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Wow, this is a fantastic feature that was heavily requested, and HN cannot stop being negative.

Great job Mozilla.

I was already using the awesome “Simple Tab Groups” extension for this but will look into switching.

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting!

Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open.

Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

Not judging or anything, I just find how other people use tools differently than I do an interesting subject.

Glad thousands of users who managed to find their feature voting site pushed Mozilla to do a few baby steps

Though the current interface isn't good - mandatory group names (which also waste space in the precious tab bar by default) and inability to ungroup with a single key (due to naming conflict) - adds too much friction. Also drag&drop to group is too precise, but also can't be disable, so now you can't reliably move tabs around with a mouse without risking triggering the grouping

And, of course, one other top-10 request - to have custom keybinds to group/ungroup - is still too far from the minimum 4500 required to implement it after a few years...

What a roller coaster ride of a post. Great job guys. No mention of whether the feature is available now on a stable release. What release version that is. How to enable it. How to actually use it. Where to go for documentation or bugs. And congratulations on concentrating on the one top feature request. What's next? Looking at some of the 20 year old bugs that still exist?

Apparently, they've also released a new profile manager that's finally simpler than the clunky earlier one. This is the last feature I really need for my workflow to completely ditch Chrome. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management

Why did it take so long? It was their number one request for 3 years and chrome pushed this feature nearly 5 years ago. The design looks like a straight copy of chrome so it's not like there was a large design process to work out. It feels like it was finally prioritized so that they could "improve" it with ai, similar to what chrome is doing.

These HN threads with people that have 20K tabs living for years are so wild! I guess I'm the only savage in the world who closes my browser window and quits the browser application whenever I'm done with my computer for the day. I occasionally use tabs to temporarily have one or two web pages open at a time, usually because I need to browse/compare both of them actively, but when I'm not actively reading a page, I see no reason to keep a tab around.

Already using Tree Style Tabs. It's the one critical plugin I need. I still don't understand how anyone works without it.

Hmm if this would just automatically work with / integrate with multi-account containers it would probably be particularly helpful.

e.g. just let me check an option to group items that share a multi-account container into the same tab group.

It's worth remembering that Firefox HAD tab groups before, just under a different name and then killed it because "nobody used it":

https://medium.com/@twidi/how-i-survived-the-removal-of-pano...

The implementation here is a bit different, I'm sure, but the core idea is the same: Group your tabs however you like and switch between the groups at will.

I use Vivaldi these days (thanks to it's excellent UI customization and "Workspaces" tab groups) so I don't see myself going back to Firefox. Maybe this is a new trend of FF devs actually adding features instead of only removing them. I guess we'll see how long this one lasts.

This is weird to me because like 10 years ago Firefox had something with tabs that I loved, where you could have workspaces and switch between them, then that randomly disappeared.

It was called Panorama and that was removed in Firefox 45

Interesting. It might take me some time to adjust my workflow to use these new tab groups, but they at least seem like a good idea. Hopefully they work great in practice.

I've not changed anything on my home setup yet, but I've been experimenting with vertical tabs and tabs groups for the past week or so. I'm not sure if vertical tabs are doing me any good, but I think Tab Groups have really been aiding my productivity.

I have so many tasks I'm working on in a given day, constantly jumping between specific instances of the same site over and over. For example, on any given ticket I'm working on, I've probably got tabs open for: the JIRA ticket, Bitbucket code, Sharepoint documentation, an AWS console, DataDog logs, etc. And I'm probably jumping between at least five tickets a day, depending on if I hit a roadblock with one or a different one is suddenly getting escalated. Being able to GROUP all of those five tabs into one little block that I can label with the ticket number, and then hide/re-expand them when I'm ready to come back to it...that's pretty awesome.

The only part about Tab Groups that has confused me so far is that there's a right-click option when clicking on a group that says "Save and Close Group". I've closed it, but have not figured out how to bring it back once closed...so I'm not sure what the point of "saving" it is.

about:config and then set browser.tabs.groups.enabled

I'm really puzzled by the UI, you have to drag and drop a tab onto another to create a tab group.

This really sucks because now when you want to move a tab you have to be pixel and timing exact to not create a tab group. Most of the time when moving a tab I end up creating a tab group then having to right click and then "ungroup tab"

Also you cannot move tab group at all

Why not just having a right click or icon to create a tab group?

Anyone else being annoyed?

Note: I'm using vertical tabs option in firefox settings

I found that tab groups themselves are not synced. So, grouped tabs from one machine will appear as random set of tabs on another machine.

> Other browsers might send your tab info to the cloud, but Firefox keeps it on your device. Your tabs stay private and never leave your device.

