- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
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Multi-account containers + tab groups would make Firefox the perfect browser for me, and I wouldn’t be able to use anything else.
Multi-account containers are almost indispensable for developers. As for tab groups, I am currently using an add-on to manage them, but having a native feature would be very cool.
SimpleTabGroups and the ability to place pinned addons in any area of the browser UI already gives you that
A better frontend for about:profiles would be great as well.
I need tiling as well. But even without that, Firefox is my daily driver.
It’s about tf time.
Finally. Have made the switch over to Firefox a few months ago and this almost made me switch back. I swap context a lot at work / home so being able to group (and minimize said group) tabs helps a lot.
Firefox has profiles, so you can further separate your work browsing from personal browsing. Each profile acts like a separate instance with it’s own history, bookmarks, addons, everything…
Is there a button to switch profiles?
No, and everyone keeps recommending extensions and hacky workarounds. Wish Mozilla would gets its head out of its ass and just add a damn button that runs the
firefox -p [profile]command in the browser itself so we wouldn’t need to use keep a desktop shortcut instead.about:profilesexists too, but isn’t really a lot better.I just leave that pinned / open all the time. Easy peasy.
They really should just add a button. I usually just type in about:profiles in the address bar and select the profile I’ll use.
You can manage profiles from the About Profiles page when Firefox is open. If Firefox won’t start or you need certain options, you can also start the Profile Manager when Firefox is closed.
Yeah no. There’s a reason why they have a “settings” menu even though we could technically all just edit about:config directly
In Gnome you can right click and manage profiles
19 plugin authors looking for a new project now
🎶You put the feature in, you take the feature out, you put the feature in and shake it all about. 🎶
I’ve been using the Panorama Tab Groups add-on for years, which (as I recall) is pretty similar to the native stuff they inexplicably removed back in the day. It’s currently unmaintained and a little janky in spots but perfectly usable.
I use Simple Tab Groups personally. Been working for years. Might be overkill for some though.
Yeah I ran tab groups for years too. I finally quit because I just had too many things open but it was definitely handy.
I never really found a use for this. Do people really need so many tabs open they have to sort them?
yes
Just did a rough estimate and I have approximately 200 tabs currently open in Firefox on my work laptop.
Of those which were opened more than 1 hour ago, how many have you used in the last hour, would you suppose?
In the last hour? I just started work an hour ago, so like 4.
So the other 196 are sort of, things you’re not working on, but haven’t really done with, and might need again?
I think most people use some combination of notes, bookmarks, history, and search to manage this.
I’m not most people
Obviously.
I’m not being critical. More power to you.
I know there’s lots of people that use lots of tabs and I’m just trying to understand how it works.
Why? Bookmarks exist. Are you trying to make sure all your ram stays full or what?
Isn’t this an old thing by now? Pretty sure tabs that are not used for X amount of time are put to “sleep”.
Bookmarks exist
Bookmarks also need a huge redesign, and not only with FF.
That is why services like Pocket and reading lists exist… Heck, I have been using Evernote as a bookmark replacement for many years (and now I need to find a replacement for it, Sadly).
Yeah, I think you’re right, but open tabs are sort of similar, they just make using your computer slower and tabs harder to find at a certain point. I say this and I have 32 GB of RAM. I find it noticeably slower if I have like 30 tabs open.
And yeah 5 characters isn’t enough for me to know what that open tab is. I have watched people use tabs like that, and no one seems to actually deal with it well. It always seems to be a struggle that they just cope with. Clicking 17 times to find a tab isn’t making anyone’s life easier.
And yeah 5 characters isn’t enough for me to know what that open tab is. I have watched people use tabs like that, and no one seems to actually deal with it well. It always seems to be a struggle that they just cope with. Clicking 17 times to find a tab isn’t making anyone’s life easier.
That is only because stock FF tab management today is trash.
I don’t like Chrome’s too much better, but for me Safari having an integrated Simple Tab Groups feature was a must have feature.
Now with these new changes can actually help to manage this, and it seems that it won’t affect FF usage at all, so one could keep using TST or Sidebery if they wanted to, for a more serious tab management.
Also, I only have 16 GBs of RAM, but I have yet to feel my MacBook Pro any slower because of FF, especially when FF is able to sleep tabs or if you restart it manually.
I am confused by most of what you’re saying… what the acronyms are, how safari come into play (talk about an absolute trash browser)…
You do you, but I’ll probably never think opening a bunch of tabs is helpful. Making it easier to do so is enabling bad behavior. I’ll probably use it, and at times stress myself out because even with a nicer UI I’ll be struggling to find something with 42 tabs open.
