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Comment by dao- | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm generally happy to see this.

I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable.

For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient.

Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.

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Tab groups again? I don’t remember when exactly, but like 10 years ago Firefox already had this feature. I was using them happily, organising all my numerous tabs to a dozen of groups by theme (work, social, movies, etc). But then Mozilla decided: “Nobody is using tab groups, screw it!” and removed them. All groups and tabs were lost. Now history will repeat?

I remember, I was around back then. :) Panorama was in some ways ahead of its time. The UI was nice visually but also somewhat heavy handed / not very beginner friendly to say the least, which contributed to it being used only by a relatively small share of our user base.

We're cautious about not repeating history. We're implementing tab groups from scratch and directly in the tab bar. Our Firefox View feature (Tools > Firefox View) may later get a more visual surface for managing groups.

It was used by advanced users. And what advanced users do? Disable telemetry;) So, I suppose the share was a little bigger but not that much.

Maybe instead of ubiquitous stupidity-tqxax telemetry we could have some neo-Nielsen families and get to pick a roughly representative sample out of voluntary, compensated users. A trusted third party contracts the victims and agregates the data. Don't ask me who regulates or pays though.

> A trusted third party

And why wouldn't it be Nielsen :) I remember when they sent me cash in the mail as a kid, fun times.

They still do that. Just a few weeks ago my daughter filled out their survey and got $5!

That's so cool, mine was about 30 years ago. I had no idea they were still doing this!

Or, just don't disable (anonymous) metrics.

There's a BIG difference between tracking and metrics, but they are often treated the same, especially by "power users".

There's no difference between tracking and metrics, they're the same thing. You get your metrics out of the data you track. Browser phone home? Tracking.

And there's no way for a user to validate that any tracking is indeed anonymous. The technical level needed to asses this is just... out of reach for everyone (the quantity of people who can properly verify this is small enough we can safely ignore it when speaking generally and use the coloquialism Everyone)

There is definitely a difference between tracking and metrics. One saves and associates information like “when and where did this piece of data come from?” along with other “identifiable” information, the other simply increments a count for things like “advanced feature X enabled”. If you don’t see the obvious difference between this type of data, then that’s on you. The latter can provide extremely valuable signals, and when “power users” disable it (and tell regular users to do the same, spreading FUD) because they think it’s “tracking” (it’s not), that’s their problem when a tool/app/service starts moving in directions they don’t like.

I was too succinct in my previous message, I guess.

To you and I there is a difference between tracking and metrics. To everyone else there is none. All my Mom knows is that the software dialed home. It is impossible to verify what it said to the mothership. The popup promised "Metrics only!" but then Little Snitch lit up like a Christmas tree 4 times! It's stealing my info!

How does the consumer know that the "metrics" didn't include home IP, OS version, and god knows whatever else? Again, metrics are a subset of data. Even the internet request to ship a fully anonymized usage info like "saved_files: 10, opened_files: 11" metric set contains Gobs and Gobs of identifiable information on and around the request itself. Does the company stash inbound request data for troubleshooting? That's fucking tracking bro. Your data dog instance is chock-full of tracking info.

It is not reasonable to expect end-users to be able to verify the claim that "only metrics are tracked". It is safer for everyone to assume this is a bald-faced lie, because at the end of the day it is impossible to verify to any level of certainty.

They're treated the same because they are the same, which people with domain knowledge (i.e. power users) are aware of.

A terrible way to get them to stop doing something you don't personally agree with is by starting your post with a bad idea, support it with a lie and close it with a personal attack.

I explicitly enable it

> which contributed to it being used only by a relatively small share of our user base.

And that's why telemetry is such a brain dead idea. People then actually make decisions based upon "number of people using feature X" which is incredibly... lets just say "unwise".

wonder if we should just accept it as "voting" and monitor their telemetry experiment and spam the option we would like

Might be more accurate. ;)

You can vote for features on Mozilla Connect: https://connect.mozilla.org/

Seems like a reasonable idea. With this in place, why are Mozilla using telemetry instead?

because Mozilla, the foundation, is hostile. it's a political money grab.

with telemetry they can justify whatever. they can go to the board and say "look people are clicking more on pocket, which we put prominently on the UI against everyone wishes, and they barely use bookmarks, which have critical bugs open for over 20years... who would have thought of this counterintuitive insight if it weren't for my genius persistence on trying and measuring new ideas uh? so are we good on the extra bonus to my close childhood friends?" ...see, it makes the pitch defensable, if you don't say the right parts out loud.

nice find. nobody uses that and sadly it became a desperate support forum which mostly goes ignored

> We're cautious about not repeating history. We're implementing tab groups from scratch and directly in the tab bar. Our Firefox View feature (Tools > Firefox View) may later get a more visual surface for managing groups.

