You asked, we built it: Firefox tab groups are here | The Mozilla Blog
You asked, we built it: Firefox tab groups are here | The Mozilla Blog
blog.mozilla.org
You asked, we built it: Firefox tab groups are here | The Mozilla Blog
108 comments
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Shit, I remember seeing requests for tab groups for like 20 years under an assortment of names and descriptions. Neat to see. Useless for me, but neat to see.
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This is a nice feature when you have a group of multiple sites you need quick access to on the regular. For me, I manage around 12 websites in three environments ; dev, test, and prod. Being able to group the websites by environment keeps things organized and somewhat readily available at two clicks (maybe three if you count collapsing a group before opening another group).
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Now, the team is experimenting with smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.
I bet you one cheap bottle of mineral water they'll implement this like tomorrow
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smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.
Yeah sure ok. Did the community ask for this too?
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For one second I thought Mozilla might have made something that wasn't anti-feature... But OF COURSE it's going to need to have AI 😑
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Real.
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I had to enable them:
about:config->browser.tabs.groups.enabled->true-
Thank you for this. Now I know hire to turn them off.
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Now, the team is experimenting with smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.
Off course, they found a way to integrate more Ai features.
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Because you know it’s really hard naming your group yourself
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Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the inclusion of some small AI feature is what justified the rest of this work being done. As in, someone got approval for tab groups only because they were smart enough to describe it as “AI powered tab groups“. Just speculation
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ffs. Of course they had to slap AI on top of it. Goddammit.
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So they're reintroducing a feature in 2025 that they added to Firefox in 2010 and subsequently removed in 2013. Such progress. Much wow.
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I feel like this feature is a good idea that has come too late for me. I already "group" stuff via windows. That'll be a hard habit to break.
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Do you use an add-on to prevent that from wiping out all but one window's worth of tabs when you close them? That's what originally made me get a tab grouping addon, after losing a ton of tabs when I broke some out into their own window and then later closed the main tab window before the secondary one. Realized immediately what happened but it was already too late to save that entire generation of precious tabs. Who knows what articles I didn't feel like reading at the time but was totally going to read later I lost forever.
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Ctrl+Q terminates the whole program at once and you don't lose any windows.
Oh btw, just like Ctrl+shift+t reopens closed tabs, so Ctrl+shift+n reopens whole windows, with all tabs.
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I either let the OS close firefox and then it opens all windows when I next start firefox. Or I use ctrl+shift+n to reopen the last closed window
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I close all windows at once via the Quit feature, then it re-opens all of them. You can trigger that from the menubar (press Alt to unhide it) in the "File" menu at the bottom.
You can also re-open a closed window from the "History" menu in that menubar.These might also be available in the hamburger menu. I've got that hidden, so can't check easily...
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I miss Panorama so much!
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Most of what web browsers do is the same feature multiple times just presented differently
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Yeah, thought the same with vertical tabs already. It's extremely cool that it's there now for folks who want it, but if you have a strategy for putting tabs into multiple windows and then dealing with those windows appropriately, then there's really no point in making it a vertical list for the handful of tabs per window you'll likely have...
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instead of having 12984 tabs open, you can have 345 groups with only a few dozen tabs in each one.
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Multitasking, preparing for meetings/workshops, not having to make bookmarks that are only relevant for the duration of a project/task.
There are many valid uses of tab groups that need to be kept open for quick accessibility without waiting for pages to load or finding specific groups of links that will not be relevant in a week
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For me, open tabs and bookmarks are different levels of the same thing. I'll open a bunch of tabs researching some task I want to do, and leave them open because I want to come back to that. Bookmarks do the same thing, but with lower visibility and higher permanence.
Tab groups let me group a handful of things to reduce the clutter. Similar to the way that folders are useful within the bookmarks manager.
To use them, just drag one tab on top of another, it'll make a new group. Give it a name, and you can now expand/collapse. So 10 tabs all related to one task can stay in-sight to remind you, but only take up 1 tab's worth of space in the bar.
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Was I signed up for some beta? I've had firefox groups for a few weeks now.
And holy shit do I need em.
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They do A/B testing for everything now. Why? No clue.
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A/B testing a very effective mass testing ground, I’m surprised some people don’t do it. Amazon is probably doing a few dozen a/b tests constsntly
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"You asked, we built it" --> "People keep shitting on us for our terrible decisions... Quick let's do something people actually want to compensate ! Wait let's also slap AI on it, I'm sure everyone will love that" (Mozilla being Mozilla I guess...)
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People love to hate on Mozilla without knowing shit. Some of it is literally 4Chan grade manipulation as well.
Like the whole ToS debacle. People just aren't interested in truth just rage 24/7
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All that article and they don’t say how to use it it turn it on, smh.
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I got a big banner page that asked me if I wanted to turn it on once I updated. Can't miss that really.
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It's being rolled out in waves over the next week or so.
I haven't seen the banner and don't have the feature yet. Should be there by May 6th(ish), IIRC.
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I would much rather see Tree Style Tab be integrated.
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I use sidebery, I find it even better
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Doesn't seem to indicate whether groups will work with vertical tabs and unless that's the case, I'm not switching from TST.
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I've been using tab groups with vertical tabs. No issues here. I'm on stable.
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They do work in vertical tabs, but only one level. You can't have nested tabs as far as I can tell.
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Waterfox does this with an improved implementation of tree style tabs. Also zero Mozilla Corp telemetry, opt-in or otherwise.
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Can't wait for Ironfox to implement this.
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Desktop only? Sigh...
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Yeah pretty sad. It would be a much more useful feature for me on mobile.
On desktop, I usually just create a new window for different types of stuff.
No easy way to organize my infinite tabs on mobile (as far as im aware).
