I hope one day it supports the very real use case of using/abusing browser tabs as bookmarks. I know I am not the only one who keeps lots of windows with currently almost 100 tabs open. Windows represent certain topics, which I finish in a day, in in months, or sometimes never - but still they re-open everytime I open Firefox. I know there are add-ons to help with "tab overflow", but native support would be better.
I don't like this idea. I can see how others would though.
I have a really hard time getting back into things. Any state a thing remembers is the opposite of helpful.
For example, I don't suspend laptops, I turn them off. It'd be a waste of time closing what I was doing before because I don't remember where I was earlier and it's easier to start over.
Browser tabs are a current state. If I will want to use it multiple times, I use a bookmark. History is for the rare time I think "wait, I swear I read that earlier".
It isn't just computing, I forget where I was in books and games sometimes and start over too. I can't be the only one.
I feel like I start to lose focus when I have more than a few tabs open. When I see people with dozens of tabs open I get a little panicky. I want to focus on the task at hand and if I want to recall an old site I'll use bookmarks and history for that, not bloat my active session state.
This doesn't sound too much different than my garage, really. Just junk and half finished projects piled up.
That might be useful some day. toss
I get why it'd be useful, and stretching the capabilities like that means that browsers get more and more useful and efficient. It just doesn't work for me, and that's alright. If you can open 1000 tabs, my 10 are no problem!
I periodically take firefox's recovery.jsonlz4 and pipe it through a bunch of jq to export it as a datestamped bookmarks-$(date ...).org file. Right now I have 15 windows and 5351 tabs. Then I close all but the windows I have actually looked at in the last month.
I expect a tab to stay in memory, at least in virtual memory, and not need to hit the server if it's in the background for a while and then I click on it again, unlike history or bookmarks.
I expect history to not be loaded in memory, it would be a waste of memory.
I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it. "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant".
All browsers use SQLite3 DBs for this stuff. History is not "loaded into memory" -- it's in the SQLite3 DB, which has a page cache, so some of it might be in memory, but the amount of memory dedicated to the page cache is fixed, so you need not worry about it.
> I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it.
There is truly no difference except that some URIs are bookmarked (and maybe also in recent history) and some are not. Either way searching these is just a SQL query against the SQLite3 DB. You really need not worry about the efficiency of the search -- it's fast enough. The table(s) that store these things have enough metadata to enable the kinds of searches you might want to do. Among such metadata is "this is a bookmark" and "this is not a bookmark".
> "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant".
That doesn't preclude treating it not that differently from history. You really need not worry about those details.
Also, a "bookmark" is more than that: it also has a name, it may be in a folder, it may be in the bookmark toolbar, it may have tags to help you search for it, etc.
If they serve the same purpose, doesn't that open the possibility to use one of them for something else?
I'm also in the group that never keeps more than 10 tabs open, much fewer usually. The idea of having all my bookmarks displayed in a long sequence of tabs sounds horrific to me personally. It would just be an overwhelming amount of information.
I would love it if bookmarks and history were easier to search and retrieve. Having them displayed in a thousand tabs on my screen constantly not so much.
Your response confuses me. The discussion in the thread includes comments about people keeping 1000 tabs, and other people saying that tabs, bookmarks and history are the same thing. I was responding that it doesn't feel very practical for my own usage. Can you explain what you mean in your response?
In some sense they are the same thing, they are all stored in the Places database in a relatively uniform schema. In another sense they aren't, history is erased after a few months whereas losing bookmarks or tabs would be very bad. Firefox Mobile has this "inactive tabs" feature which is OK but I would never turn on the option to auto-close tabs.
Not here. Would much prefer something like evolved bookmarks, yet still very much separate from a bookmark I specifically chose. Evolved would be more like the browser just hangs onto History longer if you go there more.
Tabs, I donno, I'm not the target audience for Tabs. I'm on somewhat limited resource hardware, so keeping 100 tabs open is simply not feasible. All browsers run like slugs with 100 tabs open from personal experience.
