> Like the fact that I can have like 20 tabs open at the same time before they start hiding themselves from me.

I didn't like it either at first, but then I realized it was just because it was different than Chrome. In time, I liked how Firefox did it better. You're always guaranteed to see the favicon and 3 or 4 letters of the tab's title no matter how many tabs you have. In Chrome, you're eventually looking at triangles or lines with no way to differentiate them.

>You're always guaranteed to see the favicon and 3 or 4 letters of the tab's title no matter how many tabs you have.

But I can't see the tab's favicon or letters because they're 100% hidden from me.

I currently have 49 tabs open in Chrome. If I set Firefox to be the same exact width as Chrome, I can open 27 tabs at the same time. If I open up the 28th, it starts hiding tabs.

I actually have no issue with how Chrome does it. Just seeing the favicon is enough when dealing with a large number of tabs.

EDIT: Just tested opening 49 tabs. None of the tabs show anything more than just the favicon and about 90% of the first letter. Not really sure how this is better than what Chrome does, which is show 49 favicons without scrolling.

You also have a list of all open tabs available from the dropdown arrow at the far right, but the tab width can be changed in about:config with browser.tabs.tabMinWidth.

If you're looking for information on this preference, it went away between FF4 and FF57(?) but should be back and working now so you'll see a lot of old information about it being removed.

Edit: FF58, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404465

> But I can't see the tab's favicon or letters because they're 100% hidden from me.

You can scroll on the tab bar.

What's wrong with a fixed tab bar? Like the one in Chrome?

There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it doesn't work well once you get beyond a certain number of tabs (the number will vary depending on your screen size, etc., blah). At some point, all the tabs are scrunched down to being indistinguishable blobs. Firefox, at least, doesn't have that issue, thanks to the scrolling tab bar. And the drop-down that shows all your tabs is, to me, a sufficient answer to the "my tabs are hidden from me" concern.

I understand that some people will feel differently of course. And it's less of an issue in the first place if you don't keep ludicrous numbers of tabs open.

>At some point, all the tabs are scrunched down to being indistinguishable blobs.

I don't know what you're on about. I opened the maximum number of tabs that my browser window can have visible (~90) and at no point were they indistinguishable blobs. Every single one still had a favicon.

To me, nothing but a favicon is exactly "an indistinguishable blog" since it does nothing to help me distinguish between the 10 arxiv.org tabs, or 7 or 8 Youtube tabs that I have open. shrug

This is something that bothers me when pair programming or working with co-workers who use a lot of tabs. I have to watch them fiddle between 10 jira tabs until they find the ticket. God forbid they misclick a few times (every time!) and then you get to see them hit a few other websites while all in the search of that only holy jira ticket tab.

As stated above, "In Chrome, you're eventually looking at triangles or lines with no way to differentiate them."

There are favicons. And Firefox does nothing to alleviate the problem, since it too only shows favicons. It just makes switching tabs more painful.

Favicons alone aren't really enough though. I routinely have multiple tabs open for Wikipedia, Youtube, Arxiv.org, Jira, Reddit, and even HN.

With Firefox, you get the Favicon and at least the first few characters of the page title. And if you use the tab drop-down, you see all, or most, of the title (depending on how long it is).

>With Firefox, you get the Favicon and at least the first few characters of the page title.

I just tested that and it was absolutely false.

I don't know what to tell you then. I'm typing this comment right now using Firefox, with a tab-bar full of tabs, and every visible tab has the favicon and a portion of the title visible. The rest can be found in the drop-down, with nearly the entire title displayed.

Maybe there's some setting that controls this behavior, but my Firefox is pretty much completely stock. shrug

Well, this is what I'm seeing on a pretty much stock Firefox.

https://0x0.st/zB86.png

Interesting. Maybe we're running different versions, or maybe it's somehow dependent on screen resolution or something. Weird. For me, Firefox has always displayed at least the first few characters of the title.

https://pasteboard.co/Ih7GvRO.png

This is what I see:

https://ibb.co/T4z2YfZ

I was going to say that the favicons on Chrome probably disappear at some point too, but you're right. Chrome guarantees at least half a favicon on display, but to do so, new tabs are not put on the tab-bar. They're completely hidden with no way to access them via the tab-bar.

Yeah, that is not really optimal. However, that is luckily only a problem on a very high number of tabs. Firefox's tab UI starts having usability issues at a much higher number. At my tested width.

> In Chrome, you're eventually looking at triangles or lines with no way to differentiate them.

Chrome finally fixed that a couple months ago. The favicon-hiding behavior was awful though.

about:config > browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

Change to something smaller.

Yeah, nothing like 60 tabs you can't tell apart all squeezed into view.

Tree Style Tabs is a common Firefox add-on people use to manage large number of tabs. Or you can click on the down caret on the right side of the tabs bar to get the full list of your tabs.

I tried it out, but honestly it didn't help. Dealing with 300+ tabs at a time, it just made hierarchical resolution a total mess.

I don't need to know the physical location of my tab. That's what the address bar and Ctrl+Tab are for.

Huh. Tree Style Tabs has millions of happy users. And if you type in the address bar FF will match against open tab names and urls, and let you switch to them.

Happy millions of users use Chrome.

> if you type in the address bar FF will match against open tab names and urls, and let you switch to them.

Hence my comment:

> That's what the address bar and Ctrl+Tab are for.

>And if you type in the address bar FF will match against open tab names and urls, and let you switch to them.

Something that Chrome also has.

Much like my physical desktop full of papers you can't see which is which just glancing from above, and my overall laptop desktop full of dozens of different windows... it's cluttered, but I know what's what enough to find it, usually!

Sure, I could put all those papers on my desk into a drawer, or even file them, but who's got time for that? (Answer: those who are succesfully less cluttered than the cluttered among us).

It takes less than 3 seconds to find a lost tab even with 300+ in Firefox. Ctrl+L, type in a keyword.

Firefox has the Tree Style Tabs add-on, makes having many open tabs much more manageable.

What quirks? Sounds like you just need more monitors...

I don't want to get "more monitors" just to use another browser.

Looks like you are not making correct usage of tabs, your use-case calls for something like: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/instapaper-to...

"Just avoid holding it in that way."

- Steve Jobs

I try to mostly use firefox, but there are some legit sites that do not work in firefox, youtube is probably the biggest offender with the seek very often not working properly.

I can't help but wonder if it is because firefox is actually behind or if google is sabotaging them.

FWIW this is configurable. Edit `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` in about:config

They now have a dropdown menu with all your tabs. Pretty nifty.

Chrome tabs get absolutely useless when they get to that razor thin mode. You can hover your mouse and scroll through firefox tabs if you have more than what fits in your window size.