Show HN: Advanced Tab Manager for Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Advanced Tab Manager for Firefox

addons.mozilla.org

94 pointsSujeto87 comments

If any Firefox devs or PMs are reading, PLEASE build even a simple tab grouper into the browser natively.

Regardless how recommended a given extension is, all tab manager extensions require access to all web content which is too much. I’d rather use something built in but barebones rather than an addon

Yes a million times. Please go vote for issue https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350 (and please add to the discussion, but do refrain from pure-noise "me too" comments :). If no one comments there today, tomorrow I'll post a summary of stuff discussed here in this HN thread, I see are a couple things worth surfacing.

As to why a "simple native tab group" is important even when there are umpteen extensions offering some version of it (in addition to OP's legit point about addon permissions), my take is in comment 40, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350#c40 .

TL;DR: 1. Feature parity with a Chrome feature that is actually visibly used a lot (from direct observation at work), 2. Shipping a simple high-quality "baseline".

Pleaaaaase, Moz PMs & devs, some attention to this!

> "If no one comments there today, tomorrow I'll post a summary of stuff discussed here in this HN thread, I see are a couple things worth surfacing."

Done in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350#c49

While you have their attention:

Where are native vertical tabs? Or at least a settings checkbox to turn horizontal tabs off.

Tree Style tabs should be a built-in feature, IMO. Make the browser great again.

A checkbox in settings would be better, but you can turn off the original tabs with a user style file, just in case anyone reading is unaware.

My concern with this is I’ve seen for a while now that these user chrome features are deprecated. I depend on them a lot and I dread the day they actually go away.

My killer ask for any browser, on Windows is the option to have groups create different taskbar icons, so I can treat some sites like a seperate “app”. For example youtube music.

I'd be completely satisfied if they brought the old MRU tab ordering back. The MRU tab extension is a very poor substitution for it.

Are you talking about the thing Chrome does with it's tabs where you can put them together in sections and give them a colour and name?

Not OP, but yes for sure.

Most importantly, it lets you collapse/expand groups with just a click. Makes for a fluid built-in no-frills "putting project A tabs aside to work on project B while keeping tabs ordering and grouping, without the extra friction of bookmarks or profiles" workflow.

Not OP either but yes - that is exactly what I want!

This is legitimately the only thing I've been asking for from Firefox the last <many> years, I don't really care about webgpu, usb device access would be nice as would fine grained user-controllable permissions for extensions - but all I really want every single day is a better way to group tabs. Hell - just being able to group them by colour like you can in Chrome would be a huge leap forward. I've tried all the well known extensions and I'm not a fan of any of them.

If you use Mac and haven't looked outside Firefox, note that vertical tabs are in Safari, with groups, and group sync.

Vertical tabs (plus tree tabs) are also in Kagi Orion. Which unlike Safari also runs (a subset of) Firefox (and Chrome) extensions, about 70% as of their last FAQ update:

https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#extensions

I settled down on SideBerry after having used Tree Tab Style for ages: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

It adds contexts/categories. So you can have trees of tabs per topic.

Is there an authoritative way hiding the horizontal tab with SideBerry?

The only way to hide the horizontal tab is with userChrome.css

Been using this as my userChrome.css:

https://gist.github.com/BrianGilbert/1ad7e3931406f485a86a35a...

Thanks. Surprised there isn't an extension to allow toggling on/off.

Regretfully Mozilla hasn't gotten around to providing the API for that.

Mozilla seems to see potential for abuse with this, which is why they are not offering an API for this.

Could just be an about:config flag, that would be better than having to apply userChrome.css on every profile where you need it.

I think it is because firefox wants to keep the same extention api with chrome.

This works on the LTS version of Firefox but needs an update if you’re running the latest version.

Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter to load it.

In the search box above the list, type userprof and pause while the list is filtered. If you do not see anything on the list, ignore this step.

Switch toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets preference from false to true.

Type about:support in the address bar and press Enter to load it.

Note the Profile Directory.

cd to Profile Directory and create a folder called chrome.

***

mkdir chrome;

cat << EOF > ./chrome/userChrome.css #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }

EOF

***

In Firefox again:

Restart all Firefox sessions.

Right click anywhere menu section of Firefox, and check 'Menu Bar'.

