Discontinuing the tab groups feature in Firefox

support.mozilla.org

9 points·bpierre··6 comments

Sad to hear they are just "discontinuing" it rather than porting it as an addon. Or is it killed because it's the kind of addon impossible to implement with the new WebExtensions API?

The rationale of "declining usage" could be a bit misleading. Two thought processes:

1) Tab groups are disabled by default on clean profiles (you have to move it out of the 'customise' menu), so tab groups are used by more advanced users, and more advanced users are more likely to be disabling telemetry. Combined, any usage statistics are pretty meaningless.

2) Hiding functionality by default will mean it gets used less. Showing functionality by default (Hello, Pocket) will mean it gets used more.

The tab groups feature was pretty much the only reason why I used Firefox as my primary work browser, as it managed the separation of projects / topics..

Does anyone know any alternatives (for Firefox or other browser) which can help with the visual clutter of managing 30+ tabs in an efficient way, and can handle groups as well?

Palemoon has the Tab Groups feature as a separate addon: http://www.palemoon.org/tabgroups.shtml

Source code is here: https://github.com/wolfbeast/palemoon-tabgroups

"This is the repository for the Tabgroups add-on source code for Pale Moon, based on Tim Taubert's work as part of the proposal to remove Tab groups from Firefox and moving the removed code to an extension."

Installs fine in Firefox 45a too, but it's not signed (obviously).

Exactly what I needed, thank you!

Possibly of interest will be the BugZilla item: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836758

Dates back to 2013, unsurprisingly has some more recent activity. :)

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