm currently on a really small machine (8 GB RAM)

Thanks to the proliferation of electron apps I suppose you're correct. But wow!

I use the profile manager and have dedicated (and isolated) profiles for some sticky web apps that I need to keep open through a work shift, e.g. Slack and G-Suite. My G-Suite one might even have a dozen tabs that I'll have it keep and restore on restart, holding documents that are part of a weeks or months long project. The Slack one would just be one tab per Slack org at the times when I've had to juggle a few, as I found that easier than using the Slack UI's internal way of switching orgs.

I guess it's my old school way to have isolated containers for these 1st party sites I am forced to use. I'll even cut and paste 3rd party URLs from those back into a general profile, rather than browse off to other content from those "apps".

In the general browsing profile, I don't really leave anything logged in or open in tabs for more than an hour or two, often much less. When I get up to take a break, I generally have exited the browser too. So, I may close it tens of times per day, and have it set to clear history and cookies on exit.

It's partly my defiant personality wanting to throw a monkeywrench into the tracking and personalization miasma. But it is also just more comfortable for my mind to be coming back to a cleanly reset workspace than some sedimentary remains of the past.

There's a manager I've worked with and someone had a great description of her:

"She operates like a phone that hasn't been rebooted in too long"

My (admittedly unapologetically judgemental) view is that people that need more than a couple of tabs open from one day to the next are either too disorganised to bookmark the pages or are trying to juggle an obviously unreasonable and unsustainable number of topics. I find everything interesting, so I want to read and re-visit a LOT, but because of that it's become obvious to me that 99.9% of the time I'm never going to get back to that interesting thing (and if it's ends up being worthwhile enough then I'm sure I'll come across it again or be able to find it if and when I have the time).

I'm like you in that I almost make a point of closing all the tabs when I close the browser - and I often close the browser on a daily basis.

There's someone else I know who has multiple browser windows each with multiple tabs, and they just don't shutdown their computer because it's "state" represents where they are in their overall workflow. To me, that indicates a number of problems.

Caveat: I occasionally rely on the browser, upon start-up, re-opening the same tab/tabs (usually a maximum of two tabs) that were open when I closed the browser the previous day.

I'm with you. New browser every morning. I shut my computer down at night too.

More than 8 or 10 tabs open and i start cleaning 'em up.

if you're used to opening new links in a new tab (or if it's a target link anyway), it can quickly add up to a dozen+. It can be nice to organize important ones that you need in the short term.

I have no clue how people are managing tabs in the thousands, though. I only have a few hundred bookmarks after spending 20+ years gathering them. I don't need every page I visit to be archived in organizers like that.

If you were really hardcore you'd erase your entire OS whenever you're done for the day: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/

I do tend to let tabs accumulate, but then I turn off my PC at the end of the day and let all tabs fall into the void.

I like to start the day with a blank slate. Which seems to be such an uncommon thing to do that I couldn't convince FF on my last few Linux installs not to restore tabs when reopening. I've changed the obvious settings for it, I've set the flags in about:config, I've even completely disabled crash recovery and related features. It would still always reopen the last session

Already using Tree Style Tabs. It's the one critical plugin I need. I still don't understand how anyone works without it.

It is particularly bizarre to me that the tab bar is horizontal on browsers. We switched to wide screen monitors close to 20 years ago, then stubbornly continued to waste vertical real estate for UI elements. Then webpages all went hard on mobile oriented designs and literally throw away the extra horizontal space by forcing portrait layouts. Yet we still use horizontal bars that make it hard to display tab titles and can't show more than a handful of tabs without a scrollbar showing up.

I do a decent amount of front-end work, so I'll have a browser and code editor side-by side on a 29in monitor. In this situation, I very much prefer horizontal tabs. So that's one use case.

Exactly this. Plus, I rarely have over 20 tabs and even when I'm close to that number I mainly use the 10 first ones. Vertical tabs is a cool feature but both modes are useful depending your needs.

I guess it's just habit for me. I like having navigation on top, content in the middle, and OS operations on the bottom. The space was never much of a concern because

1. vertical content is scrollable anyway. if I lose a little space it's 1% more scrolling

2. if I do need the real estate it's one hotkey away. That's how Tree Tabs works, anyway. Use F1 to bring up the hierarchy and then hide it when unnedded

Firefox has supported vertical tabs for the last year or so.

Both FF and Chrome (or anyways, at least Edge) have vertical tabs already. One of the better novel features that browsers have.

The same. Sometimes I pair with people working (programming) and having dozens of tabs open without any vertical tabs plugin. They pretty much have to spend time clicking and searching tab by tab what they need.

I don't get why vertical tab is not at least an option in all browsers.

TIL that Firefox gained native vertical tabs recently!

It's in the General section of Settings.

I wish there were better coupling between TST and STG (Simple Tab Groups). Automatic nesting of TST is great, but sometimes I'd like to just move a whole tree into a named group. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

https://github.com/piroor/tst-more-tree-commands gives you folders and a few extra commands (for which you can configure shortcuts, in about:addons - manage extension shortcuts)

FYI. Firefox supports vertical tabs natively now.

