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Comment by icegreentea | Hacker News Reader

I've been using FF4 beta since B3... does anyone actually use the panorama/tab grouping thing? I find its performance really poor and kinda frustrating, especially since I've been using add-ons that provide similar functionality for a while.

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I use it incredibly heavily, in the same way that I use virtual desktops. I have a tab group for work, a tab group for play, a tab group for documentation. Makes it very easy to quickly jump in and out of large collections of tabs without having a completely unusable tab bar like Chrome does.

I use FreshStart (an extension) for that in Chrome.

I do - kind of. Since I don't have Firefox set to reopen the last batch of tabs I had opened the last time I was using it, Panorama is kind of useless in my case, since I would mainly use it to keep tabs grouped by content, and it would be a chore to redo the grouping at each restart. Still, it comes in handy to keep reddit/hn on one group and work related stuff on another groups and quickly switch between the two by doing Ctrl - Shift - ~. A big optimization was to set browser.panorama.animate_zoom to false in about:config. That animation was killing the flow in my case.

Session restore saves your tab groups.

Mmh yeah, I should have specified that I specifically set ff up to not restore tabs on startup!

The performance is great here on Arch Linux x64, haven't noticed any hiccups with it. I use the grouping feature to separate out tasks -- I have a work group, a research group, and a misc. group at the moment. It keeps my tab bar cleaner and more relevant and stops me from getting distracted as a flip through tabs when doing work or something. I have gmail pinned as an app tab, so that tab appears on all groups.

Since I tend to have 20-30 tabs open at a time, the tabs are usually too small to read - so I ended up using the Panorama to hold "ReadItLater" tabs. But now that the TreeStyleTab add-on is compatible with FF4, I no longer use it. Btw.. if you have a widescreen monitor, check out TreeStyle tab.

TreeStyleTab changed the way I browse completely. I wouldn't be able to live without it now.

I find Vertical Tabs to be much faster; I didn't actually use the tree feature!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...

>TreeStyleTab add-on is compatible with FF4, I no longer use it

Does it work with your FF4? Mine doesn't!!!

The author's site has the latest version that works with FF4. http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en

DL: http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/confirm.cgi?treestyletab.xp...

I'm running version: 2011031901

This link: http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/confirm.cgi?treestyletab.xp...

gives me: Forbidden Installation You don't have a permission to install XPI package directly from other websites. You have to access this extension from the home page of itself.

Am I doing something wrong?

What you have appears to be the latest version (similar to what I have). Weird that I didn’t see that warning though. Which OS are you on? (I am on a mac)

I'm on Windows 7 - 64

I imagine it will get worked out, but its not until something fails that you realize your dependence.

Only by accident. It stole a longstanding adblock extension keybinding, and I haven't yet retrained my fingers.

It is invaluable when I'm doing research or development and I want to "swap out" something that I'm working on to focus on something else. Since that takes up the vast majority of my time -- yeah, I use it a lot.

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