They are referring to hiding individual tabs, not hiding the horizontal tab bar.

The legacy extension they are referring to is Tab Groups [0]. It allowed you to separate the tabs of a single session into groups. Selecting the active group would hide the other tabs.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...

Still, it seems that the current API couldn't really support that use-case if tabs with active audio or video can't be hidden. At least there will be some random tabs hanging around that don't belong to your group.

> if tabs with active audio or video can't be hidden

That's for a good reason. I don't want a tab I can't see to record audio or video. Why would you want to?

But the main use-case for this API seems to be organizing things - and it's strange that I would want certain tabs not take part in my organisation scheme.

If I had virtual desktop support, but certain windows are nevertheless shown on all desktops, that would feel broken, too.

Of course notifying users of audio/video recording is important, but this could be done with a separate notification - with options to stop recording or activate and un-hide the tab.

I don't know if this is the case, but the API ought to also let you kill any active video or audio streams playing in a tab. Then you'd be able to go ahead with hiding them.

If this is not possible or planned, it feels kind of broken in my view.

Looks like it's only for recording streams, not playing them. I misunderstood that. Apologies.

Oh! Ok. I've actually used this extension a bunch, but it was several years ago.

Wasn't it part of Firefox at one point? Or, am I misremembering.

Yes: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal

Seems reasonable to not mention a specific one by name so as not to play favorites going forward if someone else wants to make a competitor. Or maybe a Grid Style Tabs, or who knows what.

I imagine it's the same tone they use for discussion of adblocker related features, "we need this for content blocking addons" rather than "we need this to support uBlock Origin."

Hiding the top tabs can be done in current versions but you have to go digging through settings folders and set up a css file with some rules. There's also a built-in header on the sidebar than can be hidden by similar means. Hopefully they'll also let us hide that header (it lets you switch to other sidebar views like Bookmarks and History that I don't want to use in the sidebar) so I can avoid the css setup in the future.

https://i.imgur.com/mMlrU1n.png

Definitely reasonable. Just struck me as odd. Maybe there are some other extensions that they have in mind, too.

If someone was looking back at this post, they'd be missing part of the story.

> Or maybe a Grid Style Tabs, or who knows what.

Gangnam Style Tabs. I'd install it.

But yeah, no need to make an extension seem "official" to Firefox by mentioning it by name. Unless it's Pocket, obviously.

>one of the gripes of the new WebExtensions version is that it still shows the normal horizontal tabs.

In case anyone is in this position, it's relatively easy to hide them with a userChrome.css file: https://superuser.com/a/1261661

It would be nice if the extension or an easy to find setting could do it, though.

FWIW, I have this in my userChrome.css to fix that horizontal tabs annoyance: `#TabsToolbar{ visibility: collapse !important;}`. Not ideal, but a workaround I can forget about most of the time.