Tree style is better, it gives you a visual hierarchy of where each tab has come from. Makes Wikipedia rabbit holes more interesting.

Yes, I wish the native vertical tabs gave that same hierarchy. I will keep using Tree Style Tabs until it does.

And with some chrome.css changes you can make the sidebar hide until the mouse hovers over it.

https://imgur.com/a/SsKe3UC

please do share how you do it :)

Add this to your UserChrome.css for the FireFox profile you use.

      @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
      #TabsToolbar {
          visibility: collapse !important;
      }

      #sidebar-box {
        --bar-width: 40px;
        position: relative !important;
        overflow-x: hidden !important;
        /\* margin-right: calc(10px \* -1) !important; */
        /* left: var(--bar-width) !important; */
        min-width: var(--bar-width) !important;
        max-width: var(--bar-width) !important;
        border-right: 1px solid var(--sidebar-border-color);
        z-index: 3;
        transition: all 0.1s;
     }

     #sidebar-box:hover {
        --expanded-width: 250px;
        margin-right: calc(
           calc(var(--expanded-width) - var(--bar-width)) * -1
  ) !important;
        /\* left: var(--expanded-width) !important; */
        min-width: var(--expanded-width) !important;
        max-width: var(--expanded-width) !important;
     }

     #sidebar-box:hover #sidebar-header {
        min-width: var(--expanded-width) !important;
        max-width: var(--expanded-width) !important;
     }

    /* #sidebar-header is hidden by default, change "none" 

    /* #sidebar-splitter styles the divider between the 
    sidebar and the rest of the browser. \*/
    #sidebar-splitter {
       display: none;
    }

       .mozilla/firefox/<your-profile-folder>/chrome/userChrome.css

Personally, it's easy for me. If I get above 10 tabs, I just close them all. I don't see any value in having more than that and they just become a distraction for me. Tree style, sidebar tabs, tab groups, etc. are just overkill for me.

I'm in this boat as well. From my perspective, I'd only bother keeping a tab open for a long period of time if it meets the following criteria:

1) It's something I'd actually want to go and view later (most stuff fails this criteria)

2) It's not something I can easily find again

3) It's something that I only anticipate going back to a couple of times, and thus isn't worth making into a bookmark

And over all my years browsing the web, almost nothing satisfies all that criteria. I'm pretty aggressive with closing tabs, and I almost never regret closing a tab.

That's just not how some people browse. When I hit HN's frontpage, I open every thread with an interesting headline in a new tab (within the HN tree.) Then I visit them one by one, and at least each one gets another tab opened (for the article.) The article may get multiple tabs opened if it has references or links that are interesting. If there's something that I want to get back to later, or don't have time to read now but looks interesting, it stays open. If I won't get to it for a while (before the next time I return to HN) it gets pulled out of the HN tree into its own tree.

  HN frontpage
  |> Interesting thread
  .|> Interesting article
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If I'm at Amazon trying to buy a spatula, I have 10 different Amazon spatula pages open, and also three articles about spatulas within the tab tree.

I dunno. When I go to a bookstore, I don't buy one book, go home, then come back and buy another book. I browse the bookstore, buy everything that I want, and I put most of them on a shelf while I read one. I do not find the shelf a distraction.

Very interesting plugin, I will need to review it sometime soon

Hmm if this would just automatically work with / integrate with multi-account containers it would probably be particularly helpful.

e.g. just let me check an option to group items that share a multi-account container into the same tab group.

It's worth remembering that Firefox HAD tab groups before, just under a different name and then killed it because "nobody used it":

https://medium.com/@twidi/how-i-survived-the-removal-of-pano...

The implementation here is a bit different, I'm sure, but the core idea is the same: Group your tabs however you like and switch between the groups at will.

I use Vivaldi these days (thanks to it's excellent UI customization and "Workspaces" tab groups) so I don't see myself going back to Firefox. Maybe this is a new trend of FF devs actually adding features instead of only removing them. I guess we'll see how long this one lasts.

I'm nobody. I loved panorama. It was basically Exposé but in a browser which allowed me to keep not just tabs but 'Windows' organized visually without taking up separate tasks in my actual task manager.

This new feature (which I've already gotten to test), I can almost use the same way, though I'm wary of Mozilla yanking it away from me if I rely on it.

Personally I love the feature, but I really feel like window managers/desktop environments should be handling window tabs. Imagine your desktop handling all tabs across all programs the same exact way instead of being reimplemented differently for each program. You could window switch to Firefox with alt-tab, add a ctrl- to your key combo and cycle through tabs in that window. Or imagine typing the title of a tab in your desktop's searchbar and being taken directly to it.

At the very least it'd make managing 100+ open tabs more feasible.

Windows 7 and IE introduced similar level of desktop integration with tab previews and tab navigation integrated into the taskbar.

