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Comment by amarsahinovic | Hacker News Reader

I really wish they would implement tab stacking, that is the feature that I really miss from the old Opera, here is a video of how it looks in case you don't know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpJvg8icmM

I've tried to find an extension for FF that does this, but so far I was unable to find one.

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Have you tried out TreeStyle Tabs? It has all of the stacking features I saw in that video, but doesn't have the preview features (maybe you can use it alongside another extension that provides that).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I was about to suggest this too. It's like a more general version of stacking, since you have multiple levels, and much more automatic (but you can drag the tabs into a different tree structure if you want).

I think it would solve the GP comment's problem better too. There's not so much need to use multiple windows if you can just use multiple trees in the same window.

As a bonus there are many plugins for the plugin (!) such as one that lets you use the mouse wheel on it to switch tabs. [1] This is more useful in the tab tree than the normal tab strip, especially since it skips over tabs hidden in collapsed subtrees.

All that stuff about browser engine competition is great but TST is the real reason to use Firefox rather than Chrome.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

> I think it would solve the GP comment's problem better too. There's not so much need to use multiple windows if you can just use multiple trees in the same window.

Even if you do want a new window - drag the common parent tab to a new window and it takes its children along for the ride.

I've been using TreeStyle tabs for a few months now.

While I love the tool, it definitely has some rough edges with integration.

It has the same problem Firefox Multi-Account Containers has: Trying to change internal UI for an internal feature by using an addon simply isn't practical (yet).

It was practical before they killed XUL extensions and went with a crippled Chrome clone that can't hide it's horizontal tab bar. It's time for Mozilla to embrace and extend that garbage.

Read shridharama's comment here for the fix:

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1525

It's in the works for some time now: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410548

The big issue here is that Chrome's extension API (which Firefox adopted) doesn't allow this directly, so any extensions trying this need to:

1. rebuild the UI from scratch

2. rebuild basic tab handling behaviour from scratch

3. build tab stacking on top of that

4. (ideally) hide Firefox's existing tab bar

And there's two issues with the above steps:

(a) 4 hasn't been possible with the new extensions API sofar (it was in progress last I checked, maybe it's possible now)

(b) the dev effort required is big, so results have not been very polished sofar

they're getting there though

On the other hand, if you want to try something resembling that as-yet-unsurpassed 2010 UI today, Vivaldi is working on replicating it natively.

I'm never keen to recommend Vivaldi because it's (a) closed source, which is why we don't have Opera anymore and (b) it's Blink, and we need diversity there. But it's a very good browser otherwise.

I'm not clear on why you would want TST as an extension rather than built into the browser chrome. It'd be like wanting the tab bar, or the address bar, to be an extension. Those things belong in the browser chrome; they're what the browser chrome "layer" is for. Just dig into the Firefox code and add TST to the browser itself. (It wouldn't be all that much work; it'd just be 1. adding "parent" and "children" properties to tab model-objects; and 2. adding a TST sidebar view-controller, fed from the same data-binding that backs the regular tab bar.)

It's pretty clear that people desire it as an extension because a good and functional extension exists whereas first party support in a browser does not. There are certainly good arguments for it being easier for it to be built in vs as an extension if you were building from scratch right this moment but such an argument misses multiple points.

An extension exists NOW that people enjoy using. Building THIS into firefox isn't a replacement for a robust extension interface unless you suppose that first party developers can think or implement all the good ideas that will ever come about.

People in truth give zero damns if its easier to implement or more elegantly done any more than they care if their tv is beautifully engineered because their priorities aren't yours. They care about functionality. Right now firefox seems to be lighter and even post quantum have better extensions. Throwing either of those out will cause it to cede more marketshare to chrome.

> unless you suppose that first party developers can think or implement all the good ideas that will ever come about.

Er, no. What I think is that becoming a "first-party developer"—when you already know as much about the internals of Firefox as is required to maintain an extension such as TST—isn't that hard. Firefox is a FOSS project, with internals that are well-maintained and well-documented, and the UI layer is abstracted out to make working with it easier for frontend engineers (which is why, unlike any other browser, you constantly see versions of Firefox with new "experimental UIs.")

> There are certainly good arguments for it being easier for it to be built in vs as an extension if you were building from scratch right this moment but such an argument misses multiple points.

I mean, that was my argument, yes. And I don't see how it misses the point, because I'm not coming at this from the perspective of a Firefox user, nor am I coming at this from the perspective of one of the existing TST maintainers. I have no dog in the fight of Firefox's extension system, because—at the earliest point I'd even start using Firefox—it'd already be a “fact of life” that it only has WebExtensions. I'd just have to take it as a given that you can't do what TST does (did) as an extension, and ask the question afresh: how do you implement something like TST?

And the answer is: natively, in the browser chrome, and thankfully so, because that's what TST should have done in the first place and it'll make many parts of the implementation a lot easier. (See my sibling reply.)

Though, also, never mind Firefox. I'm also coming at this from the perspective of a developer who would want to implement TST-like functionality for any FOSS browser. For example, TST-like functionality for Chromium.

The fact that TST already exists for "old Firefox" doesn't really matter. That's a different web-browser than the one we've got now, and no current browser lets you do what TST did at the extension level. I don't care about ideological arguments about whether they should let you; I care about the practical facts of how to go about having TST functionality in the present/future of the browser landscape.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, I completely agree. This is absolutely something that I think should be in core.

There are some features that are rightly being removed from core in favour of being served by an extension (Container Tabs is a great example—one of my favourite and most-used features personally, but I prefer it in an extension for a few reasons). Better tab management is the opposite: this is something Firefox should work on getting right out of the box.

I get that unless/until it makes it into core, we need good, working, popular extensions to bridge the gap, and perhaps to convince core devs there's an audience, but that's no reason to stop asking for it.

Would also recommend people trial Vivaldi, or even Opera 12 (probably still downloadable from somewhere out there) to try out the general UI concept.

Given that Tree Style Tab has 7,500+ commits, 10 pull requests (200 closed), almost 400 issues (almost 1,500 closed), and the download is 5.6 megs (2.7 megs zipped), there may be more to it than your two-step solution.

Not necessarily. Sometimes 99% of the work of something is the patches you must make for a constantly-leaking abstraction that you introduced by solving the problem on the wrong layer.

For an example I've experienced personally: LinkedIn provides a data API... for a price. There are entire companies, however, that scrape LinkedIn's data instead of paying that price, and then try to work with the scraped data (which has been "baked down" through all sorts of views, localization, projections, etc.) as if it was the API data.

How much more code do you think such a scraper consists of, compared to an API client?

(The LinkedIn case is even worse because LinkedIn has stateful firewalls that actively thwart scraping, and these scrapers have to have code to trick the firewall, as well.)

Prior to quantum you could do so. You have always been able to do so with css in your user profile. You don't have to actually know css you just have to google and paste the text into a file.

For 4, you’re able to hide the Firefox tab bar with some css in userChrome.css now. I’m using tree style tabs and have hidden the default tabs as my daily driver.

Yes, here's a link on how to do this, takes 5min:

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

Try Vivaldi which has this feature integrated. https://help.vivaldi.com/article/tab-stacks/

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