I guess it answer my question about having tab groups sync to mobile phone. Maybe in 3 more year..

Why is the demo video not of the actual implementation but instead using a barebones wireframe that looks nothing like Firefox?

one reason tab management is so important is because bookmark management is so bad.

ive tried to solve for this with a thumbnail view for bookmarks on the new tab page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/yet-another-speed-d...

it uses open graph images so the previews are more useful on a wider range of pages than simple favicons like the native new tab page.

any suggestions or feedback welcome, ama!

Wikipedia has an entire, rather amusing, section on the dangers of tab hoarding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#Tab_hoarding

I know this sounds crazy, but has any browser just tried implementing two (or more) horizontal rows of tabs? - the user can decide to put them up the top or on the second row based on their own prioritising. Or just zip them up. Not saying it’s a great idea but these kind of horizontal chrome groups never worked for me, and Arc tabs are too vertical for me.

This, together with the "Expand sidebar on hover" for vertical tabs, means that I can almost stop using a customized userchrome.css file completely, and that I've disabled Sidebery. It's great to have this implemented natively!

The funny thing is Firefox already perfected this feature years ago with Panorama. Then one day decided to remove it because "less than 1% of users use it" (https://news.softpedia.com/news/firefox-45-will-drop-tab-gro...)

There's been community forks of it since then that I switched to and will continue to use instead. Grouping tabs at the top is much worse UX than an entire page you can drag and drop around, and blatantly copying Chrome.

I open a new window for each "topic" to keep the tabs grouped while keeping unrelated things separate.

I also use an extension (on my phone so can't lookup the name) to give names to each of these groups of tabs. Only the "main" window with it's tabs automatically starts up upon browser launch. For the rest of the named groups, the extension provides a button on the toolbar to "resume" any named group which launches its tabs in a new window. This workflow reduces startup time and only keeps those things open that I'm actively looking at.

Love Firefox. More than Safari or Chrome. Not only function wise. But also mission wise. Keep up the good work Mozilla.

I've been really happy with the winger addon for managing tabs. I really am closer than ever to complete control.

(no relation, just a user)

It adds a dropdown list of windows in the tab bar in which you can name each window, move tabs between windows, and save/restore windows into bookmarks.

Now instead of having 1000 tabs in 20 odd windows and eventually declaring bankrupcy, I have 1000 tabs in 20 _named_ windows alongside 500 bookmark folders of (named!) past sessions. Much better.

I will now never know. I have used nightly for more than a decade. It was the only reason. To run a 64-bit os. They fixed multiple problems over night, multiple times. Many little tiny things that made it better, nicer and faster.

That all ended four days ago. Now nightly will use up all memory on a 4gb, 8gb, 16gb and my 64gb system. It's unusable everywhere. Since I have it installed everywhere, I backed off to an older ESR. It either crashes on hacker news or says I am posting too fast. ( I have never ever ever seen this error before 4 days ago, and it's on multiple platforms. )

I have had to abandon it and for some reason other apps that would crash, are now running. I went to Edge on my desktops, and was reminded why I hate it with a passion.

I use mostly Brave now, and a bit of Chrome, but chrome will not run in very low memory.

As of today, I am removing it from all systems. All. Best of luck but I'll see you in a year or two.

Seems like it still won’t replace Sidebery for me as this provides only a single grouping layer.

We'll see how this holds up. I currently have nearly 3283 tabs in my primary Firefox window. (The other six windows only have 35-125 tabs at the moment. I sort of use the windows as tab groups.)

To its credit, Firefox is the only browser that does not either slow to a crawl or just fall over dead with that many tabs.

I still need a good tool to merge bookmarks from a bunch of older Firefox profiles, though. Does anyone know of a good tool to do that?

Great news, I use tab groups daily in Safari and recently in Firefox beta.

In Firefox, tab groups work better with a vertical tab bar.

In Safari, there is a feature that I wish comes to Firefox: that the tabs in each group act as bookmarks, i.e., they persist across browser restarts and new windows. They are always there within their group; only the tabs that are not in a group are volatile.

This makes tab groups more useful, as you don't fear losing them no matter what.

Now they only need instant tab search, like Chrome does with Ctrl+Shift+A. It's like the last thing I'm personally missing before I can actually make Firefox my primary browser. Chrome's tab search is so damn good for navigating in a big tab jungle, it's one of my favorite and most used features of the browser.

I started reconsidering Edge literally last week because Panorama View managed to lose my groups again, and Edge has excellent workspaces (envy).

Haven't tried the new groups yet, but from the video it is unclear what to do if I don't want them to constantly stay visible in the tab bar. The whole point for me is decluttering it from something I don't need at the moment.

