TST is literally the killer feature for FF. It's actually the only reason I went to FF, it was getting out of hand to have all my tabs across the top, and it makes little sense with modern screens being so wide that giving up a little horizontal space to get legible titles is absolutely worth it.
Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned. Can't be too hard to do.
Which raises the question: why would FF sabotage it? Why isn't it easy to hide the default tabs, and why does the sidebar have the name of the extension providing it stuck at the top?
They had all of the warning in the world about how important this extension was to people years before finally removing XUL, half a decade later you still can only repair the display problems through CSS that isn't kept consistent from version to version, and feature requests/bug reports on the issue are filled with antagonism from the project.
TST might be niche but the concept of a tab in general is not something only understood by technically savvy people. We’re not in the era of IE6 anymore.
I never got to leverage TST, something about the UX bothers me. I have better flow with Tab Stash. Also TST suffers with my hoarding habits and the subtree features have bare naked UI.
From the extension description, Tab Stash seems to save all open tabs as bookmarks. But this feature is already built into Firefox. Am I missing something? I’ve never used either of these extensions (will be trying out TST) so forgive my ignorance if I’m missing something obvious!
Me too. I was a long time TST user but I found I am more productive if I use stashes instead, pin the ones I use daily, and try to only keep what needs to be open in a native tab.
A "killer feature" is a phrase with its own meaning so we can treat it as an atom and apply modifiers to it. The order of operations matters, and I posit that the OP placed their imaginary parentheses as I did in my first example.
No. There is no such thing as a "literally killer feature" unless it is some feature that can cause death. A killer feature in this case is exclusively figurative and adding "literally" is wrong to do.
> Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned.
Easy, most people never use more than five or six tabs because it’s annoying to have more. TST is a solution to a marginal use case so no one invests the time into developing it.
When I saw the title of this article, I assumed it had to be about Tree Style Tags. No other browser feature has so immediately become a feature I must have so quickly.
Privacy and ad-blocking are great, but I could see myself being lazy and switching to a browser with a better UX, if one existed. But you'll have to take Tree Style Tabs from my cold, dead hands
It's pretty much the only reason I'm staying with Firefox. Mozilla has pissed me off often enough for me to attempt to jump ship, but there's just nowhere to go.
(I'm aware of Orion, but when I last used it I found it to still have performance and polish issues)
You need to use userChrome.css (that's what I do and it works great). it's a bit of a hidden feature, I hope they expose it to extensions eventually, maybe with a different API
You can hide the tab bar through userstyles css. It can't be done from Firefox itself unfortunately, but once you set it up you never have to do it again.
And Tree Tabs felt like a better Tree Style Tabs (but there were no bugfixes in past 4 years).
Though very rarely Sideberry looses/forgets the tree structure of tabs, and I have to restore it from one of the recent snapshots (which it creates every day automatically).
I've tried to switch from TST to Sidebery twice and both times hit small but bad bugs (restore not working on browser restart) and went back to TST. It's simultaneously slicker but buggier. It looks like Sidebery is still under development though: https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues
Am I doing something wrong? Every time I try to move something into a group, it just gets deselected and I have to select them again and then sometimes it works to move into a group.
People hate the UI. It was clean before the transition to webextensions, now it's messy and can only be fixed through futzing with userChrome.css (with no help from mozilla.)
If you like my garish and ugly theme, it is TST friendly (it will theme the TST tabs as long as you pick the "Photon" TST theme in the TST settings): https://alan.norbauer.com/projects/alanglow
> I'm looking for a way to have the tab bar hidden.
That's possible by editing userChrome.css. I don't remember the exact incantations, but I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in TST's docs and/or settings page.
I find multi-account-containers* incredibly useful re: tab groups. Coupled with a few pinned tabs (email), I generally always know where to look for what when I have the browser open.
This fixes most of the links on HN for me - I'm one of those people who doesn't like the browser to save anything, so every time I visit a site it's for the first time - so anyway reader mode just cuts right through all the shit in one click, no cookie banners, no subscribe banners, no interruption banners, it gets straight to the content if it's there (sometimes even cuts through shallow front end paywalls) - honestly if the site looks horrible and reader mode doesn't work, close tab - can't be arsed.
It also makes far better use of screen space than most site designs, e.g those common yet horrible headers with css position: sticky. Pretty much every big news site is made better by pulling any content into reader mode.
I wish they also had a way to search tabs without the address bar. I insist that address bars act solely as address bars so I've disabled all other features from it including search.
Even a CLI shouldn't be making internet connections automatically or unpredictably. If my terminal had the option to send my keystrokes to some sever for autocomplete suggestions (and market research) or did things like automatically append parts of URLs to what I type by guessing at what I wanted I'd disable that too.