On Mac, it seems that all the major applications are using the standard keyboard shortcuts for tab navigation and I don’t think that’s very different in practice to what you describe. I assume Windows is the same?

Google Chrome had this on Android several years ago, but it was quickly yanked out—probably because people hated it as it felt like ti bogged down the OS with it. Personally, it felt like information overload forced into a limited UX context.

But now with advancements like tab unloading/discarding and faster CPUs, it might work for some people om mobile devices. Desktop browsers though might still be hampered by limited task/context-switching options.

I totally understand the confusion it brought to users, but I'm equally disappointed in how quickly the idea was abandoned, especially by the broader Android app ecosystem. It would be so useful to be able to open multiple Amazon app tabs to compare products for example.

The feature is still in the OS, so apps that declare support can allow users to open multiple simultaneous windows of itself. Most native Android apps can probably add support for this feature with minimal code changes, as Android "best practices" have pushed apps towards good reactivity support and rigorous handling of app state in these types of edge cases.

There are extensions that does the same thing, like this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...

This looks to be a bit more integrated into the UI than the old version. The old tab groups always seemed like a bit of a separate "app" and I tried to use them, but never really used them much because I had to manually switch to the tab group view and it just didn't seem very cohesive.

I love these "nobody used it" justifications companies sometimes proclaim.

I guess there probably are features that can be trimmed back, that go unnoticed and don't draw attention.

But sometimes I think companies refactor something and just don't want to think about supporting something. Or, they have an unpopular hidden motive.

(I think of apple's target disk mode, and tesla's non-existent dashboard and now turn signal/drive select stalks)

This is weird to me because like 10 years ago Firefox had something with tabs that I loved, where you could have workspaces and switch between them, then that randomly disappeared.

It was called Panorama and that was removed in Firefox 45

There's an extension[1] now that restores the functionality, but the removal is exactly why I'm hesitant to try a new tab organizational tool: the loss of the last one was workflow breaking enough to break trust.

[1] https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups

Wow, its a shame that looks unmaintained, that tabbing feature was one of the best things in Firefox at the time.

I still use it successfully, but there are a few annoyances with drag and drop in the panorama view. It isn't as nice as when it was integrated unfortunately.

Wow! That's actually surprising (and not so given how unmaintained it is).

Thank you for mentioning this. I felt like I was going crazy not seeing anyone mentioning it in the comments.

This was a very important feature to le at the time, as I used to work on multiple projects at the same time, and I had all of those organised in a simple, very visual way. I also had a group for "communication" with all my webmails, forums, etc. And another one with all the webcomics I used to read at the time.

I used the absolute heck out of the crazy stuff they did with tabs, I was upset when it went away.

I've not changed anything on my home setup yet, but I've been experimenting with vertical tabs and tabs groups for the past week or so. I'm not sure if vertical tabs are doing me any good, but I think Tab Groups have really been aiding my productivity.

I have so many tasks I'm working on in a given day, constantly jumping between specific instances of the same site over and over. For example, on any given ticket I'm working on, I've probably got tabs open for: the JIRA ticket, Bitbucket code, Sharepoint documentation, an AWS console, DataDog logs, etc. And I'm probably jumping between at least five tickets a day, depending on if I hit a roadblock with one or a different one is suddenly getting escalated. Being able to GROUP all of those five tabs into one little block that I can label with the ticket number, and then hide/re-expand them when I'm ready to come back to it...that's pretty awesome.

The only part about Tab Groups that has confused me so far is that there's a right-click option when clicking on a group that says "Save and Close Group". I've closed it, but have not figured out how to bring it back once closed...so I'm not sure what the point of "saving" it is.

The Panorama View extension can also help with organization. A whole set of tabs for a different context, for instance.

Saved groups are shown in the List all Tabs menu (the button on the right of tab bar)

that button is NOT there

about:config and then set browser.tabs.groups.enabled

I'm really puzzled by the UI, you have to drag and drop a tab onto another to create a tab group.

This really sucks because now when you want to move a tab you have to be pixel and timing exact to not create a tab group. Most of the time when moving a tab I end up creating a tab group then having to right click and then "ungroup tab"

Also you cannot move tab group at all

Why not just having a right click or icon to create a tab group?

Anyone else being annoyed?

Note: I'm using vertical tabs option in firefox settings

>I'm really puzzled by the UI, you have to drag and drop a tab onto another to create a tab group.

You can also use Right Click->Add Tab To Group

This is what I use as the pull tabs together is very bad UI. It's to easy to move the tab instead and / or open a new window. Hope this improves with time.

Thanks for the right click, I don't know how I missed it the first time I looked...

Do you know how do you move a tab group once created?

Right click has a menu manage but only option is to create a new window with the tab group. Drag and drop doesn't to work on the tab group (to reorder it vs other groups and tabs).

> Do you know how do you move a tab group once created?

It should work once you've updated to Firefox 138.

It does thanks!