It’s like keeping a messy and cluttered desk. Some people are going to do that and say they can find everything, but 9 times out of 10 if you watch them work you can tell it makes life a little more difficult, they’re just coping with it because they’d rather not straighten up as often as others.
I look up a lot of things and sometimes one page doesn’t fully answer it so you need to do extra research, then you end up 40 tabs deep in the history of it and it all ties back to each other.
Also programming, that also requires a crap load of tabs.
The stackoverflow has a stack overflow.
I thought you only needed one: chatGPT.
If only chatgpt was that good, it can help point you in the right direction, but it will either use deprecated code or start hallucinating things, it is only a tool.
I think I have five browser containers across three devices with dozens of tabs on each. I don’t sort them. Autocomplete from the omnibox usually gives an option to jump to the tab I need.
For work, ya I’ve found it useful. Personally, at home no.
I usually always have between 20 and 40 tabs open, but I’ve seen a few people in forums complaining that some add-ons would crash because those individuals had hundreds or even over a thousand tabs open simultaneously.
It may be a little niche, but I’d bet plenty of people will use it. I’m in the middle of a personal research project, and it would make things so much easier for me. I’m currently grouping my tabs by having multiple windows open…
Different people have different ways of working. Some people are accustomed to having a million tabs open, others can’t stand it.
I have two windows in my main profile and two in a secondary profile. The main profile windows have 83 and 29 tabs open, and the secondary profile has 50 and 38 tabs.
And then more tabs in multiple windows on my tablet (sadly, Firefox still doesn’t support multiple windows on iPadOS despite the feature being introduced nearly 5 years ago and all other major browsers supporting it…At this point it’s literally the only reason I don’t use Firefox as my main browser) and yet more on my phone.
That said, I don’t actually use tab groups very much. I currently have just 4 of them, with a total of 19 tabs in them combined.
Yeah me neither.
ITT it kinda looks like people just leave tabs open as a way to remember where something is, or even as a way to remember that something needs their attention.
There are much better ways, but everyone needs to do their own thing I guess.
The thing about open tabs is that they are already open, I don’t need to do anything to put down the note. And I’d usually need to open the site again to continue working - and often other sites as well (that are now also already open in tabs nearby). So I use them even though I kinda hate them. I just wish I could organize them easier.
A fair point.
For me, I get frustrated with more than a few open.
I work in a legal adjacent field. Lots of research, skipping down rabbit holes. For me personally I find it difficult to see why a tab was open because visually they’re all very similar. I need to read and remember the context, by which time I’ve lost the “working data” I had been juggling.
My thoughts and opinions coalesce more quickly if I’m copying & pasting stuff into my notes as I go anyway.
Everyone needs to do their own thing. Mine is not necessarily better.
Having available ram apparently is just a me-thing
No not really a need at all, just an alternative to bookmarks imo. Having more than ~ 20 tabs open is a very inefficient way to work imo.
Didn’t they use to have this years ago? And then removed it?
This is a good thing, but just as a pet peave - why do people keep so many tabs open on desktop web browsers? Every new tab uses more memory. Computers were not designed to have 100s of tabs open. There is no way anyone actually actively uses 100 tabs, and I see people all the time with so many tabs you can hardly even see what is there. There is a thing called bookmarks and folders for storing commonly visited sites on a computers hard disk rather than temporary RAM…
But I do think it is good firefox is adding the capability, as grouping can be useful if done right in moderation. But it’s just kind of funny the person asking for the feature admits to having huge amounts of tabs open.
At least for me, I have ADHD—if it’s out of sight (i.e. another bookmark in one of the hundreds of folders I have), it ceases to exist, no matter how important or interesting it is.
I have 6 virtual desktops for current projects, with all of the tabs (and other applications) for each project on a desktop, and with a Firefox window for each “topic” within that project. I go through and close out old windows periodically (i.e. when I need to free up desktops), saving anything I might want to refer back to with the Tab Stash plugin. Importantly, I also have the Auto-Discard Tabs plugin so they aren’t using RAM until I need them again.
It might seem messy, but it’s what works best for my brain. I do at least try to not have more than 12 tabs per window. On rare occasions I’m even successful! 🙃
pretty sure if you don’t visit a tab for a while or reopen your browser with the “keep previous tabs” setting thingy on, those tabs are not all loaded in memory. even if I have 100 tabs open, most of them take up negligible space in ram and only load in once I click on it. also I’m lazy and creating/deleting bookmarks is more work than closing/opening tabs.