Hi! Thanks for letting us know about Firefox Team is being very careful this time, I want to share my idea too because I think the Firefox community have probably tinkered enough to figure out that Tree Styled Tab Group like Sidebery/Tree Style Tab is the best Tab Group implementation, because they're so easy to use, just drag and drop and work great in practice.

I hope you consider making Tree Styled Tab Group an option for vertical tab.

I think you're referring to Panorama View [1], introduced in Firefox 4 (2010). I think there are still extensions that replicate the experience [2].

There are many things different now that might make it work better this time. If not just that it's 14 years later, different UI, and the pattern being familiar from other browsers, might make a difference too. But no guarantees, of course.

(Note: I don't work on Tab Groups.)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110613070035/http://www.azaras...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ is widely used, but I'm not sure if it does the overview. Other extensions do.

There's also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350 filed in 2018 for restoring it, now duped against this official bug... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907090

Panorama from Firefox 4. Also called Tab Groups.

I never understand the need for tab groups, once you get above 4-5 tabs you are actively working in, whats wrong with bookmarks?

Bookmarks are perceptually longer-term than open tabs, so there may be more reluctance to save to a bookmark. (E.g., if planning a trip to Italy, do you want to bookmark some blogger's food recs for Rome, forever?)

But worse is, it relies on recalling the text in the bookmark's title to resurface it. You might not remember the page title, but you can always scan through open tabs.

I add a folder to my bookmark bar. All project related tabs get bookmarked there. When I'm done, I either delete the whole folder or file it somewhere.

I can also open all in tabs, if I really want to.

I wrote love the ability to associate a TTL with bookmarks. Let me bookmark for 3 hours or 2 days or forever. Of course the 3 and 2 are user choices.

Mostly the way I deal with this now is sharing the tab to another Firefox on a different computer then use it there and decide it's fate.

This is an interesting idea for a feature, that I think I would like too. I like to save things to maybe look at later and a TTL would manage automatically dropping them from bookmarks in case I never actually want to look at it later.

Work make me use Chrome, and I have recently converted hard to tab groups. I've found two main uses: one for a collection of reference tabs that I mostly want open or closed together (specific API references that are normally spread out over a few pages); the other is to organise groups of tabs for different projects I'm working on.

Both of these make context switching easier as I can quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using, knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a bit of the persistence of bookmarks.

I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab groups

Bookmarks suck. They are slow and cumbersome to manage, especially when it's many related urls. And for working with them, I need to open them as a tab anyway, so why not stay there from the beginning?

I use Firefox's existing native support for tab groups that it's had since pre-1.0. They're called windows.

Cool until you restart your machine.

Do you mean "… and then it's not very cool anymore"? And if so, then why not?

I think they meant that you lose your windows after a reboot, because Firefox only restores one window, compared to all of your groups.

Firefox restores all windows.

If you close your windows in the wrong order, you will lose your tabs and pinned tabs.

Example: Have a primary window with you email, calendar and important sites pinned.

Then open another window and open a few tabs.

Then at the end of the day, close your primary window first, then discover you still have the secondary window open and close it as well.

When you restart Firefox you will get the secondary window and your "primary" window will be lost with all your pinned tabs.

I actually went down a rabbit hole of trying to log it as a bug, but the behavior is by design apparently.

You can reopen the window you're missing with ctrl+shift+n, the same way you open a formerly closed tab (only that's not n, that's t). I do agree it's irritating this isn't made more plain.

Use Ctrl-Shift-Q so that all windows are closed at once.

Think of it like memory hierarchies. Bookmarks are long term storage, tabs are registers. Tab groups fall somewhere in the middle, easy to reengage with and easy to put out of focus.

Bookmarks don't have tab history.

Glad to hear Mozilla is working on adding this. I switched to a chrome-based browser for a while and the only thing I miss after going back to Firefox is tab groups.

Firefox is the only browser that freezes Ubuntu after some extensive internet use, especially with video watching. Since many years and still today.

Are you using the snap version? I don't doubt that will give a crappy experience.

happens to me too. but i would bet money it's because of memory corruption in both of our cases.

i have the exact same setup on ECC ram and zero crashes. on non ECC (cheap, garbage, that everyone accepted as the default) ram, one crash every couple weeks.

so unless you can prove software on the same cpu is non deterministic, it is ram corruption.

I've never used Ubuntu, but on Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed, I've never run into this issue (and I've had like 50+ tabs open for weeks since i don't really reboot my work laptop unless I have to)

Does it freeze completely (forcing you to resort to kill -9) or is it just slow?

In any case, I've been been a Ubuntu user since ~2010 (and a Firefox user since its inception). I remember there being a time when Firefox was slower than Chrome and freezing occasionally but that was a looong time ago and I haven't had any issues with performance or freezes/crashes ever since.