FWIW, that was also my experience when Edge added this feature. It was particularly annoying as I did not ever want to use the feature. I guess Firefox wanted to be bug-for-bug compatible? :(

In about:config, try looking for browser.tabs.dragDrop. The createGroup... and moveOverThresholdPercent flags control the group creation behavior during drag and drop. If anyone finds values that make it less likely to accidentally create groups while still allowing intentional grouping via drag and drop, I can channel these back to the team.

Is there a way to disable the creation of tab group by drag and drop altogether by tweaking these parameters ?

Also I noticed another thing: drag and droping a tab on a folded tab group doesn't work. You have to unfold the tab group then you can drag and drop a tab into it.

It would be great to allow drag and drop of a tab on a folded tab group and if dropped just put the tab at the end of the group, it would make the tab group feature more useful by allowing to quickly select and drop tabs where they should go.

You could just set `browser.tabs.dragDrop.createGroup.delayMS` to a high value like 3000; that would mean having to rest the mouse for three seconds to group tabs during drag and drop.

I'm guessing your telemetry will tell you a lot of users have started using tab groups. They may have done so by mistake. My tabs each take up like half an inch of the screen and I don't have a gaming mouse; I now have multiple tab groups which I never intended making. As this is a quite technical feature, maybe dragging should be off by default, or only when e.g. holding shift and dragging or something?

(Yes it's a beautiful feature and probably lots of people want it, just noting that the dragging is confusing. I can't think of a good way to solve the problem that doesn't make it slightly more difficult/nerdy to use.)

With the horizontal tab layout, you can drag-and-drop the group name to move the whole group, same as singular tab. Although the first time I tried it it didn't work, now that I keep trying with different click timing etc it seems reliable - not sure if there's maybe a drag handling bug hiding in there somewhere.

We've implemented drag and drop of groups for both horizontal and vertical in 138 which presumably you were updated to today :)

I've only enabled tab groups on my profile after updating to 138 today. That first attempt where drag-and-drop didn't work was already on 138. But I can't reproduce it anymore, so I assume that was a fluke. Looks good so far!

> Other browsers might send your tab info to the cloud, but Firefox keeps it on your device. Your tabs stay private and never leave your device.

I guess it answer my question about having tab groups sync to mobile phone. Maybe in 3 more year..

This seems to be a quote aimed at the AI feature, not the syncing.

Still no bookmark tags so don't hold your breath

I found that tab groups themselves are not synced. So, grouped tabs from one machine will appear as random set of tabs on another machine.

Why is the demo video not of the actual implementation but instead using a barebones wireframe that looks nothing like Firefox?

one reason tab management is so important is because bookmark management is so bad.

ive tried to solve for this with a thumbnail view for bookmarks on the new tab page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/yet-another-speed-d...

it uses open graph images so the previews are more useful on a wider range of pages than simple favicons like the native new tab page.

any suggestions or feedback welcome, ama!

Bookmarks are OK. I's just that their purposes largely varies. There's the "pin this" bookmark for sites that are often visited, there's the "save for later" bookmark for things you want to go back to later", and there's the "interesting" bookmark for things you don't need now, but would be too much trouble to find. Maybe some days, I will code an extension for all those uses cases. For now, I put the first in the bookmark toolbar and the others in "Other bookmarks" while occasionally create folders for the last type.

Wikipedia has an entire, rather amusing, section on the dangers of tab hoarding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#Tab_hoarding

That's hilarious.

> Tab hoarding can lead to stress and information overload, distraction, and reduced computer performance. It can develop into emotional attachment to the set of open tabs, including fear of losing them upon a crash or other reboot, and conversely, relief when tabs are properly restored. Tab hoarders have attributed the behavior to anxiety, fear of missing out, procrastination, and poor personal information management practices.

amusing, but true.

I know this sounds crazy, but has any browser just tried implementing two (or more) horizontal rows of tabs? - the user can decide to put them up the top or on the second row based on their own prioritising. Or just zip them up. Not saying it’s a great idea but these kind of horizontal chrome groups never worked for me, and Arc tabs are too vertical for me.

Vivaldi has had this for some time now.

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-stacks/

I would like more a completion based input for search. The address bar can work. but it's usually at a weird place and not configurable (in terms of number of items, labels, and sorting). I would like some command/query popup bar. And then I can reduce the vertical space taken by the tab bar, the toolbar, and the bookmarks menu.

>I know this sounds crazy, but has any browser just tried implementing two (or more) horizontal rows of tabs?

Yes. Firefox.

(it was like that long ago)

Interesting trick imo

This, together with the "Expand sidebar on hover" for vertical tabs, means that I can almost stop using a customized userchrome.css file completely, and that I've disabled Sidebery. It's great to have this implemented natively!

The funny thing is Firefox already perfected this feature years ago with Panorama. Then one day decided to remove it because "less than 1% of users use it" (https://news.softpedia.com/news/firefox-45-will-drop-tab-gro...)

There's been community forks of it since then that I switched to and will continue to use instead. Grouping tabs at the top is much worse UX than an entire page you can drag and drop around, and blatantly copying Chrome.

