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"Tabs you haven’t looked at in a while dim, so you can focus on what you’re working on" - I like the sound of this. Is anyone aware of a Firefox addon which does the same?

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On that note, how come that (almost) no browser vendor is experimenting with better UIs for tabs? It seems that they have remained the exact same for the last decade in both Firefox and Chrome. I get that they are functional for the casual user, but for those of us that live and work in the browser we could use more functionality. I could picture for example grouping/ungrouping tabs in a single window, bundling similar tabs, changing the color of the tab depending on how often it's used, a better way to nagivate between multiple browser windows (or "super tabs"), etc.

You could argue that you should rely on extensions if you are power user, but then with the trend that Chrome has set (and now Firefox follows) of extensions being small web apps packaged with an icon, there's not a lot extensions can do to fundamentally change how browser tabs works. Whether tabs become smarter and more functionally rich depends almost exclusively on whether Google, Mozilla or Microsoft decide to experiment it.

>I could picture for example grouping/ungrouping tabs in a single window, bundling similar tabs, changing the color of the tab depending on how often it's used, a better way to nagivate between multiple browser windows (or "super tabs"), etc

Grouping/Ungrouping tabs, to my understanding of what you mean, existed in Firefox and was just removed from the browser and pushed into an add-on. It's called "Group Tabs" and I use it extensively. Or I could have this mistaken for 'bundling similar tabs'. I'm not sure on the semantic difference you mean between the two.

Multiple browser windows seems redundant with multiple tabs or the Group Tabs mentioned above.

I use a Firefox addon called FireGestures. Not for the mouse gestures that it is primarily designed for - but because one of the wheel gestures: "[Popup] List All Tabs"

Basically it allows me to hold down right click and use my scroll wheel to switch tabs from anywhere in my browser window. So I hide the tabs up top and get more screen estate! A win-win scenario!

It looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/Wz5Jx9p.png

Vivaldi does it! They call it tab-stacking, and this is the reason I'm switching over. The browser itself is still a bit glitchy, but I loves me some tab-stacking.

I use "Tree Style Tabs" and the tab bar on the left side instead of at the top. It groups tabs on how you link-opened them from each other automatically, but you can regroup them depending on your needs. It's one of the reasons I never even considered switching to Chrome etc.

So you can access your list of open tabs from anywhere on the screen? Sounds good.

> Multiple browser windows seems redundant with multiple tabs or the Group Tabs mentioned above.

Surely it's the complete opposite: if you have multiple windows, then why do you need Group Tabs?

>So you can access your list of open tabs from anywhere on the screen? Sounds good.

Yep! Hold right-click and use my scroll wheel from anywhere in the browser window. So not the userChrome (tab area, bookmarks bar) or off-screen (my OS desktop).

I have another program that is "tab aware" bound to a different hotkey: I can press alt+space and begin typing in the Title name of a tab to open that tab from truly anywhere on the screen. It could be nice to be able to have "global hotkeys" for a browser that does the same thing.

>Surely it's the complete opposite: if you have multiple windows, then why do you need Group Tabs?

One is passing off handling multiple groups to the Operating System (handle multiple instances of your browser) while the other is the browser handling multiple groups of tabs. Different ways of handling the same thing with trivially different workflows (alt-tabbing and hoping you alt-tab to the right instance of your browser or {Ctrl+Shift+E / Rebound Hotkey} for tab groups and selecting the proper group that you can name.

Being able to name my tab groups instead of having 19 different instances of "Firefox.exe" helps when trying to find the proper group rather than the proper window.

Multiple windows lets you split screen estate though! But IIRC there are add-ons to let you split the browser screen to render 2/3/4 tabs at once for that use case.

They have their pros/cons but have a lot of overlap and redundancy.

You seem like a tab power user. Just curious if you have any sort of "tab junk drawer" like what OneTab provides for Chrome.

Slightly relevant: https://medium.com/project-tofino/designing-a-browser-that-i...

tl;dr - Mozilla engineers are doing a series of experiments questioning if how we interact with the browser today can be improved vs. the habits and workflows we've developed since the early days.

Basic userstyle / userchrome css:

  #TabsToolbar tab:not([selected="true"]) {
    background: pink !important;
    transition-property: background-color !important;
    transition-duration: 15s !important;
    transition-delay: 5s !important;
  }

Just tested seems to work fine. Might need some tweaking with

  #TabsToolbar .tabbrowser-tab:hover:not([selected]) { ... }

etc.

Try Bartab Plus - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-plus/

Bartab Plus can actually completely unload a tab after X amount of minutes / hours. The tab is dimmed and comes back / reloads automatically when you click on it.

This along with tab groups - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa... allows you to have hundreds of tabs at your fingertips across any number of groups, without paying the performance impact of having them all actually loaded at once.

And on that note, anyone aware if a Chrome extension does this?

After dicking around with the API for a while I found that that you can highlight/dim tabs using chrome.tabs.highlight running in a background script of an extension. Maybe I'll spend a little while tomorrow making a more complete version.

The Great Suspender, which actually suspends the processes of these tabs, very useful if you have lots of tabs

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

Yes it suspends the process, but doesn't visually indicate this by fading/sorting the tabs for you. At least, not the version I used a year ago. (edit: it does now!)

For me it fades the favicon slightly

http://i.imgur.com/y1xSEtF.png

To be fair the suspend feature is the killer here

It visually indicates it by replacing the site's favicon with the app's icon. If you see blocky face, your tab has been suspended.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-lite/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-unload-t...

You may want to look into BarTab

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