With four tabs open on Firefox Developer 125.0b9 I have (6) main process groups with (8) further subprocesses for 1075 MB of memory while doing ... nothing.
The tabs are Not impressive. HN (2,text), WP (text), Gmail (text). Adding only Redfin and Facebook jumps me up 500 further MB in resident memory. Two tabs, no actions. How do the landing pages for two major companies eat 500 MB of resident memory statically?...
firefox and chrome seem to have long embraced the philosophy of `why worry about memory usage when I know if it uses too much RAM the browser will simply crash or become completely unresponsive due to swapping forcing the user to reboot (or if very lucky only force-kill the browser) ........problem solved!'
I'm totally with you on this. I remember seeing this concept video from Mozilla in the mid '00s, IIRC it's pretty much this vision, and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMA5W8b1zY.
I'm actually a bit shocked that almost 20 years later and the browser interface is pretty much still the same.
Some of the ideas about being able to work with data in different formats are cool, as is attempting to group related sites/pages/topics together, but that UI looks way too visual and spatial for me. Too much movement, too many images. Text is much less work to parse for me.
It's a concept, but I agree. It does show nicely what a true "user agent" could look like. I want this, the browser as sidekick not machinery with multiple buttons etc. I want my browser to be my operating system.
browser history is a log and presumably contains things one doesn't care about after reading
but definitely so for tabs and bookmarks as "things that are interesting" - the tab is notable because it has a back/forward aspect.
It seems to me in this day & age you have media organization tools (jellyfin? I think it's called?) that just handle everything. I'd love to see some basic AI language model (more of the BERT/gensim flavor likely) that can similarly auto-organize trounces of bookmarks, I have way too many.
The other interesting and increasingly relevant feature towards bookmarks would be the concept of saving them for posteriority, as we know the internet is not forever, whether this means a local save or a ping to archive.org as to say "someone bookmarked this maybe you can hang onto it". The trick of it there is not just capturing all the content of a webpage including videos, but if we say "tabs are bookmarks" then maybe you want to capture the back/forward button pages to a degree.
Anyway that's what my dream browser might look like. Also dream browser powerfully denies browser fingerprinting.
Dumping everything you have onto the kitchen counter is also very natural. It just doesn’t remain effective for long. The cabinets are a pretty darn useful invention. Don’t mix work surface with storage.
I don't know if there have been any real studies about this, but I certainly hear about a ton of people with a million open tabs and very few who productively use bookmarks in any significant way.
My theory is that bookmarks are a failed concept, putting something out of sight but not in a useful system, so it's guaranteed to be forgotten. If I really need to save an important link, it goes in a notebook which is far more flexible.
I love bookmarks, they are simple and just work. I have a few pinned tabs I want always open, and 5-15 tabs for current things. And the way browsers are designed, this works very well, so I rarely have reasons to write about it.
But the people who don’t like bookmarks and want tabs for organization have to work against the browser, so they are far more likely to write about their issues.
I use the bookmark bar a lot, for sites that I want to open new instances of, somewhat regularly. Like this one. I use "tabs as bookmarks" for things that are relatively time limited: My current PR, a dozen bug reports, etc, get piled into a tab tree that lives for as long as that PR does. Then on any given day I'll have a bunch of tabs I open for random nonsense, which I'll clean up periodically.
Non-bar bookmarks only get used for sites that I want to find again some day but I know I won't remember.
I like bookmarks, but you're right about the retrieval problem. I think this is one of the actual problems LMs (not even LLMs) could help resolve. Semantic tagging and generating auto-tags can really help in the retrieval process. Because I do pull things back up but even the placing in the correct place to "live" task isn't straight forward. Because to actually be organized, your bookmarks need depth in their categories. Not to mention the whole issue of selecting a URL, dragging it over the toolbar, holding it over a folder, and then battling dragging it into the next frame that's showing the contents of that folder and all the menu disappearing because I went 0.5 pixels out of bounds (god, who designs these? Same people who design window edges? You really want me to grab a 1 pixel line on a 4k monitor?!)
