There are many things different now that might make it work better this time. If not just that it's 14 years later, different UI, and the pattern being familiar from other browsers, might make a difference too. But no guarantees, of course.
(Note: I don't work on Tab Groups.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110613070035/http://www.azaras...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ is widely used, but I'm not sure if it does the overview. Other extensions do.
We're cautious about not repeating history. We're implementing tab groups from scratch and directly in the tab bar. Our Firefox View feature (Tools > Firefox View) may later get a more visual surface for managing groups.
And why wouldn't it be Nielsen :) I remember when they sent me cash in the mail as a kid, fun times.
There's a BIG difference between tracking and metrics, but they are often treated the same, especially by "power users".
And there's no way for a user to validate that any tracking is indeed anonymous. The technical level needed to asses this is just... out of reach for everyone (the quantity of people who can properly verify this is small enough we can safely ignore it when speaking generally and use the coloquialism Everyone)
To you and I there is a difference between tracking and metrics. To everyone else there is none. All my Mom knows is that the software dialed home. It is impossible to verify what it said to the mothership. The popup promised "Metrics only!" but then Little Snitch lit up like a Christmas tree 4 times! It's stealing my info!
How does the consumer know that the "metrics" didn't include home IP, OS version, and god knows whatever else? Again, metrics are a subset of data. Even the internet request to ship a fully anonymized usage info like "saved_files: 10, opened_files: 11" metric set contains Gobs and Gobs of identifiable information on and around the request itself. Does the company stash inbound request data for troubleshooting? That's fucking tracking bro. Your data dog instance is chock-full of tracking info.
It is not reasonable to expect end-users to be able to verify the claim that "only metrics are tracked". It is safer for everyone to assume this is a bald-faced lie, because at the end of the day it is impossible to verify to any level of certainty.
A terrible way to get them to stop doing something you don't personally agree with is by starting your post with a bad idea, support it with a lie and close it with a personal attack.
And that's why telemetry is such a brain dead idea. People then actually make decisions based upon "number of people using feature X" which is incredibly... lets just say "unwise".
with telemetry they can justify whatever. they can go to the board and say "look people are clicking more on pocket, which we put prominently on the UI against everyone wishes, and they barely use bookmarks, which have critical bugs open for over 20years... who would have thought of this counterintuitive insight if it weren't for my genius persistence on trying and measuring new ideas uh? so are we good on the extra bonus to my close childhood friends?" ...see, it makes the pitch defensable, if you don't say the right parts out loud.
Hi! Thanks for letting us know about Firefox Team is being very careful this time, I want to share my idea too because I think the Firefox community have probably tinkered enough to figure out that Tree Styled Tab Group like Sidebery/Tree Style Tab is the best Tab Group implementation, because they're so easy to use, just drag and drop and work great in practice.
I hope you consider making Tree Styled Tab Group an option for vertical tab.
But worse is, it relies on recalling the text in the bookmark's title to resurface it. You might not remember the page title, but you can always scan through open tabs.
I can also open all in tabs, if I really want to.
Mostly the way I deal with this now is sharing the tab to another Firefox on a different computer then use it there and decide it's fate.
Both of these make context switching easier as I can quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using, knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a bit of the persistence of bookmarks.
I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab groups
Example: Have a primary window with you email, calendar and important sites pinned.
Then open another window and open a few tabs.
Then at the end of the day, close your primary window first, then discover you still have the secondary window open and close it as well.
When you restart Firefox you will get the secondary window and your "primary" window will be lost with all your pinned tabs.
I actually went down a rabbit hole of trying to log it as a bug, but the behavior is by design apparently.
(It's happening.gif)
But seriously, that makes me extremely happy. I'm using the weird hack in tree style tabs to do this and it's not great. I'd love this to work in general and something with a persistent "current context" for new tabs.
Speaking of, there are other cool new features coming to Firefox - such as vertical tabs: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
i have the exact same setup on ECC ram and zero crashes. on non ECC (cheap, garbage, that everyone accepted as the default) ram, one crash every couple weeks.
so unless you can prove software on the same cpu is non deterministic, it is ram corruption.
In any case, I've been been a Ubuntu user since ~2010 (and a Firefox user since its inception). I remember there being a time when Firefox was slower than Chrome and freezing occasionally but that was a looong time ago and I haven't had any issues with performance or freezes/crashes ever since.
I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu since 18.04 was first released (about 6 years ago), and while I've encountered some issues, I haven't experienced the problem you're describing.
Of course, browser performance can be affected by many factors in your system. If you're seeking help, you might have better luck in a dedicated support forum or the official Firefox support channels.
gestures for reload/back/forward? really?
several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?
a convoluted only-4-containers shenanigans that not even the author understand instead of simply isolating private tabs per window like everyone asked over the years?
using on android? too bad now you don't have half the settings available, AND you will not access many extension for no technical reason other than mozilla implemented a blacklist! ...oh and no access to about:config either!
i don't recall many examples because i gave up caring and have a list of settings (most not even available in the settings screen) and extension i must install on Firefox every new install which is larger than my OS customizations.... and on android i did what anybself respecting person would do and never touch Mozilla's default. install F-DROID's instead.
so, no, Firefox defaults are not very good.
How much less will Google pay to be the default search if this is added?
i remember when google and Microsoft had to do the w3c misdirection, now they don't even pretend.
Might be better that way. AdBlockers are fast-moving, with a dedicated, diligent working community. Outside the browser, they probably can work better.
And anyway, their Google contract certainly prevents them from doing shipping ad-blocking by default.
heck dev tools started as someone cloning IE dev tool as an extension... there were two... the IE clone and a dalvik debugger... mozilla had no problem picking the winer and incorporating in the official build.
> their google contract
stop normalizing this! they officially denie this arrangement exist! so they cannot use it as an excuse.
for the past decade updates to the extension itself have been UI only.
FF works for me in great ways, and I am highly productive with it, as long as some plugins still work: uBlock, tridactyl, foxyproxy. And for UI: sidebery, stylus.
From time to time I feel I should turn my back towards FF when they come up with new decisions in their UI, which I drastically reduce (no menu, no tabs,...), or new features, which are more disturbing than helping.
On android, I discovered 'kiwi browser' which is FF based but does not blacklist the plugins.
first there was a non documented setting to remove the blacklist for extensions... when they blocked access to about:config then everyone started using firefox dev... now they removed the block from nightly (i guess using real bleeding edge dev annoyed them)...
anyway, this only proves me point even harder.
And I guess threads like this is a great place to gather user opinions.
I think in this thread, people did talk about Split View a lot (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306665), can you talk to the team about this feature ? Considering it's getting a lot of comment, people seem to want it a lot.
I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable.
For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results looks similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient.
Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.