What percent of their users even have telemetry enabled? Mozilla always pulls this crap, using these biased telemetry numbers as a fig leaf to drop genuinely useful features. Luckily they still allow for community modification.

Sadly, this seems to be the general purpose of telemetry. If the gathered statistics can be contorted to justify doing something you wanted to do anyway, then telemetry will be used for just that. If it says something else, just ignore it and say you don't have enough resources or something.

Proponents suggest it is necessary to improve software. Microsoft has extensively used telemetry for at least 10 years in Windows, does that feel improved to anyone during that time? I'm of the opinion they largely used it to identify what existing features users were still being productive with so they could be enshitified next.

Most users leave telemetry enabled. It's enabled by default.

Exactly. The Panorama View is descent, but it tends to lose everything if you accidentally close the wrong window.

I open a new window for each "topic" to keep the tabs grouped while keeping unrelated things separate.

I also use an extension (on my phone so can't lookup the name) to give names to each of these groups of tabs. Only the "main" window with it's tabs automatically starts up upon browser launch. For the rest of the named groups, the extension provides a button on the toolbar to "resume" any named group which launches its tabs in a new window. This workflow reduces startup time and only keeps those things open that I'm actively looking at.

Love Firefox. More than Safari or Chrome. Not only function wise. But also mission wise. Keep up the good work Mozilla.

> But also mission wise

I have bad news for you my friend.

For years, most of (+90%) Mozilla's revenue was ad partnership based*. Recently this has gotten worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096

* https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...

The mission for the last five years or so seems to have been enrich the CEO and piss off the users?

I've been really happy with the winger addon for managing tabs. I really am closer than ever to complete control.

(no relation, just a user)

It adds a dropdown list of windows in the tab bar in which you can name each window, move tabs between windows, and save/restore windows into bookmarks.

Now instead of having 1000 tabs in 20 odd windows and eventually declaring bankrupcy, I have 1000 tabs in 20 _named_ windows alongside 500 bookmark folders of (named!) past sessions. Much better.

Seems like it still won’t replace Sidebery for me as this provides only a single grouping layer.

To replace Sidebery Firefox would need to clone like half of Arc Browser.

Arc is dead, long live Arc. Best we can hope for while The Browser Company is toying with their investor-bait "AI browser" is for other browsers and extensions to copy the good parts of it.

Great news, I use tab groups daily in Safari and recently in Firefox beta.

In Firefox, tab groups work better with a vertical tab bar.

In Safari, there is a feature that I wish comes to Firefox: that the tabs in each group act as bookmarks, i.e., they persist across browser restarts and new windows. They are always there within their group; only the tabs that are not in a group are volatile.

This makes tab groups more useful, as you don't fear losing them no matter what.

Firefox tab groups persist across browser restarts (or at least mine have for ~5 months now). I haven't had any issues with new windows yet either though I have definitely lost Firefox tabs to that issue in the past.

I agree though, Chrome does a similar implementation where tab groups act like a special class of bookmarks and it's much nicer. You have the same process where you never have to fear losing groups and you can 'hide' tab groups that you aren't actively using and they're potentially accessible from any window.

Now they only need instant tab search, like Chrome does with Ctrl+Shift+A. It's like the last thing I'm personally missing before I can actually make Firefox my primary browser. Chrome's tab search is so damn good for navigating in a big tab jungle, it's one of my favorite and most used features of the browser.

Not sure how it compares to chrome but firefox does have a solid open tab search.

You can either click "list all tabs" button (down arrow to the right of the new tab button) and then "search tabs" or enter "%" as the first character in the address bar followed by your search term.

As far as I know there is no keyboard shortcut for it.

They changed the official named from "address bar" to "location bar" ages ago when they added functionality like that, and to go with the new name, "ctrl + l" is a shortcut for it.

Netscape always called the url bar the "location bar". "Address bar" is Internet Explorer's term. (At some point Netscape/Mozilla copied the ctrl+d shortcut for A_d_dress from IE as well.)

I noticed this feature by mistake. I managed to drag a tab when I tried to switch to it and it turned blue and I got very confused and thought it must be something to do with container tabs. Then I tried dragging another one and couldn't manage to do it again. Maybe like every ten times I try dragging a tab it turns a different color. I don't understand what the difference is in my mouse movement.

I don't want to rant, but I don't a tiny bit like the UI they have made for tab groups, and I won't use it.

They should have just paid lavishly to the developer of Simple Tab Groups, and incorporate that extension into the master. Fast, cheap and perfect result. Instead they made....this :(

The tab groups make a great case for having more active tabs in an organised way, but I'm concerned that over the past few years I have observed Firefox become more and more resource intensive. I have an auto tab suspender extension and I'm still running out of CPU and RAM on a machine that should be able to handle it.

Is this feature failing for anyone else? I drag one tab onto another and it just tries moving the tabs, not grouping.