The reason I end up tab hoarding is because these are temporary bookmarks. Things I might want to but don't know yet if I want to long term store (because the bigger your bookmark library is, the more difficult it is to find things! Major flaw). Or things I'm concurrently working on (tab groups help here). A classic example of the latter is when debugging I might be tracing down an error and do not yet know if I can leave a SO post or doc closed because I haven't resolved the issue yet and there's a good chance I come back. So I can easily solve a bug and that frees up 10+ tabs. Maybe I'm doing it wrong
I'd agree with that theory - a big part of why I leave tabs open is that I'm not deliberately stashing them until later, I just get pulled into (or sometimes distracted by) something else and will, eventually, make my way back by virtue of closing tabs I'm done with. Its a fun surprise for later, and lets me entirely skip the mental friction of deciding whether something is important enough to bookmark and how I'd categorize that bookmark etc.
I look at Bookmarks vs Tabs in the same way I look at Google+'s Circles vs Instagram's "everyone vs close friends". One is far more powerful, the other forces far fewer decisions and is seemingly good enough for just about everyone.
I have tried add-ons, but for me, the native workflow of selecting tabs with ctrl, right click to bookmark them to a folder and then close them all, and then later opening them from the bookmark manager is good enough. They added multi-select around Firefox 63 and it has improved this workflow to be pretty enjoyable.
* in the address bar (that is: 'star' 'space') will put you in bookmark search. I use tags prolifically and can search for keywords here and it works pretty well.
I guess I was not clear - what I do in the bookmarks manager is go into a folder, and select and open them in groups of 20 or so, then delete them as bookmarks. So bookmarks are sort of like "tab cold storage" for me. So for me tagging them would be wasted work since they will eventually be deleted regardless. I also do use bookmarks for the awesomebar but it is mainly so they are prioritized in normal autocomplete.
Firefox handle lots of tabs very well though since the tabs are lazily loaded. Only issue is that the session system once in a while mess up and you lose everything.
Just adding this here: I created a multi-window management addon Winger[0] which lets you treat windows as 'tab groups', and it has a stashing feature (windows <-> bookmark folders / tabs <-> bookmarks) similar to Tab Stash. Despite the ostensible scope overlap, I know there's at least one person (not me) who uses both, setting Winger's stash home folder to be the same as Tab Stash's to achieve a manner of integration.
People wouldn't have to do that if they implemented "progressive bookmarks". I want to be able to bookmark a top-level web page and then later when I click the bookmark go back to the last page I was on, on that site.
I also suffer from “tab overflow” so I convert them to bookmarks. Unlike tabs, bookmarks use minimal browser resources – just an entry in an SQLite database.
Every so often, I use Ctrl-Shift-D to save all the tabs in the current window to their own folder in Bookmarks. I follow this with Ctrl-Shift-W which closes all the tabs in the current window. I repeat this for each browser window containing multiple tabs.
That way, the tabs that had been open are stored in a loosely organised way and are easily retrieved if I ever feel the need to. More often than not, I won’t look at them again but they’re there if I want to.
I hate lots of tabs with a burning passion. The whole 100+ tabs open mess is simply due to no one bothering to solve bookmarking properly.
Of course I do keep a few tabs open for long lengths, I avoid growing the count past 20 or so. If a website is worth saving, I put the link in a text file with the page title and maybe some keywords if the title isn't relevant to the subject. Usually that is enough to find the link with a quick grep.
Indeed, Vivaldi's workspaces is just great for this (although unsynced) as it allows you to maintain your work in the same "visual" place you usually organize your pages - in the tab row! But this also allows you to close any window and restore it freely without losing that information/alignment
Firefox View poorly duplicates functionality found in other places of the browser already. Meanwhile, the rest of the product just languishes.
Here's a fun thought: You have Firefox Android setup to sync with your Mozilla account. You have made the questionable decision to have 300 tabs loaded into that session. You made further questionable decisions to place your phone on a precipice about a ceramic tile floor. Cut to a few hours later, you're performing "new Android phone setup".