Chromium browsers on mobile do this, but it's also a bit weirdly complicated/frustrating to work with at times, I hope of Firefox get to it, they can make it super simple.
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The folks over on IOS are waiting very patiently for extension support. Firefox folks taking their time.
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Apple won't allow extensions for web browsers on their app store.
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All browsers on iOS are Safari in disguise
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I'm sure it's much more complicated on iOS considering they are forced to use Webkit instead of Gecko.
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Try the Orion browser for that, I like it
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Isn't profile management introduced like right now in the same release?
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Vivaldi: laughing in 2019
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Firefox laughing in 2004 with anything else...
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I am on Vivaldi now but after manifest v3? I'm very happy to see tab
stackinggrouping come to Firefox based browsers as that's definitely the escape plan, possibly very soon. -
You mean laughing in before COVID
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*here again. Let's see how long it takes them this time to remove it again.
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Been loving the feature.
My next hope is that they'll upgrade tab groups so (when collapsed) I can move them around like normal tabs. Right now it's a little awkward if I start the group in the wrong spot.
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Been using it for a couple of months now at work. It's good.
I also appreciate how intuitively it works. I wasn't aware of this feature when it first landed in developer edition, but after I accidentally created a group with drag and drop, the feature just clicked.
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Noooo it has AI garbage, what the hell.
I really need this feature, I have over 500 tabs open right now, I just hope it works well.
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Why not just using fucking bookmarks? What's the point of all this "organization" when it's ephemeral anyway? I don't get it why most people are so allergic to bookmarks.
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Bookmarks I use for pages I want to store for a longer time. Tab groups I can use for pages I have open at the moment, e.g. because I'm working on X and Y, so I group the tabs based on X or Y. But I don't need to keep the tabs between sessions.
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Scenario: working on two tickets and having some yt/spotify/whatsapp in background. I separate the tickets and tabs related to them in their own tab groups and the social media tabs in another group. I can easily navigate through them and have less mental overhead on where everything is, especially if I color code the groups.
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I just open a second window for this.
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Have any Simple Tab Group users tried out Mozilla’s very overdue revisit to this functionality?
I’m interested in pros and cons before switching over.
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"You asked, we built it" = "Your data is profitable, so we slapped AI on it and feign altruism".
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Hoping someone might be able to help me out with this info, I've tried looking and can't find a solid answer.
When you use the "Save and close group" feature of tab groups, do they
- Stay forever, no matter if you close Firefox, restart your pc, not used that group in months etc.
- Allow an unlimited, or at least a high number, of saved and closed tab groups.
I mainly ask because it specifically puts closed and saved tab groups in a section called "recent tab groups" which sounds suspiciously temporary.
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Still waiting for mobile, tab groups missing from Firefox mobile is the only reason I'm still using chrome
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This update borked my Sidebery config. It doesn't expand on hover anymore. I will look into it after I wake up but does anyone have an idea what could they changed on CSS?
Edit: Took me some time but it's fixable.
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Pretty much every update screws up my config these days, but it's good because it means they're actually working on improving the interface
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I think this update was the first one that brake my config in a long time. I was actually expecting this from vertical tabs update but it went fine. The current UI of Firefox looks too mobile-y. Thankfully we got add-ons and CSS options.
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Finally! Thank you!
Now do vertical tab groups pleeease
edit: turns out the tab group flag was set to false when I switched to vertical tabs. Toggling it to true enabled them
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Try using Zen, it's basically Firefox with vertical tab groups.
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What do you mean by vertical tab groups? Cause we just got tab groups and a while ago we got vertical tabs. And you can ofc use them together. Isn't that vertical tab groups?
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I don't think you canOMG You're right
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Considering I've been screeching this to myself, I wonder how they heard.
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I've been using them for a few weeks now. Lifesaver as I try to organize stupid bullshit that life forces on me.
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Great. Now do Guest mode. It's a must-have for places like libraries and internet cafes - if Firefox equalled Chrome in this regard it'd easily gain a percent on the market share scale.
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Is Guest mode different from Private Browsing?
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In fact - no, it's just a reskin of incognito to make it not feel like you're not watching porn.
Which might make it feel like a non-issue and a useless thing to add, but flip that around - it's a low-cost, potentially very high-reward improvement. It really should've been implemented ages ago.
The only things that need to be changed is the new tab page and the toolbar - both design "improvements".
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I'm saving all my tabs on a regular basis for 3 firefox pages. How does grouping tabs impact saving them? Does it create sub folders in the main saved tab folder?
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Me using the Tiled Tab groups add-on for 2 years now... Good-morning
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This is mostly useless to me; I already enforce all tabs into unique containers to isolate browsing and website contexts from one another; while still allowing me to make exceptions to the rule and "unbreak" things if that's causing an issue, but still keeping things isolated from the rest of the browsing.
As for Tab Management; I use two windows and a plugin; Tab Stash Plus; which collapses tabs I stash into a bookmark.
Every so often when I reach a critical mass of tabs I personally go through them and play "Keep/Toss" with more odds on Toss. Only useful tabs get stashed and are then searchable from the plugin.
In general; since this feature now presents a possibility of an extremely UNWANTED AI integration I will be setting the config to off and leaving it off...using a relevant config policy tool or plugin to enforce this to off if needed. I hate AI features that I didn't ask for and this one definitely doesn't seem like it's going to be helpful nor compatible with my current workflow.
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Ohhh that's what it is! I was did couple times since the last update; by mistake, didn't know what it was. Now I know.
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108 comments
AI garbage seemingly pays the bills...
Seems like it creates bills, but also has enough hype behind it to generate investment/donation interest.
Thankfully, the useful changes trickle downstream to Waterfox, LibreWolf, Floorp, etc.