Show HN: Advanced Tab Manager for Firefox (opens in new tab)

While you have their attention:

Where are native vertical tabs? Or at least a settings checkbox to turn horizontal tabs off.

Yes a million times. Please go vote for issue https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350 (and please add to the discussion, but do refrain from pure-noise "me too" comments :). If no one comments there today, tomorrow I'll post a summary of stuff discussed here in this HN thread, I see are a couple things worth surfacing.

As to why a "simple native tab group" is important even when there are umpteen extensions offering some version of it (in addition to OP's legit point about addon permissions), my take is in comment 40, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350#c40 .

TL;DR: 1. Feature parity with a Chrome feature that is actually visibly used a lot (from direct observation at work), 2. Shipping a simple high-quality "baseline".

Pleaaaaase, Moz PMs & devs, some attention to this!

This is legitimately the only thing I've been asking for from Firefox the last <many> years, I don't really care about webgpu, usb device access would be nice as would fine grained user-controllable permissions for extensions - but all I really want every single day is a better way to group tabs. Hell - just being able to group them by colour like you can in Chrome would be a huge leap forward. I've tried all the well known extensions and I'm not a fan of any of them.

I'd be completely satisfied if they brought the old MRU tab ordering back. The MRU tab extension is a very poor substitution for it.

Are you talking about the thing Chrome does with it's tabs where you can put them together in sections and give them a colour and name?

Sidebery is wonderful, but the real gem is Tab Stash. Lets me organize tabs into topic-related groups, with the added bonus that not all of these are "living" tabs. Some are archived/hibernated. By default, live tabs are in an unorganized/unnamed group. The only issue I had was I couldn't tell which tab was playing audio. Tab Stash doesn't have indicators for this, so I installed the Sound Control extension to list tabs playing audio and switch to them.

I got: vertical tabs, tab grouping by topic/label, tab archival (low memory use)

I am a huge fan of Sidebery, but it really highlights how messed up Mozilla is. Not only have they failed to provide a native vertical tab solution, but then you go to turn off the damn horizontal ones and you have to jump through convoluted hoops by enabling the userChrome.css and then figuring out where the hell to put the file and all of this for one edit. Yeah sure, I have figured it out (and have to re figure every time I install FF), but there is no way that I could ever tell a random user to switch to vertical. I cannot fathom how Mozilla could not add a checkbox to their anemic settings menu.

In grasshopper you can filter by domain, but also can add tags, and colors, to any tab, and filter through this. There's a profile editor accessible when you right click the items.

Why not use the bookmark sidebar?

Is there an authoritative way hiding the horizontal tab with SideBerry?

As someone who keeps tabs open forever (as better bookmarks), resulting in tens of windows with each tens of tabs, I finally settled on Tab Session Manager [1] which allows me to "stash" these Windows and restore them later.

It seems this add-on manages and AllTabsHelper open tabs only and does not have a separate session manger (the one built into Firefox is a joke, sadly).

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...

> Why do so many people need a tab manager in say Firefox, but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander

I guess you could call me a "tab hoarder", I commonly have 50+ tabs open for the various topics and contexts I'm browsing and switching between. I usually also always restore my previous session from the day before, so some of the tabs are 2 weeks old but I have yet to finish the thing they're related to, so they stay up.

Compared to other applications that I close/open without restoring the previous context. I guess the terminal/tmux is the one that has the most context, and there I usually have 5-10 tabs open at any given time, for the same reason as above. And then I do use a manager of sorts (tmux), but for all the rest, I'm just opening/closing things as needed.

For myself at least vertical tabs can be easily grouped to visually show task or subject. If I’m doing ticket work for example,each ticket gets a main tab with their related child tabs indented underneath. I’ve even written a small web app that creates custom tab titles which I use for organizing tabs.

Lack of vertical tabs is why I don’t use Chrome.

I think it's largely a solution for bad UI, both in the web and in the browser.