I don't want to rant, but I don't a tiny bit like the UI they have made for tab groups, and I won't use it.

They should have just paid lavishly to the developer of Simple Tab Groups, and incorporate that extension into the master. Fast, cheap and perfect result. Instead they made....this :(

Is this feature failing for anyone else? I drag one tab onto another and it just tries moving the tabs, not grouping.

Yes, I updated. After doing so it told me about this feature. No, I also cannot see the tab group creation when right clicking. FF 138.0, Sequoia

I noticed this feature by mistake. I managed to drag a tab when I tried to switch to it and it turned blue and I got very confused and thought it must be something to do with container tabs. Then I tried dragging another one and couldn't manage to do it again. Maybe like every ten times I try dragging a tab it turns a different color. I don't understand what the difference is in my mouse movement.

Every Firefox upgrade involving tabs makes me hope they finally debug the tab closing button on macOS. Disappointed again. On macOS the tab close button belongs to the left side, not on the right side. Firefox still gets it wrong.

This is a usability flaw that renders it basically unusable to me. I suspect this oversight stems from too many programmers not having enough understanding about proper application design and development on the Mac. It's a cultural issue then.

But I keep hoping, mainly because other browser vendors get it right. Namely Vivaldi and Opera amongst others.

I have tons of tabs open but tab grouping is an anti-feature. It takes way more time fucking around with tab groups, opening them, closing them, moving then around than I've ever saved by using them.

Pls stay revelat and don't die and keep on working against all chrome and stuff. And we hope your financial woes could be taken care of with donations if Google's money no longer dry up. There is no replacement as of now for firefox. And recent issues with your privacy and adds things are not good either when it comes to people which are your users. Mostly we care about our data. Btw nice feature long awaited.

It's just a clone of chrome feature. Cool they impelmented it too. I just don't see this "we listen to the community" more like "we are just trailing behind chrome"

The tab groups make a great case for having more active tabs in an organised way, but I'm concerned that over the past few years I have observed Firefox become more and more resource intensive. I have an auto tab suspender extension and I'm still running out of CPU and RAM on a machine that should be able to handle it.

Horizontal tabs, tab groups, seems native Firefox is almost if not at the point where I don't need an extension for tabbing any more, which would be great in my books. (Currently and for almost a decade using Sidebery. The containers integration and 'panels' is what I think might still be missing for me to switch. I'd probably sacrifice the former, but I love panels.)

AI powered smart groups... more AI, yay.

/s obviously

I wish companies would spend less time shoving AI down our throats, because I feel like they are over-hyped and the privacy trade-off is rarely worth it.

I'd love to see Tab Groups, but what I don't love is how Firefox has lost their focus and vision. For years, Mozilla's mission was not only to provide a private and secure browsing experience, but one that was also lightweight and simple. Nowadays, it seems their idea of innovation is to just rip off Chrome's features.

I never thought I‘d belong to the group of people who never close tabs. Had read David Allen some twenty years ago and subscribed to his „inbox zero“ mantra. Until I realized I don’t have the time to clean up. I keep doing stuff, and when the chaos surpasses thresholds, I reset that system (close all tabs, restart, start with a clean slate). But this sounds interesting. Will give it a try.

I'm hoping they can auto-assign tabs to groups by domain name. Most of my tabs are just random Github links into various repos.

I have been waiting for this. I currently use profiles, and container tabs, this will further help organising stuff.

I have no idea why people need 500 tabs open. Like dude I never go beyond 12 tabs on my machine like ever. Aren't you too distracted if you have that many tabs open. Perhaps you should complete the task in some of the tabs and close em?

Kinda wild watching every browser finally get around to this after all these years - feels like the stuff people actually want is what keeps slipping through the cracks most. You ever wonder why the basics take forever to get built while every company chases the next shiny thing?

Is there a way to migrate from tab groups implemented by an add-on?

In my case I have been using Simple Tab Groups (STG) for years. I want to copy my STG tab groups, import them into the native tab groups, test that out and decide if I like STG or the native functionality better.

We get tab groups, but can't get a working gradient without banding. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771

The link just tells me to download new firefox: """ blog.mozilla.org Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly. Click here for more information """

Great to see this feature, and it looks smooth and easy to use. I'm left wondering whether it will sync across devices and notably also to FF on Android?

As someone who frequently has tens of open tabs across different windows, this will be massively helpful. Especially since I frequently find myself trying to remember which window was for which ‘mental group’.

> What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it

How about 4500 people ask mozilla not to sell their data?

