Please work on tab grouping instead!
Now this would be useful.
It was useful 8 years ago when they removed it, that’s for sure.
Tab groups where natively implemented?
Yes, they worked differently than the way Edge or Chrome do now and were in many ways superior for tab management, much more like Vivaldi’s sessions but more intuitive. I was a heavy user and so am biased. They said “just use an extension!” but it would crash and lose your session (and imo the extension works even worse today). It was really ahead of its time.
Few people used it because they didn’t advertise it or make it easily discoverable. You had to know the shortcut already through osmosis or drag the button out of the customize menu.
Simple tab groups works better tbh. It uses the features to hide, list and manage tabs.
But a native in-line implementation would be best.
I actually prefer Chrome’s tab groups, preferring to have groups visible and one click away. Ideally the user would be able to choose whether to show or hide inactive groups.
Except it’s still not available on mobile
True. That is an entirely different UI and also underlying browser issue. Mobile does not have Containers or process isolation.
Closest thing to that feature is this add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/
Very laggy and overcomplicated, but found that too!
Yeah it’s kinda laggy but does its job. I guess that was the reason why did they remove it from Firefox, it was slowing things down.
Afaik Epiphany has this.
Over there! In the past!
Or vertical icon-only tabs!
Or tabs not crashing when you want to move them between different windows.
I really hope you can turn this off
There’ll be a setting in about:config no doubt.
Indeed. I get there are people who probably like this feature, but not me.
I’m tired of Mozilla pushing UI changes on people just for the sake of “progress”.
…especially when they don’t bother to fix years (sometimes decades) old bugs.
why? It’s objectively better?
it also shows the url of the page, super convinientIt’s objectively worse. Fancier but objectively worse.
Another big, distracting pop-up that has no benefit over the existing tool tip which is still distracting when it pops up unintentionally. Also the preview will use more system resources.
It’s objectively worse. Fancier but objectively worse.
It isn’t though, Firefox stock tab management is awful, when you pile up a decent number of tabs you can’t even see the name of the tab properly, this happens in all the browsers ofc, but at least you can have more tabs opened without this being an obstacle.
You really need 3rd party add-ons to manage your tabs with Firefox, unlike in Chrome, Vivaldi, or even Safari.
With this feature at least you can have a quick look at your tabs easily, just like with the aforementioned browsers… Now I really hope they could add a button like Safari where you can see all your tabs too…
It’s not objectively better or worse. Some people will prefer it and some people won’t.
Not objectively worse or objectively better, but subjectively worse.
your gpu is actually much slower at text rendering than rendering images
If this defaults to on, I’m turning it off.
Out of curiosity, why? If it’s a knee-jerk reaction to change that’s completely understandable, but I can’t see anything to dislike about the feature itself
I can already read the title of the page and see the favicon, so it actually doesn’t show new information. If I accidentally move my mouse there it covers a big part of the page i’m looking at
If you have many tabs opened:
I can already read the cropped title of the page and see the multiple favicon
cropped title of the page
To be super pedantic (sorry), that depends on how they’ve customized their UI. You can define a larger minimum tab width, if you’d like. Almost everything in Firefox is customizable.
That is nice and yeah, I’m talking about the default experience you can get with Firefox for macOS, if it is any different in any other OS I wouldn’t know, now if you know about a good customizing guide I’d appreciate it…
There’s a bunch of different ways you can customize it.
- Default right click -> customize toolbars fore simple rearranging of toolbars, density setting and stuff
- Changes made in about:config (such as “browser.tabs.tabMinWidth”)
- And the most powerful but difficult, userChrome.css. The UI of Firefox is actually defined by CSS. More info: https://www.userchrome.org/
EDIT: Oh and there are of course addons and themes too
When I shop online, I have many tabs from the same site open. The tab title is the store name + the item name, so the item name never fits. A bunch of identical ebay icons is way worse than this.
I understand it may be useful for some people, but I’m simply not one of them
But that’s not what you wrote. You claimed that it doesn’t show new information because you can see the favicon and title. It does show new information.
On top of the fact that those previews are annoying as hell as other comments pointed out, I want to add that this kind of feature also uses a fair amount of processing + memory.
I think that is a nice opt-in feature for those who wants it but I like my default light and simple.
Not OP but I’d do the same, for the simple reason that I find most overlays super distracting. It immediately triggers a need to see what’s underneath.
I think it’s more that there really isn’t a need for this. If I’m not sure what a tab is I can always click on it. Chromium got this a while back and (even with minimal exposure to Chromium) I didn’t like it, it weirdly felt annoying and unnecessary.
deleted by creator
Tree style tabs makes this feature entirely useless.
