Please work on tab grouping instead!
Or vertical icon-only tabs!
Genuinely the only good thing about Microsoft Edge. I wish other browsers had this.
One of the only reasons I used vivaldi for a while.
Or tabs not crashing when you want to move them between different windows.
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.
Missing the days when developing a new browser was possible.
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.
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.
If this defaults to on, I’m turning it off.
This has been people’s reactions to anything good that comes into Firefox for close to 20 years now
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.
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)_/¯
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
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.
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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.
Mozilla look for most useless stuff to implement.
Here I’m still waiting for an official vertical tabs feature.
In the meantime, Floorp has it built-in to the browser.
I was aware of Floorp and had no particular interest in trying it until now. On my way to install it now!
Last time I looked at Floorp was when it was first announced and it seemed to just be hardened Firefox, similar to Librewolf. It’s gained a ton of features since then!
I think it has better customization than librewolf and (beta iirc) integration with tree style tabs and vertical tabs. Although I haven’t used it for long (2-3 months) the experience has been great. It has been my recommendation for anyone coming from Chrome.
This is quite useful, especially for those sites without meaningful or distinctive names.
I really hope you can turn this off
There’ll be a setting in about:config no doubt.
I’d rather have them work on fingerprint spoofing, and getting rid of the tracking from google they put into it
Librewolf, if you want to use a firefox based browser, use librewolf instead.
This was already a thing for ages until they killed it, but it is still possible if you are okay with tweaking userChrome.css
Why Mozilla wastes resources on their own implementation instead of providing API’s to third party developers is beyond me.
Your first link is based on XUL, which was deprecated because it was wasting resources being unmaintainable and insecure.
Here’s a great article about that
Admittedly, yes, XUL was a complete shitfest. Though I remember that it was more due to security patches and poor memory management that caused the apparent poor performance, not so much for addons. I was on waterfox classic at the time of writing of this article and had like 30 addons enabled, including TST, CRT, and TileTabs. all non-e10s-blocking, and, I assure you, it was just as fast(and slow) as quantum.
But, that’s besides the point. Customization, especially via addon’s, was one of the defining features of Firefox. Before, you had opera, which you could customize it within certain limits, Firefox if you want full control, and IE if you’re a dummy. Now, you have Vivaldi if you want customization within certain limits, Chrome if you’re a dummy, and Firefox is… just… not chrome? I’d say the addons should’ve been kept at all costs, maybe in a different way, without amputating the whole browser. But they did and it lost it’s appeal to a major portion of people. Of course there are still exclusive features like container tabs and min vid, but those are not exclusive to quantum either. The whole ordeal sounds just like that time when Yandex, in order to solve a support ticket overflow, just removed the contact support button.
Tab. Groups.
Yes
Not a fan of Edge, but absolutely love the tab groups. Use them at work all the time.
Tab groups, vertical tabs, synced Workspaces. I’ve hacked together most of it, but being able to have separated pages of tabs synced through my account would be a godsend. Only thing keeping me on MS Edge.
I don’t know why I never vibed with vertical tabs, but I’ve just never been able to make it work mentally. And I could see a double-edged sword with synced workspaces (I think having a button to click and see open tabs on other devices is a perfect middle ground). Personally, tab groups is the only thing I miss from Chromium. I used the feature for grouping, but also for labeling tabs: “Check back Tuesday,” or “Don’t forget to follow up,” or whatever. If they gave us tab groups and then never updated Firefox again, I think I would be pretty happy.
EDIT: well okay not happy, but I would be satisfied with the browser we ended up with.
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.
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.
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
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
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
I often get myself into a position where I have 50+ tabs open, but then I get annoyed with all the damn tabs and go on a purge… furiously clicking X on tabs down the line until I have it down to something manageable. This happens every couple of days. I wish there was a setting where one had the option of limiting themselves to x amount of tabs and if you hit the limit you know it’s time for a purge. I’ve seen where chromium browsers also have tab groups… I’m not sure if that helps for tab hoarding, I guess it could be more organized that way, but also sounds like it just enables more tab hoarding.
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’m not sure how clicking can be considered “power user”… Had I said “just install tree style tabs, it’s much better”, you might’ve had a point, but you’re arguing that clicking is worse than hovering. Really can’t agree with you.
But hey, I don’t give money to Mozilla and the chance is very low that I ever will, so they can do what they want. If they think this is how they want to spend the 500 million they get from Google, that’s their prerogative.
I’m sorry, but did you… read my comment?
I didn’t say clicking is power user, I said that you assessing features in terms of speed (“Is hovering faster than clicking?”) is a power user approach. It’s deeper than just bare speed and accessibility features are not developed to provide physically faster experience, but one that is more comfortable for some group of users.
Hovering preview does not even take ability to click through tabs away, but could provide comfort for a user who is not as browser proficient, for the reasons I outlined above.
Oh great. As if my life doesn’t have enough curses on it.
Agreed. As a Netscape/Phoenix stan since late 90s, I sometimes do like the peeking feature on Ungoogled Chromium. Yes, I am a power user, but often I have one trillion tabs open with just the webpage tab icon barely visible, and need to check roughly what the tab is showing.
I would even propose there should be a very faint 1-2 pixel thick scrollbar so you can see how far you scroll on your hundreds of tabs left/right, similar to vertical tabs having a scrollbar for Tree Style Tabs.
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
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For what it’s worth vertical tabs is currently 3rd most rated suggestion
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.
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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.
Good morning, babe! Servo ended ages ago, and a lot of the performance improvements from it got absorbed into Quantum as l10n and Rust code. I was alpha testing Servo back in the day.