I believe they do use just as much RAM as current tabs, it’s just computers are better at handling it now.
Mozilla makes reference to them eating RAM, but I’m not 100% sure.
Use fewer tabs
Each tab requires Firefox to store a web page in memory. If you frequently have more than 100 tabs open, consider using a more lightweight mechanism to keep track of pages to read and things to do, such as:
Bookmarks. Hint: “Bookmark All Tabs” will bookmark a set of tabs. Save web pages for later with Pocket for Firefox. To-do list applications.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-or-cpu-resources
In general, yes more tabs = more RAM used, but Firefox does have a neat trick compared to Chrome that helps lower memory usage for those of us with hundreds of tabs. When you launch Chrome with a bunch of tabs open from a previous session, it actually loads them all into RAM at launch, with Firefox, it doesn’t actually load the pages of tabs from previous sessions, until you switch to them. The page titles and icons get loaded into RAM, obviously, but if you have lots of old tabs that you almost never open, the memory usage impact of lots of tabs is minimized.
I, to my daughter: “For (this and that reason), you have to reboot your laptop.” Daughter: “But then I have to close the browser!!!” - she basically uses hundreds of browser tabs as temporary bookmarks, having pages open for weeks occasionally. Having to close down the browser is a panic-inducing thing for her…
Does she have ADHD by any chance? That’s a very consistent bit of behavior with myself and my ADHD homies.
My excuse would be ADHD, I constantly lose track of what I’m focusing on and when I do focus on something I want to explore every part of it, that means exploring every path/solution/fact etc about it, then it’s a I want to have this open because I will need in the future like tomorrow or I want to explore it more later so I don’t want to bookmark it because I will lose my thought process, but time goes on and I will focus on something else and the cycle repeat. I find it very hard to just close them because I keep thinking, I will need it soon but soon never comes or when it does I already closed it and now I’m blaming myself I didn’t have it open. It’s a silly issue to have but it’s how my brain works.
Those are my emotional support tabs, ok? yes all 22 of them.
Unfortunately, the way many companies are set up these days, they require employees to use multiple different web applications to do their job. And if you’re a developer, you need many different tabs for testing scenarios.
Vivaldi has tab hibernation so that the extra tabs barely take any resources unless you open them.
I use over 100 tabs. Basically serves as an always changing bookmarks. Those tabs are also split across multiple workgroups between which I can switch easily with a flick of my mouse.
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A wise person once told me
Unused RAM is wasted RAM
A tab may ascend to a bookmark once it has been verified good and/or useful.
Right now it is TBD, i came across it while looking at/for something and will keep going down that path, but want to take that tab page in in the future.
i started using tree style tabs which was absolutely life changing. best computer memory i’ve had in years, it’s a far more logical and space-friendly way to keep lots of tabs open and still be able to read the titles. i feel like specifically grouping adds too much overhead - i have to think about which group to put each into, and think (even a little bit) about where to find it later
I love the way the Tree is automatically created. Having the ability to rename the root on the occasion where it’s not intuitive, would be perfect.
Was looking for that! Yeah, tree style tabs just makes researching so much easier. It also just feels good closing a parent tab after falling very deep in a rabbit hole.
Link for firefox if anybody is asking what we are talking about: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
Perfect timing as I just recently switched back to FF from Chrome and Safari and I freaking need this.
Me too! For now, check out Simple Tab Groups extension.
Yes, that is my main one along with TST!
About. Fucking. Time.
An option for an additional tab row would be nice as well. I’m not going to use the dev version to get that working (the only way to do so right now with an add-on)
I’d rather see the kind of tab organization found in Arc browser, but let’s take this a decade at a time.
Arc works perfectly for my workflow. Using Firefox since Netscape days, but arc is really good. Don’t love that it is chromium and not open, but the ux is incredible. And air traffic control is such a nice feature.
I love Arc and I won’t change, probably even if they charge for it… I wish this wasn’t a feature only present in a Chromium derivative because it made my job much more productive and makes the move a bit difficult.
Been waiting for this. The tab group extension didn’t work well for me.
This is actually great. I hope it makes it to Firefox Android as well.
I don’t actually have a use for it. But my partner is a huge tab group user on mobile, so I can’t switch her off of Chrome. If this launches on Firefox Android she would probably switch. It would be great for privacy and browser diversity.
Pretty sure this existed on desktop firefox somewhere around 2005.
It did