I'm not sure how this contributes to the thread. This isn't a technical support forum, so it might not be the best place to discuss specific browser issues.

I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu since 18.04 was first released (about 6 years ago), and while I've encountered some issues, I haven't experienced the problem you're describing.

Of course, browser performance can be affected by many factors in your system. If you're seeking help, you might have better luck in a dedicated support forum or the official Firefox support channels.

I'm on the Firefox snap on Ubuntu but don't get any freezes.

> I currently work on tab groups

(It's happening.gif)

But seriously, that makes me extremely happy. I'm using the weird hack in tree style tabs to do this and it's not great. I'd love this to work in general and something with a persistent "current context" for new tabs.

If you're unfamiliar with Sidebery, it's similar to TST but has a neat tab groups feature as well.

Speaking of, there are other cool new features coming to Firefox - such as vertical tabs: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...

Thanks, sideberry looks great. I've defaulted to TST for so long, I haven't looked for alternatives, but it seems worth trying.

Thanks for your replying, it's great to know that you're very open to see what Firefox forks are doing.

And I guess threads like this is a great place to gather user opinions.

I think in this thread, people did talk about Split View a lot (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306665), can you talk to the team about this feature ? Considering it's getting a lot of comment, people seem to want it a lot.

Native vertical tabs in vanilla FF? Whoohoo! Imho, the killer feature is automatic group assignment based on URL patters. Will the vanilla implementation support it?

We'll at some point support the tabGroups webextension API, so it would be fairly straightforward for add-ons to do that. We're also looking at automatic grouping options though.

Thank you!

What is the hold up on adding Chrome like tab groups with colours and ability to collapse them?

We're working on that.

its good to see you giving direct feedback.

Firefox defaults lately are awful and out of touch...

gestures for reload/back/forward? really?

several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?

a convoluted only-4-containers shenanigans that not even the author understand instead of simply isolating private tabs per window like everyone asked over the years?

using on android? too bad now you don't have half the settings available, AND you will not access many extension for no technical reason other than mozilla implemented a blacklist! ...oh and no access to about:config either!

i don't recall many examples because i gave up caring and have a list of settings (most not even available in the settings screen) and extension i must install on Firefox every new install which is larger than my OS customizations.... and on android i did what anybself respecting person would do and never touch Mozilla's default. install F-DROID's instead.

so, no, Firefox defaults are not very good.

> several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?

How much less will Google pay to be the default search if this is added?

but they will never say that out loud ;) so what is the official position? they don't even have one. nobody touch tickets mentioning these things. so sad how open source is so easily coopted.

i remember when google and Microsoft had to do the w3c misdirection, now they don't even pretend.

> several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?

Might be better that way. AdBlockers are fast-moving, with a dedicated, diligent working community. Outside the browser, they probably can work better.

Not just that, but why would Mozilla pick the winner here? Everyone complains about the side effects of default search engines, let's not do it again with ad-blockers!

And anyway, their Google contract certainly prevents them from doing shipping ad-blocking by default.

because that was the original promise with extensions! contribute without the red tape, and if enough people like it, we will incorporate.

heck dev tools started as someone cloning IE dev tool as an extension... there were two... the IE clone and a dalvik debugger... mozilla had no problem picking the winer and incorporating in the official build.

> their google contract

stop normalizing this! they officially denie this arrangement exist! so they cannot use it as an excuse.

the extension already incorporates a interface to select/finetune/update the rules.

for the past decade updates to the extension itself have been UI only.

I'm a firefox-only user, and I read your comment in two ways. It's grumpy, but also on the point! Thanks, I feel similarly. What is your main browser btw?

FF works for me in great ways, and I am highly productive with it, as long as some plugins still work: uBlock, tridactyl, foxyproxy. And for UI: sidebery, stylus.

From time to time I feel I should turn my back towards FF when they come up with new decisions in their UI, which I drastically reduce (no menu, no tabs,...), or new features, which are more disturbing than helping.

On android, I discovered 'kiwi browser' which is FF based but does not blacklist the plugins.

Man you got my hopes up for a bit there since I remembered Kiwi browser was chromium based which after checking, it still is. From there website: "Kiwi is based on Chromium and WebKit." https://kiwibrowser.com/

Note that Firefox for Android no longer explicitly allowlists extensions: anyone can write one that anyone can install.

For Android, I've been using Firefox Beta as my daily driver for over a year, it works flawlessly, and about:config is available.

yeah, even the very own devs HATE the defaults someone (who?) decided for android.

first there was a non documented setting to remove the blacklist for extensions... when they blocked access to about:config then everyone started using firefox dev... now they removed the block from nightly (i guess using real bleeding edge dev annoyed them)...

anyway, this only proves me point even harder.

They've automatically added spying by default now too. Mozilla is now an ad-tech company. Don't expect defaults to get any better.

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