... and that ridiculous kluge is why the vast majority of users will never experience vertical tabs - which would be a better experience for the vast majority of users...

... and also a great reason for keeping notes! As a linux user modifying a text file is par for the course, yet I totally agree in substance with your point.

In grasshopper you can filter by domain, but also can add tags, and colors, to any tab, and filter through this. There's a profile editor accessible when you right click the items.

Why not use the bookmark sidebar?

Sidebery is wonderful, but the real gem is Tab Stash. Lets me organize tabs into topic-related groups, with the added bonus that not all of these are "living" tabs. Some are archived/hibernated. By default, live tabs are in an unorganized/unnamed group. The only issue I had was I couldn't tell which tab was playing audio. Tab Stash doesn't have indicators for this, so I installed the Sound Control extension to list tabs playing audio and switch to them.

I got: vertical tabs, tab grouping by topic/label, tab archival (low memory use)

In grasshopper you can organize through tags, and colors, which create profiles mapped to urls, so they also apply for instance if you are in History view. The profile can be set to match the root, or the exact url. You can also filter different kinds of tabs, like unloaded, or playing. There's also a button that appears when a tab is playing, to go back to that tab (focus it).

I use Simple Tab Groups which has similar features. It works great and its autosave also saved my open tabs a few times.

I am a huge fan of Sidebery, but it really highlights how messed up Mozilla is. Not only have they failed to provide a native vertical tab solution, but then you go to turn off the damn horizontal ones and you have to jump through convoluted hoops by enabling the userChrome.css and then figuring out where the hell to put the file and all of this for one edit. Yeah sure, I have figured it out (and have to re figure every time I install FF), but there is no way that I could ever tell a random user to switch to vertical. I cannot fathom how Mozilla could not add a checkbox to their anemic settings menu.

It’s really surprising how hard it is to customize Firefox considering its image. Wanna change a shortcut, tough luck. Wanna change the UI? Hope you’re a web developer. Wanna build a native app with it? We’re the only browser that no one is working with.

I've settled on AllTabsHelper https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/all-tabs-help...

Not as full featured as some of the others but does what I need.

I wish any of the tab managers would allow me to sort by domain, as it is I've installed a second add on just to do this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/order-tabs-by...

As someone who keeps tabs open forever (as better bookmarks), resulting in tens of windows with each tens of tabs, I finally settled on Tab Session Manager [1] which allows me to "stash" these Windows and restore them later.

It seems this add-on manages and AllTabsHelper open tabs only and does not have a separate session manger (the one built into Firefox is a joke, sadly).

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...

I don't want to piss on the OP effort, some people will find it useful.

For me, I don't understand the problem. Why do so many people need a tab manager in say Firefox, but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?

It should be implemented on os-system level, so you can access the content, no matter with which app.

Yeah. I don't understand why modern browsers don't allow disabling tabs. I already have a window manager that's quite good at managing windows. I don't need another level for that with its own rules.

Having a separate window per tab will consume more resources, than showing only a single tab content at a time.

Meh, window management is optimized to the hilt. The real expense is the web view, which you're going to have anyway, as these days all browsers use separate processes.

Don't know which of you or the sibling is right. But even assuming you are, maybe display a warning or something, but let me disable the tabs. They're an absolute PITA. I would gladly buy more RAM to accommodate that.

For Firefox, I've found an extension that moves tabs to a new window. It mostly works, but there are rough edges. I apparently have enough resources for all my browser windows in my shaggy laptop for it to never swap. The overhead doesn't seem huge enough to warrant the removal of the possibility of disabling tabs.

https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks/blob/master/c...

Will this open new tabs in a separate window? After a quick look over it, it'll just hide the tab bar when there's only one tab present.

In settings/preferences you can make “open a new window” the default.

It doesn't work well enough. For example, CTRL-Click a link ignores it and opens a tab. Menu -> Settings also ignores it and opens a tab.

Shift-Click does the trick, but not for Menu > Settings. You can also drag a tab to tear it out to become a new window.

It doesn't work well enough. It's mostly terrible, for example window size and position not being remembered, and opening in random places and sizes.

People use all their cloud services via Firefox, not so much via Word.

Also, you may be writing one document but have a hundred tabs open for research.