Simple Tab Groups is how tab groups should have been done in Firefox from the start. I think if they would be like that they would not have to rip them out. Tab search or rather filtering is included and is such a splendid addition. Also automatic backup of groups is a fine feature, but so far I only needed to use it for migration.
I'd like to add that it combines very nicely with Gesturefy, defining a couple of mouse gestures to switch between tab groups (either through a small popup or switching moving back/forth) is what got me to actually use the tab groups meaningfully.
I should be clear. What I was referring to when I said `keybindings` is browser/developer keybindings that are not yet made configurable.
There's been an open issue for 7 years asking for a shortcut key for the eyedropper[0]. The navigation between developer panels is also a bit tedious. The page focus key, F6, is not configurable.
These are some instances I was thinking when I said I wanted good keybinding support. I'll be really willing to try an extension that achieves these but it's really the browser's job.
With that said, I've tried a bunch of these extensions in the past! I'm not a vim guy so I settled with Link Hints[1] for in-page navigation. I cannot recommend it enough for non-vim guys. It's really underrated.
Thanks for the mention of F6, I had been looking for a page focus key for a while to restore focus after switching to the address bar.
I've discovered that "ctrl-f esc" also works; focus goes back to the page when the search bar closes. Convenient if you have capslock remapped to escape.
For what it's worth, Chrome has a reader mode, just hidden behind an experimental flag, and a native PiP mode for videos, accessible with the media controls icon that appear when a video is playing.
I use Panorama Tab Groups. It lets me create groups of tabs (obviously) for each project. Each project has 10-20 tabs and I can quickly switch between them. It means that most times, I only have 10-20 tabs visible. Makes things much easier to navigate and keep track of.
There is tab search (and history, and bookmarks for that matter) from the address bar (i.e. typing `% foo` will search all tabs for `foo`). I don't know if it's turned on by default, but you can set it up from “Search shortcuts” settings section.
What do you dislike about tab groups? Or is Chrome's implementation on mobile not good?
I think the current design is ugly. The way Edge handles them in the vertical tabs sidebar looks a lot better than the way other Chromium derivatives handle them in the tab strip, but still not the best. I like Vivaldi's implementation better, but the UI is relatively laggy. I miss old Opera.
I find them unpredictable. I don't know when something will open in a new group, I don't know how I can move a tab out of/into a group. I find it to be kind of a mess. And of course it was shoved at me without even asking whether I want it.
(Thanks in advance for the solution. I mostly use Firefox anyway)
> Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.
I've been using Brave for a while and I'm considering going back to FF, partly to get out of Chromium.
However, this is a point I don't get. What do I care if these features are native or plug-ins? My Brave plugins are synced, so whenever I install Brave and set it up I immediately. If the plugin is well done, there is no difference, and for people who don't care about that particular feature it could be less bloat to have it on a feature.
Specifically for the Reader mode, the Chromium Addon I use comes from the Firefox code for the same functionality, so it's just as good. Kudos to FF, OSS is awesome.
Really wondering why this is so neglected in all browsers. I know quite a few users that like to accidentally press CTRL + T when trying to write a capital T after sitting 2h on a site to put in some info.
It is good that browsers grow more sceptical of sites capturing hotkeys, but some sites really benefit from the question if you really want to leave that page. As far as I know this is the only long-term supported solution. Restoring tab might work but not on all sites.
two leading spaces changes text to code formatting
perhaps lines are closer together here.
It definitely does with me. I used Edge when I was using Windows and I liked it!
I went back to Windows after almost 2 years for work and MS has managed to bloat it too. Don't understand why I need a Math solver. Edge bar is annoying. Favorites and bookmarks are 2 separate things?
I turned them all off obviously but defaults matter.
I went from disliking Edge, to liking it, and then slowly disliking it again as they added bloat to it.
What turned me off from it was when I lost a year's worth of (unimportant) bookmarks and history. One day I opened it up and it decided to kindly sign me in automatically (probably detected I was signed into an MS site in-browser), and it wanted to automatically sync all my history, auto-fill info and passwords to Microsoft's sync servers. I immediately disconnected my account to stop this, and then it deleted my Edge profile afterwards as a further courtesy.
I understand that these two behaviors are probably Features, but I don't like the feeling of losing control of my software. And now these features like MSFT Rewards, coupon services, credit card services, and the "Bing Bar" (or whatever you call it) are just too much for me. Not to mention every PC I use Edge on tends to assault my eyes with political propaganda since Edge's New Tab page defaults to biased news outlets.
If you mean a basic calculator in the URL bar, Firefox has that too (also a simple units converter) but off by default. They do that because people use search engines for that kind of stuff. The implementation (at least the Firefox one) is quite simple.
