Tab strip for Firefox Android now available in Firefox Nightly - check it out and share your feedback!

[Jon]

Hey all, 

Exciting news…

The tab strip feature for Firefox Android (tablets) has landed in Firefox Nightly 🎉

This has been a popular idea here on Connect—see this thread—and also requested often in app store reviews and on our support site. 

So a big thank you for sharing your feedback, which played an important role in getting the work prioritized. And speaking of feedback… 

We would love to hear your thoughts on the feature. If you have a tablet, download Nightly and check it out. 

⬇️ let us know what you think ⬇️

[jxduran]

Feedback for the team: enable for foldables. It was already working before, what is the reason to manually take this feature away? Vivaldi has a tab bar for *all* devices including regular slab phones, why can't Firefox have it for foldables at least?

[Frenchy82]

Please add this function to mobiles. It's so usefull

Thanks a lot for the work done

[firecat]

The feature should definitely be in the version for phones and for foldable devices. I also like the ability to add a vertical tab bar, as it was before.

[Contantchangesa]

Ok, now how do I disable it?

[jxduran]

I think a good place for this should be a new "Tabs bar" toggle in the Settings > Tabs screen, above or below the toggle to "Move old tabs to inactive"

[Contantchangesa]

Would be nice. It's extremely stupid that there isn't even an about:config option for this.

[hellequin967]

This is great to see finally.  Tabbed strip browsing on Android tablets.

Two feedback entries.

1.  Default view for tablets should be desktop mode or at least have a way to enable it as default for the browser rather than per tab.

2. I've noticed when in desktop mode the view is zoomed in and no way to zoom out to make the page more legible.

Examples below:

Firefox:

Vivaldi:

3.  Also when selecting desktop mode and moving away from the browser, on return it doesn't remember you've chosen desktop and defaults back mobile on refresh.  Only solution is to open a new table and re-select desktop mode.

[cpeterson]

Here is a Bugzilla bug tracking the request to default to desktop mode on tablets: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1790516

Chrome and Safari default to a desktop-like mode on tablets. Their User-Agent strings omit the word "Mobile" (so websites serve a desktop page), but they still mention "Android" or "iPad" (so websites that want to promote their native Android or iPad app can do so). TBD which approach would be best for Firefox Android.

[okay_okay]

looks great thank you!!!

[metachs]

There seriously needs to be a way to disable the tab strip. It removes useful functionality: swiping the nav bar to switch tabs (Why?), and bottom toolbar. The tabs themselves are oversized horizontally, (vertical mode stock config Galaxy Tab S9 fits 4 tabs, chrome fits >8). It takes up way to much vertical space overall. IMO not having a tab bar was one of the benefits of Firefox on android, and this is horribly disappointing.

Why did this disable swiping to switch tabs!?

[suikaz]

I'm pretty sure the tab bar popped up when scaling was set to a certain value even before and that's the main reason I opted for a slightly less dense UI, to avoid the tab bar, so it certainly needs to be easy to disable

[Emmic]

any chance we can get some kind of pinch to zoom thing in this, which lets us make each individual tab section larger so we can actually read the full title of the tabs we have open? on my screen I can currently see 8 tabs, but would rather be able to see 5 and actually see the whole page titles.

[cwh]

Can you advise when this feature will be available in the regular android version of Firefox, which I presume is the app used by the vast majority of the installed base on android?  I heard about this much needed change many months ago, but am still waiting.  Not sure how much longer I'm going to hang on before moving to another browser that already has a proper tablet layout, with tabs.  The current smartphone layout is just painful on a 10+ inch tablet. Thanks. 

[hellequin967]

I'm running the nightly build on my Xiaomi 6 with the tab strip.  All I can say is this was released to you right now I suspect it would be a disappointment.

My primary browser at the moment is Vivaldi but you can use any chromium based browser to compare and the tablet experience is still light and day apart.

[Synchro]

Thank you for working on this. This is a really must-have feature. What about the way it is realised I would like to suggest a couple of things:

1. Now the width of a tab in the tab strip is permanent, so when there is no more space the old ones go away from the strip and I have to swipe the strip to reach for them. For me it's more common the way it is realised in Firefox for Windows, when tabs become more narrow but all of them can be seen at once.

2. Now this strip and the address panel can be placed only on the top of a page, not on the bottom. If this stay in the final release, this can be inconvenient for old users.