Because stock tab management is entirely useless…
With this feature you can manage your tabs at least a bit better.
stop resisting!
This has been people’s reactions to anything good that comes into Firefox for close to 20 years now
Really? AV1 & webp support, Quantum engine, process-per-tab, reader mode, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 support, cross-site tracking protection…?
Browsers have a lot of features. Some convenient, some come and go. That’s ok.
Firefox is an ideological choice for some people so both cynicism and unconditional support is expected.Actually a decent amount of people were pissed at Quantum, process per tab, discontinuation of XUL, and the new extension system. There is like a whole project to restore the ancient Firefox, and it’s slow as fuck (it’s called Palemoon)
I am a longtime Firefox user. I absolutely love many innovative feature Firefox has implemented (such as container tabs). Firefox does so many things better than other browsers, such as allowing CTRL-clicking tabular data for copy-and-paste.
However, I’m usually annoyed by features they add that seem like they’re just doing it to be like the dominant browser.
The worst was when they reassigned CTRL+I from getting page info to match IE’s behavior of viewing favorites. Thankfully, they’ve gone back to the sane behavior.
It’s a good feature, and probably makes sense to default to on. But I know I’ll find it more distracting than useful, so I’ll turn it off.
Large tooltips on mouseover are usually distracting. Facicons, text, and additional windows do enough to remind me what my tabs are.
New features often aren’t helpful to each and every user, but as long as I can turn off the ones that are actively unhelpful to me, I’m perfectly happy to see them.
deleted by creator
This is just a clear sign of struggling with change adaptation bruh.
Gladly Lemmy userbase is so tiny compared with FF userbase that it won’t influence Mozilla decisions to not implement this at all…
And you’ll probably be able to deactivate it as they say so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If this defaults to off, I’m turning it on.
deleted by creator
Mozilla look for most useless stuff to implement.
Some people in the comments here seem really hostile towards those who want to disable the feature, but I support your “right” to customize your Firefox exactly to your liking. I’m just happy that we can even do that.
Getting this feature is awesome, and being able to turn it off is also awesome.
Here I’m still waiting for an official vertical tabs feature.
In the meantime, Floorp has it built-in to the browser.
In current versions of Firefox you hover your mouse over a non-active tab […] to see (after a small delay) a tooltip containing the web page title.
Uh… what is the point of that? If I am looking for a specific tab then:
- I probably want to switch to the tab that I am looking for, so staying on the current one is not required
- if there are a few tabs from different pages from the same domain the difference might be hard to see on a thumbnail (similar page headings with logos)
- and most importantly: opening the tab is faster than waiting for the delay anyway
This sounds like a “cool” feature that’s looking for an actual problem to solve.
Tooltips are a standard accessibility feature. Just because you may not find them helpful doesn’t mean others do not benefit. The delay is to ensure they don’t get in the way unintentionally (but still allow usage) for those who do not need the accessibility benefit at all times.
In the vast overwhelming amount of cases tooltips show additional information that you cannot see from clicking on something or provide an explanation to an option that isn’t available without scrounging through a manual. None of those apply here.
Tooltips show the full title of the tab, which is useful if the title is long, the tabs are small because there are a lot of them, or it’s a pinned tab
The page title isn’t necessarily visible on the web page that sets the title.
Clicking is not always a simple task.
I shouldn’t have to leave my current page just to figure out what another tab is.
Again, just because you feel something is useless or easily avoided doesn’t mean that all internet users feel the same.
So, a toggle in accessibility settings, default off?
Wait, FF doesn’t have separate accessibility settings anymore?
I suspect the small delay is just to prevent them from going crazy if you swing your mouse over the tab bar, it’s not going to be like a second or something. Sounds useful for the case of multiple tabs on the same site with similar titles, especially at higher resolutions.
It’s a second https://sopuli.xyz/comment/6926705
Ok… That’s too long. Weird decision.
came here looking for this exact comment. Agree with all point (last one most importantly).
Firefox team should look at what Arc browser is doing.
This is quite useful, especially for those sites without meaningful or distinctive names.
This is not even close to the worst thing they have ever done, but stuff like this is a waste of resources. People mostly want official vertical tabs and more than anything engine performance improvements. (and the ability to pretend to be Chrome in Youtube)
engine performance improvements
Absolutely. Firefox is so slow compared to Chrome. Switching tabs, scrolling, video calls, … sure. Sure, Chrome/Chromium is a memory hog, but come on Mozilla, just invest in Servo already and stop adding useless features.
Firefox desktop performance is on par with Chromium. Also Servo is now a project under the Linux Foundation, and likely Mozilla Corp doesn’t have enough employees to contribute to external projects.