One irritation I have with FF is its confoundingly difficult way to add arbitrary "search engines" with a keyword. eg: I want to just type `r subreddit` and have it expande to `https://reddit.com/r/subreddit`. You can DO it, but natively if FF doesn't "see" the URL as a search (so it doesn't provide the 'add search engine' option in the search bar right-click) it's overly hard to accomplish. Had to install a plugin, and/or hope project Mycroft has it.
I want to see extensions which change how the user interacts with the browser (eg. Vimium or gesturify) work on browser internal pages such as settings, extensions or reader view. I know its not going to happen because "security".
Regarding tab groups, there's two things that I've found that seems to have solved my requirements:
- Workona (this is an extension for chrome)
- Arc (https://thebrowser.company/)
Both essentially have the idea of "spaces" for web browsers.
Native reader mode is fantastic! The underlying parser (readability) works great. Shameless plug: I use Readability to parse web articles and send it directly to Kindle: https://ktool.io
I'm typing this from a desktop Firefox on PostmarketOS in Poco F1 smartphone, I love it.
Especially since I have to rely upon the browser for most 3rd party services due to the lack of a proper Linux client.
But running Firefox on Linux mobile has largely been a community effort, I wish Mozilla realizes the need-gap and invests in official Linux smartphone version.
But I'm actively moving away from 3rd party extensions in FF as I found a recommended extension promoting anti-vaccine agenda[1], The only extensions I use now are ub & Multi-account containers. I would prefer if FF integrated them by default and thorough reviews for recommended extensions.
No. Tab groups are great, they allow you to bundle context but persist it front and center. On a given day I might be working on five different things, I context switch between tab groups, make some progress within a group, and move along. Bookmarks absolutely do not solve this issue. Bookmarks are not ephemeral, and take considerably more time to organize than simply using tabs naturally.
I don't use groups (I liked them when tab groups were a feature of Firefox). I search for tabs by typing stuff in the awesome bar, that works.
I always have a lot of tabs and kill everything from times to times. But it's nice to reach a tab that's already loaded when you need it, instead of reloading the page every time, making a network access, using resources and having to wait. A page being already open is also a hint that it's something I accessed recently and that it's most likely the thing I need.
I don't want to waste my time managing bookmarks (actually the sibling comment from lamacase captures my view very well on this). That's not how I use a browser. But it's good they are there for people like you who find a use for it.
The former don't preserve login state (and site state in general) or scroll position, navigating between them requires an internet connection and often uses significant data (important when working from a metered and/or unreliable connection like on a train or plane), just to name a few differences.
Ok, great idea. Now we just need an extension that auto-bookmarks every newly opened page until I unbookmark it, and a category of "super-bookmarks" to curate the pages I would manually bookmark now.
I've never understood how people get into a workflow where they expect to have lots of persistent tabs. I rely on the fact that I can reset my browser by quitting it - everything goes away and I can start fresh, ahhh! The idea of browser state as something valuable is foreign, and it kind of makes me feel uncomfortable.
I usually work on about 5 projects at a time. During a given day I will switch between those projects at least once an hour. With Panorama Tab Groups, I only see about 10-20 tabs at a time and they are all specific to the current project. when i switch, it does it all at once and the pages don’t reload. They retain their state. I can be editing something in one tab group, switch to another tab group to check on a dependency, and then switch back to the firs group to finish editing.
I do use bookmarks for longer term organization but my workspace is all handled in tab groups.
Wow, I should have read this before cadence-per-cadence making the exact same comment!
I have no idea why nobody uses bookmarks and everybody keeps hundreds of tabs open. When did that start? Who even has the RAM for that? How do you even click on them when they’re that tiny? So many things just don’t make sense.
> Coworkers look at me like I’m a freak because I usually keep fewer than 10 tabs open :)
Haha! That's me. My maximum is 15 and then my cleanliness ghost kicks in. I said tab groups because I like organization even if it's just 10 tabs. I honestly don't know why I said tab search.
Having coworkers looking at you like you are freak while keeping your job because the company sees you as a bringer of value is the best compliment you can get from your workplace :)
Your browser has a chronological list of the previous pages you visited. It’s very easy to quickly go back to a page you had open recently and fairly easy to search for it in the history if it was some time before. It’s actually probably easier than finding a tab amongst a lot of tabs.
For persisting state, it’s simple. You don’t. History is going to send you back where you were if the url scheme is not brain dead. I will personally stop using sites which don’t do that properly because they are annoying to use.
For forms I just fill them when I need to or keep them open for a bit if I forget I would need some information which I need to check. If I realise it’s going to take some time, I just close them and fill them properly when I have all I need.
- Native reader mode
- Native PiP mode for videos
Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.
Things I want to see in Firefox:
- Good/extensible keybindings
- Tab groups
- Tab search
EDIT: How do I break sentences to newline in HN without really making a new paragraph? You know, for bullet points, etc.