What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it. Tab groups have long been the most requested idea on Mozilla Connect –
Ok but when do you make the decision to invest in organizing open tabs into groups versus bookmarking them or just moving them to a dedicated window. When do you close the tab or tab group – only when the initiative is over? Do you “archive” those tabs as bookmarks?
That’s the key, it’s like having a separate window, but without the separate window.
At work I’ll open anywhere between 40 and 100 tabs at a time, but I want to keep them near my existing tabs and not in another window. I have an extension that opens them all in a new tab group. I typically work from the left edge of the group and close out of tabs as I get through them. I can still hop between my non grouped and grouped tabs without having to change windows. And if I want to pause it for a bit then I “minimize” the group like a window.
This question is a highly personal one from my perspective.
I haven’t used the groups yet but I often toggle between six or seven contexts throughout the day and I’ll give them a shot for that.
Profiles toggling just didn’t work for me as it was too … Slow for me as in I have to reorientate myself whenever I switched profiles.
Here’s a use case: I often have to open up a bunch of instances of the same website (an internal version of a customer-facing page). They all have the same URL, but because they’re single-page apps, they all have massively different functions. For a few hours, I’ll need to flip back and forth between a few of them at a time, as well as some other websites on different pages, as well as an external program that I’m referencing or modifying. Then I don’t have to do that again for a week or two. So I use a tab group to put all of them in, and then once they’re done, I save and close the tab group to reopen next time.
Here’s another use case: I can use a single tab inside a “tab group” but use the tab group label to “name” the tab. That way, even though I have a dozen tabs open with the project name I work on at the beginning of the title, I can look at the label and know which one is the Jira ticket for the devops task I’m working on, which one is the Jira ticket for the new feature I’m waiting for QA signoff on, which one is the Jira ticket for the dependency update I need to do, etc. I also use this functionality when I have a bunch of stuff processing and I need to remember which one is on which step; do I need to do step 3 on this one or step 4? The tab group label knows.
Or here’s another one: I’m currently in the middle of a big accessibility push for our product’s front-end. I have all of the various tabs and resources and Jira tickets and specs open in a tab group, and I can flip between all of them. I open them all every time because it’s rare that I only want one of them (though, if I do, it’s nice that Firefox automatically sleeps all but the active one when I reopen the group). When I’m working on the project, I open that tab group. When I’m done, I save and close it.
Tab groups were literally the only thing I missed from Chrome when I migrated. I’m so glad to have them back, even though it did take seven five long years. Since it was available as a feature flag, I’ve used it so much.
Tab groups are built for open tabs, bookmarks are built for revisiting things. Their use cases are quite different in my opinion.
Ok but when do you make the decision to invest in organizing open tabs into groups versus bookmarking them or just moving them to a dedicated window. When do you close the tab or tab group – only when the initiative is over? Do you “archive” those tabs as bookmarks?
And then there’s the profile variable
That’s the key, it’s like having a separate window, but without the separate window.
At work I’ll open anywhere between 40 and 100 tabs at a time, but I want to keep them near my existing tabs and not in another window. I have an extension that opens them all in a new tab group. I typically work from the left edge of the group and close out of tabs as I get through them. I can still hop between my non grouped and grouped tabs without having to change windows. And if I want to pause it for a bit then I “minimize” the group like a window.
Why do you have to “get through them” in a specific order, though?
Because I have bees in my head that tell me to get through them in order
This question is a highly personal one from my perspective. I haven’t used the groups yet but I often toggle between six or seven contexts throughout the day and I’ll give them a shot for that.
Profiles toggling just didn’t work for me as it was too … Slow for me as in I have to reorientate myself whenever I switched profiles.
Here’s a use case: I often have to open up a bunch of instances of the same website (an internal version of a customer-facing page). They all have the same URL, but because they’re single-page apps, they all have massively different functions. For a few hours, I’ll need to flip back and forth between a few of them at a time, as well as some other websites on different pages, as well as an external program that I’m referencing or modifying. Then I don’t have to do that again for a week or two. So I use a tab group to put all of them in, and then once they’re done, I save and close the tab group to reopen next time.
Here’s another use case: I can use a single tab inside a “tab group” but use the tab group label to “name” the tab. That way, even though I have a dozen tabs open with the project name I work on at the beginning of the title, I can look at the label and know which one is the Jira ticket for the devops task I’m working on, which one is the Jira ticket for the new feature I’m waiting for QA signoff on, which one is the Jira ticket for the dependency update I need to do, etc. I also use this functionality when I have a bunch of stuff processing and I need to remember which one is on which step; do I need to do step 3 on this one or step 4? The tab group label knows.
Or here’s another one: I’m currently in the middle of a big accessibility push for our product’s front-end. I have all of the various tabs and resources and Jira tickets and specs open in a tab group, and I can flip between all of them. I open them all every time because it’s rare that I only want one of them (though, if I do, it’s nice that Firefox automatically sleeps all but the active one when I reopen the group). When I’m working on the project, I open that tab group. When I’m done, I save and close it.
Tab groups were literally the only thing I missed from Chrome when I migrated. I’m so glad to have them back, even though it did take
sevenfive long years. Since it was available as a feature flag, I’ve used it so much.I think you organize tabs into different containergroups based on groups and bookmarks