Yes, I updated. After doing so it told me about this feature. No, I also cannot see the tab group creation when right clicking. FF 138.0, Sequoia

I figured out why the feature was failing on my system: I needed to enable Install and Run Studies under Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla under Firefox Data Collection and Use under Privacy & Security under Settings. I can understand why Mozilla would do that (they consider it an experimental feature).

Along the same line, the Firefox Labs section of Settings requires the same settings to be enabled. When I enabled it under about:config then opened the settings, the label would briefly appear then disappear. When I went back to about:config, I found the setting was reset to disabled. Again, I can understand why Mozilla would do that.

Yet understanding why is not the same as accepting why. If they want to promote themselves as an open and privacy preserving web browser, they should accept there are some compromises to be made when it comes down to letting users experiment and collecting telemetry.

Appears to still be rolling out progressively - something that the release notes left out. I'm on 138.0 and I don't have it either.

> All users should expect to see the feature by May 6, 2025. [1]

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups

Seems weird to announce it as part of a version and then also as a rolling release. Seems like the message could be much clearer by saying it is part of the browser but may be disabled by default.

FWIW, I checked about:config. There's some options in here that seem highly relevant

  browser.tabs.groups.enabled              false 
  browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled        false 
  browser.tabs.groups.smart.optin          false 
  browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled    true

Changing `browser.tabs.groups.enabled` to `true` enables the feature. Though note that it can still be difficult to align them right such that they group. Presumably `browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled` is the AI feature mentioned in the article. But I have no idea what `browser.tabs.groups.smart.optin` and `browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled` are.

I just updated on my work Windows machine, it seems to be working great

Pls stay revelat and don't die and keep on working against all chrome and stuff. And we hope your financial woes could be taken care of with donations if Google's money no longer dry up. There is no replacement as of now for firefox. And recent issues with your privacy and adds things are not good either when it comes to people which are your users. Mostly we care about our data. Btw nice feature long awaited.

Horizontal tabs, tab groups, seems native Firefox is almost if not at the point where I don't need an extension for tabbing any more, which would be great in my books. (Currently and for almost a decade using Sidebery. The containers integration and 'panels' is what I think might still be missing for me to switch. I'd probably sacrifice the former, but I love panels.)

I'd love to see Tab Groups, but what I don't love is how Firefox has lost their focus and vision. For years, Mozilla's mission was not only to provide a private and secure browsing experience, but one that was also lightweight and simple. Nowadays, it seems their idea of innovation is to just rip off Chrome's features.

It's just a clone of chrome feature. Cool they impelmented it too. I just don't see this "we listen to the community" more like "we are just trailing behind chrome"

Opera had vertical tabs and groups in 2010.

I used FF for 20 years and moved to Edge a few years ago. I thought similar about this feature, Edge has had tab groups and vertical tabs for a long time now.

I really hope their implementation on mobile is better than Chrome's. I prefer no tab groups on mobile over what Chrome did.

I have no idea why people need 500 tabs open. Like dude I never go beyond 12 tabs on my machine like ever. Aren't you too distracted if you have that many tabs open. Perhaps you should complete the task in some of the tabs and close em?

Perhaps you should let different people have different workflows?

Great to see this feature, and it looks smooth and easy to use. I'm left wondering whether it will sync across devices and notably also to FF on Android?

I never thought I‘d belong to the group of people who never close tabs. Had read David Allen some twenty years ago and subscribed to his „inbox zero“ mantra. Until I realized I don’t have the time to clean up. I keep doing stuff, and when the chaos surpasses thresholds, I reset that system (close all tabs, restart, start with a clean slate). But this sounds interesting. Will give it a try.

I'm hoping they can auto-assign tabs to groups by domain name. Most of my tabs are just random Github links into various repos.

Kinda wild watching every browser finally get around to this after all these years - feels like the stuff people actually want is what keeps slipping through the cracks most. You ever wonder why the basics take forever to get built while every company chases the next shiny thing?

I have been waiting for this. I currently use profiles, and container tabs, this will further help organising stuff.

The link just tells me to download new firefox: """ blog.mozilla.org Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly. Click here for more information """

As someone who frequently has tens of open tabs across different windows, this will be massively helpful. Especially since I frequently find myself trying to remember which window was for which ‘mental group’.

We get tab groups, but can't get a working gradient without banding. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771

Not that one actually has anything to do with the other, but I'd rather have useful functionality than meaningless aesthetic crap that I'd never notice if I wasn't examining the pixels with a magnifying glass.

I don't know about you, but this seems pretty damn noticeable:

https://bug627771.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=94621...

Every photo of a landscape ends up with these weird giant floating blobs in the sky.

Is there a way to migrate from tab groups implemented by an add-on?

In my case I have been using Simple Tab Groups (STG) for years. I want to copy my STG tab groups, import them into the native tab groups, test that out and decide if I like STG or the native functionality better.

Looking forward to use this!

