Mozilla confirms it will add Tab Groups, Vertical Tabs, Profile Management to Firefox
Mozilla has officially announced a roadmap that outlines some important features which will be added to Firefox. Notable additions will include support for Tab Groups, Vertical Tabs, and a better Profile Management system.
Vertical Tabs are coming to Firefox
Mozilla's Tweet poked fun at itself, saying that it heard users who had been asking for a vertical tab bar in the browser. The feature is already available in the Larch channel of Firefox, which Martin tested last month.
Vertical tabs aren't new, Brave browser has the feature, as do Vivaldi, and Microsoft Edge. Firefox users have relied on extensions like Tree Style Tab and Sidebery for a similar experience. Waterfox collaborated with Tree Style Tab to add Vertical Tabs by default. It is easier to scroll a list of tabs listed vertically on a sidebar than to scroll the tab bar horizontally. Vertical tabs can be particularly useful on multi-monitor setups, and ultrawide screens. You can test the vertical tab bar in Firefox in the latest larch version, which is available on Mozilla's FTP portal. The feature is still in a pretty bare-bones state, but it's a start.
I would prefer having a vertical tab bar that doesn't take up space on the edge of the screen, i.e. if the bar is hidden automatically, and reappears when you hover the mouse over the edge, or perhaps with a hotkey. A search bar to filter the list of tabs would be cool, but I'm not sure if Mozilla plans to add one.
Tab Groups in Firefox
Another feature that Mozilla is working on is Tab Groups. Once again, this is already available in all Chromium browsers. The feature lets you stack tabs together, sort of like putting tabs in a folder. It is very useful to organize tabs based on your usage. This is a feature that many users who have switched over from Chrome miss in Firefox. So it is good to see that it will be officially added to the browser. I have a number of pinned tabs in Firefox for work/personal use, grouping them together would not only save some space, but also help keep it tidy.
New Profile Management System in Firefox
Firefox is getting a new Profile Management System that will allow you to keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate. Google Chrome (and Chromium based browsers), and Apple Safari already have a similar Profile Switcher, all you need to do is click on a profile name, and the browser opens a new window dedicated to that profile. The data from each profile is saved separately. The new system will allow users to switch between different profiles quickly.
Firefox does support Containers, which allows you to isolate sites, but I think the proposed Profiles Management System will be even more useful, especially if you use multiple accounts with a service provider (e.g. multiple Google or Microsoft accounts).
Tab Wallpapers, Streamlined Menus
Users who wish to personalize their browser will love this news. Firefox will add support for tab wallpapers that are customizable. It appears that Mozilla will offer a catalog of backgrounds such as photography, colors, and abstract images. The menus in Firefox are also getting a makeover. Mozilla says it will streamline the menus to reduce clutter. The new design will prioritize top user actions to allow them to be accessed quickly. If I'm understanding it correctly, it sounds like users would be able to add/remove items from the right-click menu, or at least rearrange them.
The announcement on Mozilla Connect also mentions some intuitive privacy settings that will help users enable anti-tracking technologies in a more simplified, easy-to-understand way.
AI in Firefox
As we have previously reported, Mozilla is working on bringing AI features to Firefox which will use local, on-device AI models for privacy. One of these features will allow the AI to generate alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, to make them more to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities. The browser will process the content on your device, instead of using cloud services.
Mozilla says it will add Vertical Tabs, Tab Groups, and the other features in the coming year. Which feature are you most excited for?
Back in the days of XUL you could use Classic Theme Restorer to resize tabs to such a degree that it was possible to get 30 of them or more across the tab bar. But WebEx put paid to that along with several other things you could do to customize Firefox.
Vertical tabs? Floorp has had those for at least 12 months, but I don’t like them and just use the space for bookmark (folders) and their contents which I find easier to work with. Link to download Floorp if you’re interested: https://floorp.app/en
Officially, not supported on any OS less than Windows 10, but I’m using it in Win 8.1 and it still works.
Tab Groups never left, friends: https://github.com/117649/Tab-Groups
More useless bells and whistles added to a software by a corporation that is led by mindless children catering the the whims of mindless children.
Firesux is POS. they can’t even move their History and Downloads to a tab, still displays in outdated sidebar from 2002, yet they update the UI every few years and make it uglier while the browser becomes more web-incompatible.
What a joke to use Firesux.
@Bsbwb 10 BAT for you saar!
nice seething. let me guess: brave user
For years, I and other users been asking for a ‘tabs at the bottom’ option. I ask again now.
This option should be very simple to add, far simpler than today’s additions. We had it years ago.
I don’t like Firefox refusing to give its users such an obvious option.
It is even trivial to add with custom CSS. That is of course, should people be willing to invest 10 minutes of work in a text editor.
The entire UI can be customized, again, if one is willing.
Thanks, @Aurelius. I was not aware of that. In that case, someone has surely written an extension to do the job?
I’m not a techie, and I don’t know the CSS code. How trivial is it? Ashwin, perhaps you know about this.
I’m happy Firefox will get the features you mention, all of them. Just hope that streamlining FF menus doesn’t mean some options will be removed from menus. Firefox is my favourite browser.
Note how the comments section is full of damage control from the usual suspects
Kind of like you when a yet another Chrome zero day is discovered.
[https://i.imgur.com/NI0NgCU.jpeg]
Well, seems like it is everything Chrome already has, so I don’t know how good it is they are adding features that were obvious in Chrome or Chromium forks.
The interesting thing is Chromium is not even offering tab groups, they already sync between desktop and soon with mobile (flag), so Chromium keeps getting better while others are trying to catch up.