How do you recover those tabs? (No no no, there's three different ways of viewing Synced Tabs in Firefox Desktop and none of them let you bulk save as bookmarks; and no, Firefox for Android can't replicate them over or help you at all either). The answer, after 6 years of users asking about this, is to enable internal debug features and run a user script from some Gist on GitHub. .... seriously.
Meanwhile in addition to the new, disjoint Firefox View, there's the disjoint hodge-podge of functionality duplicated between the sidebar, library view, and Firefox Account "menu".
Firefox's product development and vision is one of the most infuriating of any product, open source or otherwise, that I use.
Also, the new Firefox View has the same completely BAFFLING padding that the settings and addon pages have expect its /not even consistent/!!? Just shrink the browser window and watch as 90% of websites out their properly adapt and adjust, but nope! not Firefox's own internal "new" pages.
There's only a few more things I really want from a browser and I'll admit, at this point most things are minor.
- Tab groups: I handle this by Simple Tab Groups[0], which how it seems to do this is by bookmarks. I think something like this is a godsend for tab hoarders like us (100? Gotta pump up those numbers!). Making native would be really nice and would be great to containerize them. Especially across devices and accounts (I never want to use my Firefox account on a work computer. I wish send would come back so I can send tabs and links between different devices. Or maybe like "partnered" or "containered" accounts because we all have multiple machines we want to not just share everything across, but I'm digressing). Grouping tabs by projects or tasks really helps manage so you don't get a ton of orphaned tabs. You can just close the group when you complete.
- Duplicate Tab Closer[1]. For the tab hoarder, this is such a critical addon. When treating tabs like temporary bookmarks (which is why we hoard?), you may run into a tab again and not having dupes really prevents things from exploding. I just wish I had a bit more control/explanantions and could interact with the tab groups.
- Auto Tab Discard[2]: "caches" tabs so they aren't actively running or taking up your ram. I wish it actually cached though because this more seems like it just bookmarks because you reload the page when you come back rather than quickly pull a cache. I know because sometimes a page will go down and I have lost it
I know us tab hoarders aren't a big market share, but I think these types of tools, if made native, could also really help a lot of other people. I'd really love the idea of being able to sync specific tab groups across containerized accounts, so I can do things like share a group of tabs between home and work machines.
IDK, what do others think? What do you use to manage tab hoarding? My hardest problem is properly purging[side note]
[side note] this is an extra problem on mobile. Often I don't realize I'm opening new tabs because when I just open the browser sometimes it drops me in the last one and sometimes I'm on the "home page" (new tab). So I get orphaned tabs this way. And on mobile it is even harder to group and deal with "inactive" tabs. Which for me are frequently research papers. And we all know Zotero and Mendeley are shit. Seriously, why can't I easily load them into my ipad and mark up those documents, share marked or unmarked, attach notes or communal share? Do the creators do research? Sorry, off topic again.
I hope it never optimizes around this. There are a million ways to organize information and "leaving it all over the fuckin place in case I ever need it" is not an organization method, it's the absence of one.
Then again I do love seeing people have fifteen million tabs open, it helps me set my expectations about what they can handle.
After updating (from 124) I saw this message, although it wasn't in the release notes:
> With this latest version of Firefox, you’ll experience 25% quicker on-average page loads, which means more all-around zippiness anywhere you go online.
Any details on how this performance improvement was acheived?
Anecdote: Firefox (124) has become unusable for me on Arch Linux. Highly resource intensive applications (particularly including video streaming, even worse with camera / webrtc) consume way more CPU resources to the point of my laptop lagging out.
I don't remember the exact versions, but I upgraded to 124 earlier this month. Brave works great for video streaming, but breaks applications I use. Firefox development (125) also breaks some applications I use, and has the same performance issues as regular firefox.