Since I do not need it and kept accidentally enabling tab groups I looked for a way to turn it off. You can do so by setting browser.tabs.groups.enabled and browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled to false in about:config.

I wonder how many times I saw this feature implemented, die, missed and implemented again... Especially in Firefox all features seem to have relatively short but endless circles of dying and resurrection

All I want is to pin tabs on the right, near the place where newly open tabs go. This isn't bad though.

> What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it.

That's allegedly less people asking for the feature than the tabs I have open or 0.0028% of the user base. I don't believe it.

That's the critical limit. They build it in as a non-removable addon and reenable it every update. Anything more popular is not allowed! /s

If I could assign a bookmark to a container, that would be great.

I don’t like Sidebery and it doesn’t really work for me.

Another thing that annoys me in Firefox is that they recently changed the sidebar. I still use Firefox though.

Rant over.

A little tangential question, but what is up with the "Distilled" logo on their blog site? I don't think I ever noticed this earlier, and I can't seem to find anything on their blog explaining it.

For some reason I had thought this was already implemented and I just wasn't using it because I don't have a lot of tabs open. It appears I was mistaken. Nice to see this implemented in Firefox.

It was an existing feature, then it got moved to an extension, then they broke the extension. And then, much later, they implemented it again.

Are there any known issues with it? I just updated on my Mac and don't appear to be able to group tabs - dragging one on top of another just reorders them

I switched to Floorp last month and it's amazing. It's a Firefox fork with tab rows. Tab rows are the real MVP. None of the annoying weirdness of Tree Style Tabs, where you have to keep track of a hierarchy of tabs that are hidden behind other tabs. Instead, you just see 3-4 rows of tabs and you make a mental map of what is where.

Once they release the new version in a month or two, we'll also get newer Firefox features like these tab groups, and we'll also get workspace improvements. Floorp is 10/10.

"I used to have 30 windows open, each with 30 or 40 tabs."

I can't be the only person who only ever has about 2-3 tabs open at a time in a single window.

Honestly, no matter what fancy UI features they add, until they add WebSerial and WebUSB, Firefox is not a replacement for anything Chromium based for me. I have a lot of devices that use all that, and I don't want to constantly deal with switching browsers or making standalone wrappers so that I can use them.

But Firefox devs have a strong "we know whats good for you" mentality and refuse to add it.

Amazing news. This was the one thing keeping me from switching from Chrome to Firefox.

firefox keeps on give after shedding a couple months ago.

the shakeup from google not been able to give them money anymore seems to have done good for the project.

Does Mozilla still steal everything I type into FF and sell it? Or just steal it? Does it?

I just updated to 138 on MacOS but I don't have this feature, so I guess it's not here for all of us.

How is this different from creating a folder of links on my Bookmarks bar and selecting "Open all"?

How does one quickly find the right window when you have a few open?

This is why I only keep one open.

I wonder when this will come to Librewolf.

Is there a way to hide the colored tab group buttons so they can only be seen in the List-all-tabs drop-down?

You can Right Click->Save and Close Group. Though it will reopen if you select it from the dropdown.

there is no drop down

I'm so thankful for this.

Chrome has tab groups and it helps. And I want to move away from Chrome because Google.

Finally, I can use Firefox again!

Thank you for posting this !!!

How about fixing bug 1813919, which is an actual usability bug?

At minimum I should be able to re-group tabs by domain.

Is this a superior solution to the firefox containers add on?

Seems different to me. Containers allow you to have different cookies per container.

I think I'd combine the two features, each tab group having it's own container. I'm sure some use would lose their space-bar actuated room heater or whatever the relevant xkcd is.

They're really not the same concern at all. If groups needed to function as containers (or did by default), you would be logged out of a site if you tried to visit it outside of a tab group (or dragged the tab in/out).

Where can I download it? I don't see a link in the blog.

As others said, it will be built into Firefox, and is already part of the mid-April release, but apparently not yet enabled. When I updated to 137.0.2, it opened the following page:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups

> Starting in Firefox version 137, you can use tab groups to manage open tabs in Firefox by grouping them together and labelling them. All users should expect to see the feature by May 6, 2025.

There's a link at the bottom for me: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Assuming you want to download firefox. It seems to be integrated into the browser, there's no add-on or so for this that you would need to download separately.

Weird, I had to go into about:config, search for "browser.tabs.groups.enabled" (which was set to false) and enable it there.

It is built into the latest version of Firefox. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

always wanted this, FINALLY.

Moving from Arc to Zen, this was the biggest drawback I felt, and now, I'm just waiting for the merge!

Similarly moved from Arc to Zen; hopefully this will allow for multiple windows/views into the same set of tabs? or at least a future possibility.

Only thing holding me back from moving from Arc to Zen is syncing.

Awesome, looks more convenient than onetab.

I have never understood why people have hundreds, or even thousands of tabs. Why not use bookmarks? Hoarders.

I think I've seen this feature announced a million of times, by pretty much all web browser makers

We'll see how this holds up. I currently have nearly 3283 tabs in my primary Firefox window. (The other six windows only have 35-125 tabs at the moment. I sort of use the windows as tab groups.)