There are also the Chromium browsers that use custom UI not native like Vivaldi that have these features and more, and while UI is slow and buggy and weird, it offers amazing features.
Of course Firefox fans will forget about how many websites still won’t work, chromecast, and all that, but at least they should be happy Firefox is getting features and just telemetry or some AI or some extension embedded or something.
I will still not use Brave, cope.
Can you tell me if the chromecast technology is open-sourced?
And proper site isolation is of course still unavailable.
just enable first party isolation and use containers …
this is the most robust site isolation you will get in any browser
that major problem is, that most users be don’t even know how to use/configure their browser
Firefox really needs to focus on compatibility, speedy performance, and improving useability.
Leave stuff like this to extension developers – help extension developers and other people which do a much better job of making Firefox desirable than you do – stop breaking people’s userchrome for superfluous crap?
I’ll say it again if you’re copying chrome, at least copy their history system? No “Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Last Month, etc” just one long searchable list, which is a SQL database file, which by itself also has high searchability.
well extensions are a serious security issue … except for private sessions, an extension ‘sees’ more or less everything your browser does, so it can steal more or less all data or profile all of your activities at ease.
Most extensions are developed by individuals who after several years either give up and abondon the code or simply sell their extension to shady sides for a small sum, who can then abuse the extension in the way described above or even use the update mechanism of the extension to install malware into the extension. Has repeatedly happened in the past.
Further does a vast collection of extensions constitute a unique combination and thus makes the browser a perfectly trackable/fingerprintable target.
And finally: extensions are JIT-compiled Javascript, not ahead-of-time compiled C++, meaning excessive use of extensions also significantly slows down the speed of the browser and increases the memory footprint of the browser. Which is exactly the thing you don’t want, right ?
So as a summary: while i do understand, why people like extensions, extensions themselves do in principle constitute a potential privacy and security risk and should be avoid as best much as can be. Doesn’t mean get rid of all of them, it just means get rid of those that are not absolutely necessary.
It also doesn’t mean that all extensions are “evil” .. the majority certainly are not, and some are useful to increase security or privacy (eg uBlock origin, Noscript, uMatrix, Containers etc) but it’s also the easiest way for an attacker onto your the system if you accidentally opt to install the wrong extension. The higher the number of installed extensions, the higher the risks, that one of them going to be compromised.
I understand that this deviation from the simple black-and-white scheme won’t be understood by mentally less agile readers, but i hope most will get the basic principle.
@Anonymous
“well extensions are a serious security issue”, well why do they have to be? I don’t agree with such blanket statements. If someone publishes an extension on the firefox extensions page, it should be checked to make sure it’s only doing what’s necessary, it’s not a new issue, they could do something similar to android apks which have a permissions manifest – or, the end user should just accept associated risks, either works for me, but I’ve got many extensions and none of them seem to be compromising my security as we speak. Unless I’m wrong and they are?
I mean, I can also say “executables are a serious security issue”, anything that can run is a security issue.
If an extension is abandoned, then the browser can check last extension update date with last firefox update date, and give user a warning that extension may be deprecated. If a malicious actor buys an extension and pushes a malicious update, first you have to have automatic updating turned on, secondly upon detection, the malicious extension should be removed from the firefox site, the developer account terminated.
None of these issues you’ve outlined are novel or special.
“Which is exactly the thing you don’t want, right ?” I can say more than anything I don’t really like a browser, 50-70% of which is features and modules I don’t use or won’t ever use.
But all I’m gonna say is, those who seek to sacrifice freedom for a little bit of safety…
“Speed is everything when you’re online, so we’re continuing to work hard to make Firefox as fast and efficient as possible. You can expect even faster, smoother browsing on Firefox, thanks to quicker page loads and startup times – all while saving more of your phone’s battery life. We’ve already improved responsiveness by 20 percent as measured by Speedometer 3, a collaboration we’ve spearheaded with other leading tech companies. ”
shut up and read next time
the salt is real, my dude!
You’ve quoted something that is not on this page, you expect that people here will all read the summary, then go read the actual announcement? And the quote isn’t as much of an own as you think, since it clearly relates to the android version of Firefox, which is irrelevant to me, as their minimum android requirement is 5.
And thanks for making me click on the real announcement, there are lots of things in there which indeed do not fall in the category of “improving compatibility, performance, usability” and in my opinion will go on to bloat up the browser further. So thanks, now I stand by my original statements with confidence.
@bruh nice passive aggressive damage control. next time you lost an argument better stay quiet.
@Anonymous Oof what a burn. The way I see it you haven’t disproven much if anything of what I’ve said, however you’ve made it clear how upsetting it is to you when people don’t sing the praises of your favourite poor babby browser.
Also worth pointing out that passive aggressive isn’t as bad as straight up aggressive (like telling someone to shut up because you disagree with them). Juuust sayin….
Tab Groups used to be in Firefox, years before it was added to Chrome. They were removed in an effort to streamline it, but from the very day they came out, that same code was repackaged into an extension on AMO, where it still resides today (although it was partially rewritten when the extension format changed).
It really seems like Mozilla is betting on more growth by reversing their prior strategy of “keep the browser compact and let users add extensions for the features they want”.
>“keep the browser compact and let users add extensions for the features they want”.
The problem was that when they transitioned to xul extensions, it limited a lot the power of extensions and many of the things simply couldn’t be implemented as well in extension. Vertical tabs is a great example of such feature. Ideally Firefox would be a sort of modular browser where you can have those really powerful extensions that can pretty much do anything, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon..
@Eric “when they transitioned FROM xul extensions”
Fixed that for you.