The fan on my laptop has been broken for most of this year (replaced due to first fan making noise, but havent had time to figure out why the replacement stopped working). I have been running with all high performance CPU features disabled in the BIOS for years with the purpose of not using the fan anyways, and it has been working great with 1 or 2 intensive applications max running in firefox (and as much other low intensity stuff that basically doesn't consume much resource such as another browser - chromium, vscode, my development environment including a vm).
I don't currently really have any conclusive idea about what's going on. I will have to start using my desktop, fixing issues with my laptop, and do some more testing out of my workloads. Overall I'm just getting the feeling that something is horribly wrong with Firefox.
That's probably a good note though. If you're a FF user these gains probably won't be noticed because your window shifts to keep up (just like it is hard to see improvements in yourself because day to day gains might be small but add up over time). But if you aren't a FF user, this is quite the speedup and might be enticing enough to get you to try it again. Because there's still a general belief that FF is slow.
I tried switching back to Firefox to take advantage of their multi account containers, but there were a couple of UX things that kept me from sticking with it:
- still no way to remap Ctrl+T to open a new tab in the current container context
- lack of native tab grouping, meaning that it works with plugins like OneTab
- vertical tabs that play nicely (meaning integrates nicely so that the UX feels good) with some sort of separation feature, for example, tab groups, workspaces, profiles, etc. Leaving this up to extensions seems to lead to a suboptimal experience here.
Very willing to try suggestions as I’ve spent days testing every other browser to compare (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, Floorp, Orion, etc) with Safari being my current default. Surprisingly, Edge has the nicest vertical tab implementation so far.
Sidebery has a form of Tab Groups called panels (see: https://imgur.com/Za9lwej) that are built into the functionality. I also have just found Sidebery to work a little better than any of the alternatives. But they're not too far apart.
Yup, tried sideberry, tree style tabs, and simple tab groups since I think there was a Mozilla page they suggested those three. None of them felt as usable as native tab groups in any of the other browsers that support tab groups (or workspaces, profiles, or whatever else their approximate implementation is). Especially in terms of interactions with other tab-related extensions. Part of the problem with having that be a non-native feature.
That's kind of the opposite of my experience. Can't leave Sidebery, it's so well integrated and usable when combined with a couple userchrome.css tweaks that any other browser simply feels subpar to that; not nearly the same attention to detail.
Do you have links to the userchrome tweaks that you use? I hear that mentioned a lot as a way to make sideberry better. IMO, the default for sideberry isn’t good. The few tweaks that weren’t outdated made things a bit better, but nothing really hit the mark. Like I said above, very willing to give suggestions a try.
edit: my main worry with relying on userchrome tweaks is things falling out-of-date or abandoned. I saw this a lot in my testing.
I only hide the main tab bar and sidebar header, both tweaks are copied verbatim from [0] (which is linked from the sidebery github readme) and the size of the window buttons block is corrected manually in a var.
Yes, tweaks going out of date was also my concern, but they're already a few years old and nothing broke so far. I reckon I could just adapt them if anything breaks, they're easy.
I don't have a solution for the Ctrl+T issue. I use mainly the default container as with First Party Isolation I don't need to use containers beside some specific use case (multiple accounts), otherwise I put things in containers strictly for the thing like banking.
For the latter I would recommend Simple Tab Groups. It also has a sidebar which I like very much. I understand it may not be the thing you are looking for, but there are a lot of things you will not get anywhere.
Sideberry extension gives you a lot of what you're looking for. You can have separate tab panels for each container, and a keybinding (ctrl+space by default iirc) that opens a new tab in the current panel and the current container.
Sidebery has been "good enough" for me to transition from Edge back to Firefox, but I wish you could put your Tab Groups into a named folder vs. just having some tabs nested under a "parent tab".
Yup, those would also be great UX improvements. Firefox used to have something like “Show tab overview”. I think it was called Panorama? I might try looking for it to see if it still exists and works.
edit: the problem with relying on extensions for all of this is that it’s not cohesive. I found that to be the main problem with Firefox that makes me put it a tier lower than everything else right now.