I miss the days with Opera. Not only could it group tabs, but it had previews too. Mouse gestures. Keyword searches. Page link filters and batch operations. RSS-reader. Chrome didn’t even exist back then, and IE and Firefox are still playing catch up. Kinda amazing to think about it.
Vivaldi is the spiritual successor, but having to use chromium rendering engine, it’s so many concessions and steps back. Has the mouse gestures, tho.
The gestures were amazing. Some are ingrained in my muscle memory after all these years.
Same here. And the single-key shortcuts for switching tabs. Modern browsers don’t even come close.
Brave has configurable keybinds, you can set any key you want to do anything.
However I still need to use the vimium extension to have proper keyboard only web navigation, because with the exception of qutebrowser none of the “popular” web browsers have the select link mode with the f key.
I never got used to the f-key navigation, if i can’t use shift+arrows i fall back to mouse.
I don’t know, maybe Brave has this, unfortunately some time before Opera 9 and now I became one of these annoying people who only use FOSS.
Missing the days when developing a new browser was possible.
1000ms delay seems to be little too much to my liking, changed
browser.tabs.cardPreview.delayMs
to 500 and it feels much better.Preview is pretty short for some reason, it might be related to my monitor (32:9) aspect ratio?
Have they ever said if vertical-tabs is a feature they will add? Vivaldi and Edge both support it by default and it’s awesome.
By vertical tabs do you mean tabs on the side instead of the top? If so, check out the tree-style tabs extension, it’s great.
The extension is awkward to use imo. The way Vivaldi has it integrated for example is miles better and I really want to see Firefox do same.
I find that Firefox manages tabs better. So eveb though i use side tabs on vivaldi, I prefer them on top in Firefox, and it’s just a keystroke away to see the list vertically, but not stay that way.
deleted by creator
For what it’s worth vertical tabs is currently 3rd most rated suggestion
I think many people in the comments suffer from some version of curse of knowledge.
Sure, this feature us quite irrelevant for a power user who is quick to navigate the browser and needs a split second to remember what tab it is simply by reading the header and seeing the icon.
However, many less proficient people can benefit from this feature. Not once I saw how someone who has 10 tabs open and needs to go to a different webpage, starts meticulously clicking through every single one of them because they have no idea how the page they are looking for is called, they are too overwhelmed by using web as a whole to take notice.
Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”
Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.
There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.
Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.
Oh great. As if my life doesn’t have enough curses on it.
How is hovering over a tab and waiting for a preview faster than clicking it?
Again, in my opinion you approach the problem like a power user. Using a browser is not a speedrun where every millisecond matters. Here is why I think it provides more comfort to an average user:
- No need to divert attention and look around the monitor. When you’re not well versed with a mouse, it’s easier to click and look at the same place
- Nothing distracts you unlike when you click through pages. Imagine going from dark theme page to a light theme page, the entire screen suddenly lights up
- Depending on the way it is implemented (perhaps by keeping compressed page screenshots?), it might be faster to show a preview than to render the page again on a weak machine
I don’t understand how someone can have 10 or more tabs open. The times when I have “many” tabs open is when I’m looking for references while doing art, and that still hardly ever surpasses 5 tabs! XD
I think it’s much easier to have more than to have less. Most people I encounter have such a mess of pages in their browser, makes my hair stand on end. If we continue to approach this as an accessibility feature, it starts to make even more sense since tons of users have so many tabs they only see icons, not page names
Currently have 23 tabs open, 7 are youtube, 3 lemmies, and i guess the rest are docs I cant tell I’d greatly benefit from the tab previewer
Nice! I remember using an extension for that back in the day
Actually I was going to look up such an extension, but then I read this news (some days ago here… This is Lemmy after all…) But then I’d rather wait for the official implementation.
“We’re super excited to announce that we’re working on a feature that has been requested by no one ever”.
Not a bad feature IMO…
Chrome has it for some reason so I guess they’re just copying them
being chrome but slightly worse at some things and slightly better at other things certainly sounds like a winning move…
It’s a stay-in-the-competition one. While I would love to see a ground breaking change soon, Mozilla surely can’t do that in every update.
they’re already out of the competition, let’s not pretend that firefox has any significant amount of marketshare
I requested it
Yeah I always turn off that previi crap immediately as it usually gets in my way of doing things. Please don’t even spend time on this feature, I don’t really see the use
I love tab previews, but I would hate to give up vertical tabs for it. If they would implement vertical tabs + previews, I for one would be happy.
Anyone know a way to mimic Brave vertical tabs with preview? I can get close, but without preview images and that’s what I’m after.