What has actually changed here? I'm perhaps not the best person to be thinking about this, because I routinely use the nightlies to test things, but weren't many of those things in the stable already?
The more exciting thing in my opinion is the really cool work that's been going on in the form of the Vertical tabs/Sidebar nightly experiment.
Bookmarking feature to bookmark multiple tabs, among other things. That actually sounds useful and innovative. If you can pick a folder for those bookmarks and search them, that would be a killer feature.
The context menu item for duplicating tabs might be new, but you've been able to middle-click the refresh button to duplicate the current tab for quite some time now.
I have been using Sidebery for 2 years and never had an issue. It has all the features I need (bookmarks, tabs, panels integrated with firefox containers, themes, snapshots)
Sidebery is fantastic, but I do have to mention, that it had bugs in the past. It sometimes put all my tabs into the same group, so that I had to sort them anew, and sometimes it crashed, so that Firefox reloaded it and redisplayed the sidebar.
Lately I have not had any such issues with it.
I've had this happen once a few weeks ago, and enabled auto-snapshots, so I think if it happens again I can just restore the most recent one.
Also, in the past I've had Firefox crash in some weird way where it lost all my tabs, so I hope I'm safe from that too. (Tho it hasn't happened in a long while.)
I used TST for years until I switched to Sidebery, and I must say it somehow has all important settings from TST (which I supposed to be impossible - TST caters to tweakers in an extreme way) but is also faster (both startup time and day to day) and seem to use less memory as well.
Some things are in unexpected places (for example I expected to reopen a closed tab with right click outside an open tab - reopen closed tab, but it's in the trash icon at the bottom), but I think they are in better places. Sidebery is better designed.
Sidebery can also save your tabs automatically, something I used another extension for (Tab Extension Manager, which loads very slowly)
I also switched from TST a while ago. I agree with the others that Sidebery feels a good bit more polished.
It also has quite a few more features, like panels for bookmarks and closed tabs and, most importantly for me, integrated tab groups.
But if you just want "less buggy and prettier TST", you can probably just turn all the other stuff off, it's pretty customizable.
I switched from TST to Sideberry, I'm much happier now.
It's still weirdly slow, it somehow takes thousands of milliseconds (entire seconds!) to display the tab list on startup, but much less buggy than TST.
I also switched over a year or so ago and find it a significant improvement with one notable exception: in TST when you hover over a collapsed tab group it would show you a list of all tabs in the group while Sidebery doesn't. Similarly when closing a group Sidebery doesn't show all of the tabs that would close, just the total count.
I submitted a feature request a year ago but got no traction, and now I just expand and re-close groups before mass closing to double check if I need anything.
This looks interesting. I have to ask though, do you play EVE Online? That's a very distinctive font I've never seen used elsewhere and this looks really similar.
- You Right click a tab and choose `Add to new Tab Group`.
- You then name and set a colour for the group.
- You then drag tabs in and out of the group.
So far the tabs work much the same as ungrouped ones. There is a small coloured button to the left of the group with the name, and the tabs in the group are underlined with the same colour.
But then you click the button and the tabs all collapse.
The nice thing is when expanded they are just like every other tab, not hidden away in a folder, or some menu or modal. But then you can clean up with the press of a button.
Lack of Tab Groups is what stopped me from switching to Firefox last year.
That sounds like tree style tabs except with colors, that you have to manually set groups instead of it being grouped based on what opened what, and it's still horizontal so can't see more than a handful of tabs at the same time. On the other hand, it being native sounds like a big advantage (looking with one eye at xpi addons here, specifically the vertical tabs one Mozilla developed themselves and then immediately killed because it had been decided addons need to not be so powerful)
You can pre-select multiple tabs to add to the group when creating a new one. It will also automatically add newly opened tabs originating from a grouped tab in the same group. Not vertical like TST, but a very nice quality life improvement in the native browser.
If this means I can remove my firefox CSS that hides the horizontal tab bar at the top, and instead have it hidden automatically whenever I have Sidebery open, then this is an advance
People are wild with how many tabs they leave open. I never needed any of the advanced tab features or add-ons because I actually close tabs!
I only leave a tab open if I’m still actively using it. If I need to remember a tab I save the url in a bookmarking tool of some kind. Then I can easily find it later.
Ctrl/cmd+w is the keyboard shortcut. I highly recommend it. If you have so many tabs you can read all the titles in normal horizontal mode, you have a problem.
As a reformed tab hoarder, I concur completely. I do a nightly sweep where I force myself to save URLs for anything I need and close my browser completely.
FYI Brave, and I suppose Chromium, has a flag that, when enabled, when typing an existing tab/already open website, shows the the existing tab instead of allowing to create duplicates by mistake.
Firefox offers this in the dropdown when typing a URL, there's a "Switch to Tab" option to take you straight to the existing tab instead of creating a duplicate.
Firefox has been doing that for a long while too. It recommends going to the already open tab but you can ignore that and open a nee tab anyway if you wish.
Unrelated, why don't any non-chromium browsers do tabs like Chrome?
Taking personal preference out of it completely, it would seem the most used browser by virtue of this fact has the best UI, so why not just copy it?
I'm anticipating replies along the lines of, Chrome doesn't have the best UI, but the numbers don't lie, something is going on. Even just offering it as an option would be a good way to test the theory. (I know Firefox has themes and customisations to make it similar, but it's not the same, it's a hurdle and the end result isn't the same, and Mozilla doesn't seem interested in making this pursuit easy).
Why would I want to "group" tabs though? Is it something related to that disease people have of hoarding thousands of tabs instead of just opening what they actually need?
Chrome's tab groups implementation is pretty nice. I used it at work, very neat. Having tabs grouped by ticket, I might not work on one ticket today, I can collapse the group.
Of course, like its tabs, it's only good in small numbers, and in small names...
Probably how Chrome (and recently, Safari) segregate profiles by window. It makes keeping work tabs and personal tabs (for example) very simple / obvious.
Not Chrome though, so I don't see the relevance. I also don't like it. The address is relevant to that tab only, so it should be hierarchically inside it.
> - Firefox has tab scrolling, minimum tab widths, and the tab itself is a floating box, not a part of the page visually.
So, visual tweaks? Fine, but I don't see how that would improve UX massively.
> - Firefox's address bar is also different, to me it seems potentially also should be A/B tested with directly copying Chrome
Perhaps. Or maybe there's a lot of people who prefer Firefox's. In any case, again - visual tweaks?
I really don't see how any of those would bring great improvements to the Firefox experience.
> it would seem the most used browser by virtue of this fact has the best UI
This doesn't follow at all. It's not how anything does or ever has worked. Consider your claim in the context of the days of IE6, if this is not obvious to you upon reflection.
I use Chrome only because it’s required at work and I’ve never missed any part of its tab functionality on my personal computer. Specifically, I’ve found tab grouping quite clunky.
I’d much rather be able to assign colors to entire windows and use these as my groups (I already have muscle memory for switching between these on all OSes), but that doesn’t seem to be possible.
The more exciting thing in my opinion is the really cool work that's been going on in the form of the Vertical tabs/Sidebar nightly experiment.