Snark aside, I’m still a firefox user because they haven’t molested us with manifest v3 yet. I hope it stays that way.

Since I do not need it and kept accidentally enabling tab groups I looked for a way to turn it off. You can do so by setting browser.tabs.groups.enabled and browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled to false in about:config.

A little tangential question, but what is up with the "Distilled" logo on their blog site? I don't think I ever noticed this earlier, and I can't seem to find anything on their blog explaining it.

I wonder how many times I saw this feature implemented, die, missed and implemented again... Especially in Firefox all features seem to have relatively short but endless circles of dying and resurrection

> What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it.

That's allegedly less people asking for the feature than the tabs I have open or 0.0028% of the user base. I don't believe it.

For some reason I had thought this was already implemented and I just wasn't using it because I don't have a lot of tabs open. It appears I was mistaken. Nice to see this implemented in Firefox.

If I could assign a bookmark to a container, that would be great.

I don’t like Sidebery and it doesn’t really work for me.

Another thing that annoys me in Firefox is that they recently changed the sidebar. I still use Firefox though.

Rant over.

Are there any known issues with it? I just updated on my Mac and don't appear to be able to group tabs - dragging one on top of another just reorders them

"I used to have 30 windows open, each with 30 or 40 tabs."

I can't be the only person who only ever has about 2-3 tabs open at a time in a single window.

I switched to Floorp last month and it's amazing. It's a Firefox fork with tab rows. Tab rows are the real MVP. None of the annoying weirdness of Tree Style Tabs, where you have to keep track of a hierarchy of tabs that are hidden behind other tabs. Instead, you just see 3-4 rows of tabs and you make a mental map of what is where.

Once they release the new version in a month or two, we'll also get newer Firefox features like these tab groups, and we'll also get workspace improvements. Floorp is 10/10.

All I want is to pin tabs on the right, near the place where newly open tabs go. This isn't bad though.

What happened to boycotting Firefox over their terms of service changes demolishing privacy?

I just updated to 138 on MacOS but I don't have this feature, so I guess it's not here for all of us.

How is this different from creating a folder of links on my Bookmarks bar and selecting "Open all"?

I wonder when this will come to Librewolf.

Amazing news. This was the one thing keeping me from switching from Chrome to Firefox.

Does Mozilla still steal everything I type into FF and sell it? Or just steal it? Does it?

Is there a way to hide the colored tab group buttons so they can only be seen in the List-all-tabs drop-down?

I'm so thankful for this.

Chrome has tab groups and it helps. And I want to move away from Chrome because Google.

How does one quickly find the right window when you have a few open?

This is why I only keep one open.

Finally, I can use Firefox again!

Honestly, no matter what fancy UI features they add, until they add WebSerial and WebUSB, Firefox is not a replacement for anything Chromium based for me. I have a lot of devices that use all that, and I don't want to constantly deal with switching browsers or making standalone wrappers so that I can use them.

But Firefox devs have a strong "we know whats good for you" mentality and refuse to add it.

firefox keeps on give after shedding a couple months ago.

the shakeup from google not been able to give them money anymore seems to have done good for the project.

Meanwhile my pinned tabs still disappear when re-loading the browser.

Very frustrating that it's not available in my Firefox yet.

How about fixing bug 1813919, which is an actual usability bug?

Looking forward to use this!

At minimum I should be able to re-group tabs by domain.

Is this a superior solution to the firefox containers add on?

Where can I download it? I don't see a link in the blog.

i've been using horizontal tree tabs for years, but this looks like a built in native version

maybe they can make it horizontal next

Thank you for posting this !!!

always wanted this, FINALLY.

Moving from Arc to Zen, this was the biggest drawback I felt, and now, I'm just waiting for the merge!

Awesome, looks more convenient than onetab.

Shame Google Meet doesn’t work anymore.

I have never understood why people have hundreds, or even thousands of tabs. Why not use bookmarks? Hoarders.

I think I've seen this feature announced a million of times, by pretty much all web browser makers

After Firefox Mobile, killing Thunderbird and a sharp decline in market share, Mozilla finally starts to build what it's users want. Selling it as gigantic success is very American.

In the end vertical tabs are nice and I hope I like the new tab groups too (the previous official tab group addon got killed by Mozilla and 'destroyed' my workflows at the time).

Let's see, maybe Mozilla is on the path to something great yet again by being more innovative.

Yay!

Unfortunately I can no longer find it. But I still remember being called psychopath and having mental health issues on HN for having a few hundreds tabs opened.

Now let me name windows.

Now we're cooking.

"What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it."

What a weird flex. I think if you make >700 million dollars a year you should have someone driving instead of feature farming the comments section.