Still no swipe to change tabs on iOS, which makes it a non-starter on that platform for me, and a browser I can't use on every device can't be my primary browser. Bummer, because I really want to use Firefox.
I recognize that you aren't placing any (explicit at least) blame here, simply stating facts, so I want to make clear that what I'm saying is simply an addition to your comment, not a refutation.
Is it really surprising that iOS isn't an important target for Firefox, given that Apple's draconian rules don't allow them to do much? If we're going to assign responsibility for this, I think Apple is who deserves (at least most of) it. Given the major (artificial) impediments imposed by the gatekeeper of the platform, were I in their shoes I would never invest scarce dollars into such a risky undertaking where there is a hostile* and extremely powerful overseer.
*To be clear, I mean hostile to 3rd party browsers, such as Firefox
I also miss this feature, I hope they have that on their roadmap. But the whole UI is kinda janky to me, sometimes it flashes when I'm interacting with it, and the closing tab gesture seems to have a sensitivity issue, sometimes I try to close a tab, and it doesn't close because I didn't swipe enough.
Hmm, can you disable the av1 support? I use Firefox on streaming services specifically because it uses an older codec which is easy to capture video clips from in OBS
> Firefox now prompts users in the US and Canada to save their addresses upon submitting an address form, allowing Firefox to autofill stored address information in the future.
I don’t use Firefox often outside of cross browser testing, and this initially surprised me a little too. But as a software developer, my second thought was “well yeah, there are probably thousands of potential features like that which they will or won’t get to eventually, like basically every other software project”.
Firefox still won't remember and autofill my credit cards even though I know it's a feature they offer in other countries, it's a feature offered in my country by other browsers and it's even a feature they mistakenly expose in the settings page of some but not all of their browsers (mobile only, if I remember right), despite not working.
What would be really nice is the ability to clear form data separate from search history. Even better would be the ability to disable saving form data while saving search history.
You'll be interested to know that Safe Browsing was introduced in Firefox 2 in 2006, and the malware check feature was introduced in 2014! I suggest you search using your favorite search engine to see how this feature works while also preserving the privacy of your URLs and downloads. It uses hashing! Here's a good link, I suggest you scroll down to the Privacy section and read carefully: https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...
Yes, but the phrasing about being "more proactive" seems to suggest that perhaps this approach has now been adjusted.
However, according to Bugzilla [0] it seems to be about blocking HTTP downloads on all pages compared to previously only blocking HTTP downloads on HTTPS pages, and then someone tweaked the wording to add the sinister-sounding part about being "more proactive".
> Firefox now more proactively blocks downloads from URLs that are considered to be potentially untrustworthy.
I got a hit yesterday from a plugin I wanted to download from blendermarket. After fiddling with Firefox, I downloaded the plugin. It had a binary component that I audited with several anti-virus programs. The rest was Python code, that I also audited. No auditing found anything suspicious. Yes, there is such a thing as malicious binaries in places, but I would like to know more about how Firefox is deciding to flag download links. Is it AI working on generic signals? If Americans can carry guns, while does Firefox doesn’t let me download things? A warning about “our foxy algorithm doesn’t like this egg” would be okay, but blocking the download and forcing the user to jump through hoops is flat disrespectful.
> If Americans can carry guns, while does Firefox doesn’t let me download things?
I'm almost afraid to ask the reasoning behind this, but to go out on a limb and assume I understand your question accurately, because one is a constitutional right of citizens protected by the government and the other is a private company making a judgement call and you're opting into their reasoning by using their product?
Regardless of whether you agree with the specifics of either of them or whether they are good choices or systems, they have nothing to do with each other, at all.
I hope one day it supports the very real use case of using/abusing browser tabs as bookmarks. I know I am not the only one who keeps lots of windows with currently almost 100 tabs open. Windows represent certain topics, which I finish in a day, in in months, or sometimes never - but still they re-open everytime I open Firefox. I know there are add-ons to help with "tab overflow", but native support would be better.