For myself at least vertical tabs can be easily grouped to visually show task or subject. If I’m doing ticket work for example,each ticket gets a main tab with their related child tabs indented underneath. I’ve even written a small web app that creates custom tab titles which I use for organizing tabs.

Lack of vertical tabs is why I don’t use Chrome.

>Lack of vertical tabs is why I don’t use Chrome.

The funny thing is that edge and brave managed to enable native vertical tabs.

> Why do so many people need a tab manager in say Firefox, but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander

I guess you could call me a "tab hoarder", I commonly have 50+ tabs open for the various topics and contexts I'm browsing and switching between. I usually also always restore my previous session from the day before, so some of the tabs are 2 weeks old but I have yet to finish the thing they're related to, so they stay up.

Compared to other applications that I close/open without restoring the previous context. I guess the terminal/tmux is the one that has the most context, and there I usually have 5-10 tabs open at any given time, for the same reason as above. And then I do use a manager of sorts (tmux), but for all the rest, I'm just opening/closing things as needed.

I tried it once but i dont function like that. Every couple of minutes I just spam ctrl+w to reset my mind off and i start again and repeat.

That's fine, everyone works differently, both in our heads and with our workflows, and that's why we have different solutions, no silver bullets and yadda yadda :)

I think it's largely a solution for bad UI, both in the web and in the browser.

I have a window open just with YouTube tabs of videos that interest me and that I intend to watch in the near future. As an OS-level window, it has weight and presence. Inside the window I have vertical and nested tabs. So I have videos grouped by topic or just by the rabbit hole I used. I can collapse them, move them around, etc. It's tactile. If I put all those videos into a YouTube playlist, it becomes static. It's a link in a list. It becomes less convenient and natural to add things to the list or even interact with them. There's no nesting, no grouping. Have you tried working with a YouTube playlist? It's abysmal. I'd rather keep them in a more concrete state as a tab which is integrated into my browser's tabs system (or whatever extension I use for it, in this case Sidebery) as part of a window that's a natural part of my OS.

This is all before considering how incredibly bad and basic Chrome and Firefox's history tabs are, which we also end up replacing with hundreds of tabs. I wish I had a vim-like undotree or anything like it to navigate my past tabs. There's a whole spatial component that's missing, whole dimensions missing, and I've never understood why.

You don't manage your Word documents in Word. You use the OS for that. That's pretty much why nobody needs tabs in Word.

> I think it's largely a solution for bad UI, both in the web and in the browser.

Agreed, several of my friends hoard tabs instead of using the "bookmark" feature. I suppose it is because bookmarking is one more step and organizing bookmarks takes further effort.

How does the OS help you there? Does it have "tactile" organization accessible to you without loosing focus by switching to another app?

What's so hard about understanding that easily accessible groups of documents is a useful concept in organizing your digital life?

And why do you think they don't? I'd love to have a consistently great tab management experience in all the apps that have tabs (and all the apps that don't). It's just they are more closed, so it's harder to do that with some extension

And it's a bigger issue for the browser since you'd usually have more pages opened there

> but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?

Because they rarely open so many tabs there? I routinely open dozens of tabs in web browsers as I navigate to other pages wanting to keep the previous while I explore the web (I hardly ever left-click links - I almost always wheel-click) but I rarely ever open more than 6 folders in Total Commander or more than 6 documents in an Office.

> but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?

How do you know? Those apps have no way to customize on the same level that Firefox allows. But they also have their ways to handle masses of documents and windows, they are just not very good.

i refuse to believe this is a real question

As a developer here is a scenario:

Start day on task A. Open Task, Open Subtask, Open git PR to check comments, Open Azure portal to check something, check Kibana Logs. Do a seperate second Kibana query.

Get asked about task B

Open Task, Open OneNote docs on that task, open a chatgpt session for that task

This is a mild example

Why not close tabs as they are used? Because if I need them again the load time of many sites is atrocious and then I also need to remember how I got there. I would need to save my kibana query or make a note of how I got to that Azure blade. Neither of these update the URL to capture the state (they are not HATEOAS) or I donn’t trust them to.

Could you please also add a button to sort the tabs by domain? I don't want hierarchical grouping like some competing extensions offer (to me such UX feels like additional complexity), only sorting.