To its credit, Firefox is the only browser that does not either slow to a crawl or just fall over dead with that many tabs.

I still need a good tool to merge bookmarks from a bunch of older Firefox profiles, though. Does anyone know of a good tool to do that?

After Firefox Mobile, killing Thunderbird and a sharp decline in market share, Mozilla finally starts to build what it's users want. Selling it as gigantic success is very American.

In the end vertical tabs are nice and I hope I like the new tab groups too (the previous official tab group addon got killed by Mozilla and 'destroyed' my workflows at the time).

Let's see, maybe Mozilla is on the path to something great yet again by being more innovative.

I have tons of tabs open but tab grouping is an anti-feature. It takes way more time fucking around with tab groups, opening them, closing them, moving then around than I've ever saved by using them.

Yeah, I've had close to a thousand tabs open regularly on my main system, but I just use windows as my tab groups (and workspaces as my window groups). Another layer of grouping isn't what I need to manage that better.

I do think it's nice to have as an option for the many people who seem to want it, though.

I started reconsidering Edge literally last week because Panorama View managed to lose my groups again, and Edge has excellent workspaces (envy).

Haven't tried the new groups yet, but from the video it is unclear what to do if I don't want them to constantly stay visible in the tab bar. The whole point for me is decluttering it from something I don't need at the moment.

If you click the little < left-scroll arrow on the left of your tab bar a few hundred times you'll eventually get to the start of your tab group. Then there will be a box [ ] that you can click. That will toggle visibility of the tab group, so all the tabs in it will be hidden. Click the box again to expand the group.

AI powered smart groups... more AI, yay.

/s obviously

I wish companies would spend less time shoving AI down our throats, because I feel like they are over-hyped and the privacy trade-off is rarely worth it.

What happened to boycotting Firefox over their terms of service changes demolishing privacy?

I will now never know. I have used nightly for more than a decade. It was the only reason. To run a 64-bit os. They fixed multiple problems over night, multiple times. Many little tiny things that made it better, nicer and faster.

That all ended four days ago. Now nightly will use up all memory on a 4gb, 8gb, 16gb and my 64gb system. It's unusable everywhere. Since I have it installed everywhere, I backed off to an older ESR. It either crashes on hacker news or says I am posting too fast. ( I have never ever ever seen this error before 4 days ago, and it's on multiple platforms. )

I have had to abandon it and for some reason other apps that would crash, are now running. I went to Edge on my desktops, and was reminded why I hate it with a passion.

I use mostly Brave now, and a bit of Chrome, but chrome will not run in very low memory.

As of today, I am removing it from all systems. All. Best of luck but I'll see you in a year or two.

Yay!

Unfortunately I can no longer find it. But I still remember being called psychopath and having mental health issues on HN for having a few hundreds tabs opened.

I mean, I'm not surprised, how do you cope with so few tabs?!

Very frustrating that it's not available in my Firefox yet.

It's available for everybody since FF 137, just randomly not enabled.

Go to about:config and then set browser.tabs.groups.enabled to true.

Meanwhile my pinned tabs still disappear when re-loading the browser.

Shame Google Meet doesn’t work anymore.

Works in firefox for many people I work with. Perhaps worth troubleshooting? Or maybe Google serves different bits to different people.

Window-sharing doesn't work at all in Firefox (last several versions) on macOS 15.4; Safari works fine for Google Meet events.

Camera frequently fails to work at all, or takes 45 seconds to detect. Audio is flakey, sometime mic doesn’t work at all. Not to mention GitHub is unusable, they seem to have done something to the comments view that doesn’t really work. And the Trello GitHub plugin doesn’t work at all.

Every Firefox upgrade involving tabs makes me hope they finally debug the tab closing button on macOS. Disappointed again. On macOS the tab close button belongs to the left side, not on the right side. Firefox still gets it wrong.

This is a usability flaw that renders it basically unusable to me. I suspect this oversight stems from too many programmers not having enough understanding about proper application design and development on the Mac. It's a cultural issue then.

But I keep hoping, mainly because other browser vendors get it right. Namely Vivaldi and Opera amongst others.

> What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it

How about 4500 people ask mozilla not to sell their data?

Snark aside, I’m still a firefox user because they haven’t molested us with manifest v3 yet. I hope it stays that way.

Now let me name windows.

i've been using horizontal tree tabs for years, but this looks like a built in native version

maybe they can make it horizontal next

Now we're cooking.

[flagged]

"What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it."

What a weird flex. I think if you make >700 million dollars a year you should have someone driving instead of feature farming the comments section.

What a weird way to say they shouldn't listen to their users.

The parent is clearly bemoaning the lack of apparent creativity that comes from a FOSS golden child.

Yes, implement generic features like vertical tabs (but who wouldn't implement them at this point without nesting?), but some creative experiments in UI/UX that seek to improve the browsing experience might also be possible?