I have a window open just with YouTube tabs of videos that interest me and that I intend to watch in the near future. As an OS-level window, it has weight and presence. Inside the window I have vertical and nested tabs. So I have videos grouped by topic or just by the rabbit hole I used. I can collapse them, move them around, etc. It's tactile. If I put all those videos into a YouTube playlist, it becomes static. It's a link in a list. It becomes less convenient and natural to add things to the list or even interact with them. There's no nesting, no grouping. Have you tried working with a YouTube playlist? It's abysmal. I'd rather keep them in a more concrete state as a tab which is integrated into my browser's tabs system (or whatever extension I use for it, in this case Sidebery) as part of a window that's a natural part of my OS.

This is all before considering how incredibly bad and basic Chrome and Firefox's history tabs are, which we also end up replacing with hundreds of tabs. I wish I had a vim-like undotree or anything like it to navigate my past tabs. There's a whole spatial component that's missing, whole dimensions missing, and I've never understood why.

You don't manage your Word documents in Word. You use the OS for that. That's pretty much why nobody needs tabs in Word.

> but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?

Because they rarely open so many tabs there? I routinely open dozens of tabs in web browsers as I navigate to other pages wanting to keep the previous while I explore the web (I hardly ever left-click links - I almost always wheel-click) but I rarely ever open more than 6 folders in Total Commander or more than 6 documents in an Office.

As a developer here is a scenario:

Start day on task A. Open Task, Open Subtask, Open git PR to check comments, Open Azure portal to check something, check Kibana Logs. Do a seperate second Kibana query.

Get asked about task B

Open Task, Open OneNote docs on that task, open a chatgpt session for that task

This is a mild example

Why not close tabs as they are used? Because if I need them again the load time of many sites is atrocious and then I also need to remember how I got there. I would need to save my kibana query or make a note of how I got to that Azure blade. Neither of these update the URL to capture the state (they are not HATEOAS) or I donn’t trust them to.

It should be implemented on os-system level, so you can access the content, no matter with which app.

People use all their cloud services via Firefox, not so much via Word.

Also, you may be writing one document but have a hundred tabs open for research.

> but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?

How do you know? Those apps have no way to customize on the same level that Firefox allows. But they also have their ways to handle masses of documents and windows, they are just not very good.

What's so hard about understanding that easily accessible groups of documents is a useful concept in organizing your digital life?

And why do you think they don't? I'd love to have a consistently great tab management experience in all the apps that have tabs (and all the apps that don't). It's just they are more closed, so it's harder to do that with some extension

And it's a bigger issue for the browser since you'd usually have more pages opened there

i refuse to believe this is a real question

Already added to my notes. I'll likely implement it. Make it pin+normal tab aware even, like only sort normal, pins, or both.

>I already enabled URL display so it already is two-line effectively but I feel like probably making both parts (the title and the URL) two-line each.

So apart from having URL + Title shown at the same time, I take it you mean to reserve two lines for those to have some room to wrap? I'll add a note to try it as a setting.

I documented unlocking the width of the sidebar in Firefox here: https://dev.to/semanticdata/unlock-the-sidebar-width-in-fire...

That sounds suspiciously like a number placed in a style sheet. Have you checked in the directory for your Firefox profile?

>Is this manager advanced enough to replicate Vivaldi's tab tiling and stacking functionality?

No, but it can do a bunch of stuff, which you can try.

>also not sure why the screenshots devote 80% of space to non-addon functionality like page with some distracting chip images and colored tables

Was easier to take screenshots like this. But maybe I'll try cropping next time. I guess the idea was to show how it looks as a sidebar, or as a popup.

It's available here: https://github.com/madprops/grasshopper. The link was in the left sidebar behind some tracking redirect.

You can download the xpi file directly from the versions page (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...) and extract it:

  $ file grasshopper_urls-746.xpi 
  grasshopper_urls-746.xpi: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract, compression method=deflate

There's a link to the github in the store.

Grasshoppers are cool. And a platform has been created to add more features if they make sense. It already can do a bunch of stuff, I advice you to give it a try.

Yes the theme is very customizable, check the Settings. There's also commands you can use if you double tap Ctrl twice. You can open the command palette and select Light Theme.