Already added to my notes. I'll likely implement it. Make it pin+normal tab aware even, like only sort normal, pins, or both.

Thanks. Sounds great.

Sort Tabs has been added as a tabs action (Top right menu). Or as a command.

Wrap Text is now a setting. Defaults to false.

For further ideas you can use the github repo... thanks

Perfect. Tank you for a gret job. Do you take Monero donations?

By the way, does anyone happen to know how to overcome the sidebar width limit in the current Firefox versions? I want the tab titles to be less truncated but Firefox won't let me expand the sidebar more than 432 px in width.

An alternative (maybe even better) idea which came into my mind is make item title display multi-line (word-wrap). Is there a Grasshopper configuration option for this? I already enabled URL display so it already is two-line effectively but I feel like probably making both parts (the title and the URL) two-line each.

That sounds suspiciously like a number placed in a style sheet. Have you checked in the directory for your Firefox profile?

I already forgot the details, but I tried some solutions like this I could google up. Yes, I remember changing some numbers in some files in the profiles. Nothing worked. Apparently these were only meant to work with older versions.

>I already enabled URL display so it already is two-line effectively but I feel like probably making both parts (the title and the URL) two-line each.

So apart from having URL + Title shown at the same time, I take it you mean to reserve two lines for those to have some room to wrap? I'll add a note to try it as a setting.

I documented unlocking the width of the sidebar in Firefox here: https://dev.to/semanticdata/unlock-the-sidebar-width-in-fire...

This worked (with Firefox 118.0b2). Thank you very much. I already had almost proper userChrome.css there I apparently created previously but I never knew sidebar should be replaced with sidebar-box.

This reminds me of a sabbatical project i ran with during the pandemic. ended up sputtering out due to lack of time and motivation, but i did end up pushing out an initial alpha for some friends

https://elos-edu.notion.site/eLOS-Connect-0-0-11-a72acbec893...

Still trying to clean up the code enough to release out into the open.

Is this manager advanced enough to replicate Vivaldi's tab tiling and stacking functionality?

(also not sure why the screenshots devote 80% of space to non-addon functionality like page with some distracting chip images and colored tables)

>Is this manager advanced enough to replicate Vivaldi's tab tiling and stacking functionality?

No, but it can do a bunch of stuff, which you can try.

>also not sure why the screenshots devote 80% of space to non-addon functionality like page with some distracting chip images and colored tables

Was easier to take screenshots like this. But maybe I'll try cropping next time. I guess the idea was to show how it looks as a sidebar, or as a popup.

Given the required permissions I’d like to read the source code before using it, but that doesn’t seem to be available. Is this correct?

You can download the xpi file directly from the versions page (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...) and extract it:

  $ file grasshopper_urls-746.xpi 
  grasshopper_urls-746.xpi: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract, compression method=deflate

There's a link to the github in the store.

It's available here: https://github.com/madprops/grasshopper. The link was in the left sidebar behind some tracking redirect.

>behind some tracking redirect

Put there by mozilla btw

Is there anything that OP can say to sell this to someone heavily invested in Sideberry (an excellent piece of software imo)?

Grasshoppers are cool. And a platform has been created to add more features if they make sense. It already can do a bunch of stuff, I advice you to give it a try.

Went ahead and played around some with it. Pretty smooth, handled the 600 or so tabs I had like a champ. The myriad of filtering options are great, surprised I had so many duplicate tabs. Combination of tags and colors is an interesting approach but I found it a bit lacking in ergonomics and I really can't see it being better than Sideberry's tab panels/groups approach (the killer feature for tab hoarders imo). Good extension though, will be keeping an eye on it.

Can it be configured to mimic native look&feel or at least use a light theme?

Yes the theme is very customizable, check the Settings. There's also commands you can use if you double tap Ctrl twice. You can open the command palette and select Light Theme.

I know I am going to sound stupid, but I failed to find where the settings for this extension are. Neither the toolbar icon, nor the sidebar, nor the Firefox's extensions management page seem exposing any.

Main menu is the top left button inside the extension. In that menu you can enter Settings. Then in settings you can click the category to see a list of other categories, or use the arrows.

I see. Thanks. It just says "Tabs" so I couldn't guess it's there intuitively. Perhaps you might want to add a downward arrow to the button right side to hint it's a drop-down menu.

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