this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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99
Firefox "tabs" in a tiling WM (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In the image, these are not tabs. These are firefox windows, being rendered as tabs (and as stacks) by sway.

I just switched to sway, and found that browser tabs no longer make sense. They were designed in the UI dark ages to make up for how terrible Windows XP's WM was. Now, though, sway can do tabs just as well as firefox can, and sometimes, even better. It is better to unify the management of all windows under a single WM, rather than this ad hoc mixture of the real, global WM, and a fake firefox-only (or terminal-only) WM. That way, all windows are managed with a single set of keyboard shortcuts.

I also found firefox's toolbar to be way too thick.

So, I used userChrome.css to hide the tab bar and adjust the toolbar's height:

/* Hide the tab bar. */
#TabsToolbar {
    visibility: collapse !important;
}

/* Adjust the toolbar height. */
#urlbar-container {
    --urlbar-container-height: var(--tbh) !important;
}
#urlbar {
    --urlbar-toolbar-height: var(--tbh) !important;
    --urlbar-height: var(--tbh) !important;
}
:root {
    --tbh: 26px !important; /* ToolBar Height. Adjust this one. */
    --toolbarbutton-inner-padding: calc((var(--tbh) - 16px)/2) !important;
    --toolbarbutton-outer-padding: 0px !important;
    --toolbar-start-end-padding: 0px !important;
    --urlbar-margin-inline: 0px !important;
}

Put this file at <profile root>/chrome/userChrome.css. You'll probably have to make the chrome directory. Then, in about:config, set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true, to get firefox to read userChrome.css. Oh, and don't forget to tell firefox to open new pages in new windows instead of new tabs.

I have also found it useful to map the firefox command to Super-C, so that I can make a new firefox window without needing to have some other firefox window already in focus.

I have also found it useful to keep an empty firefox window open in some unused workspace on its own, so that after I close what I didn't realise was the last open firefox window, firefox does not close entirely.

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 7 months ago (3 children)

this post was made by a non-tab-hoarder

[–] [email protected] 40 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You use tabs as tabs,
I use tabs as bookmarks.
We are not the same.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Problem is, you can only have one bookmark for each url. So if you want to have readling list bookmarks, you better not use bookmarks for anything else.

There's a workaround, sure, add a # and some gibberish to the URL's end, but that's not really a solution

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

you better not use bookmarks for anything else

I don't get it, instead of what?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What I wanted to mean is that if you use bookmarks as a reading list, you are better off not using them for any other purpose, like saving articles by categories for later reference.
This is because each bookmark can only be in a single bookmark folder.
Additionally, if you have an addon that makes bookmarks, and it creates a bookmark for a site you have already bookmarked (let alone mass creates such bookmarks), the old ones will be lost along with their tags.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Oh I see, that's true! Firefox bookmarks are a bit suboptimal in my experience too, for me it's because they don't have a description field so it's harder to search for them (unless you put the text in the title, but all these kludges are annoying)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

I currently have around 170 tabs open...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

You only saw the tabs open on this workspace.

But yeah I don't have hundreds of tabs open. It is incompatible with my workflow. Only the "tabs" directly relevant to whatever is currently happening in the current workspace are kept open.

A link either gets read or it doesn't. If I don't have time to read a link somebody sends me personally, I just tell them that. I don't string anybody along about a link I know I will never read. I can't allow for any link backlog. That leads to . . . dark places.

Also, I don't really use bookmarks either. When I disable search suggestions and use firefox suggest, it leave more space for history. It works so well I don't really need to bookmark anything. Frequently opened sites make their way to the top on their own.

[–] vvv 29 points 7 months ago (1 children)

something to consider here... Firefox lazy-loads out of focus tabs when you start it, so if you're a tab hoarder, it's nice for just the one active tab per window to load when you start the browser.

I'm not sure that you can get it to do the same with "out of focus" windows. or maybe I have a tab hoarding problem.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, the first thing I do when I log in is restore my Firefox session, which includes several windows with quite a lot of tabs. I also use the Auto Tab Discard extension so I can keep lots of tabs in my workspace without having all of them loaded all the time.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

in case you don't know, you can discard tabs natively without an extension in FF now by going to URL about:unloads. it's a newish feature in the past year or so. much more rudimentary than Auto Tab Discard but gets the job done with one less extension.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Ooh - thanks for the tip!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You haven't seen my Firefox with Sidebery extension and almost 300 tabs open, neatly organized into categories, tab stacks with three levels and folders :P ~~I should clean it up some day~~

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You haven’t seen my Firefox with Sidebery extension and 544 tabs open, not even remotely organized into categories, no tab stacks with three levels and folders :P ~~I should clean it up some day~~

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

I'm scared. To have 600+ tabs open like this...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

In a conventional set up you have tabs which are collected into windows. When you close a window, all tabs it contains are closed. You can do other things on all the tabs in a window, like reload, unload, bookmark, etc.

Windows can be divided among workspaces arbitrarily or can be on all workspaces. Workspaces can be created or deleted on the fly. Windows which are in a deleted workspace do not close, they just move to an adjacent workspace. Though you could probably script otherwise if you wanted.

From your screenshot am thinking your system is just like having all tabs in a single window in a single workspace?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

So is each Firefox tab a separate window with this design? And thus managed by sway as separate windows and tabbed accordingly?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Thank you. I do not think it ever crossed my mind to simply not use the firefox tabs.

But there are a couple of features missing i would miss.

  1. Reopen Tab
  2. Tab Containers
[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I though Ctrl+Shift+T also worked to restore windows?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Ctrl-Shift-N restores closed windows

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

You don't use multiple tabbed windows to sort what you're doing?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Gosh, I'm so fascinated by the concept of removing/hiding the tabs implementation from every app and relying 100% on the window manager to provide this

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

I still find windows and tabs to be a useful way to have a nested organizational structure for web browsing. To solve the visual issue, I permanently hide the tab bar, and I use tree-style tabs with css to auto-hide the tab panel unless my cursor is all the way on the left side of the window. I also have the toolbar autohide unless my cursor is at the top of the window.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

We need a community to showcase various UI hacks for Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

I think this is super inefficient if you happen to have more than maybe three tabs open. How long will it take me to reach to the file explorer I've also opened? Moreover, how long will it take me to find it...?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I like the idea of a tiling window manager but I found it about as effective to use a regular window manager like KDE or Gnome that allows you to snap windows to 1/4 or 1/2 the screen ... Windows even does that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Tiling WM are more than screen splitters. It's difficult to apprehend without trying it. A friend of mine had the same reasoning before actually trying one. Now he couldn't go back. Although, like everything else, tiling WM are not for everyone and that's why there're other options :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

there was too many bugs in tiling WM last time i tried... which one do you use?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I've been through awesomewm, i3, and dwm. Now I'm using bspwm. Each one has its own specificities and is more or less easy to familiarized with.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

COSMIC is getting "fancy zone" snapping at the moment it seems (community efford)

COSMIC already has tabbing/stacking windows which is so cool, as I can finally ditch Konsole for Alacritty (if I manage profiles for distroboxes and color profiles etc).

I kinda try to get used to autotiling but its strange as fuck.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

You do you but if you are looking for a keyboard centric workflow you might have a better time with sidebery and vimium.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

You'll soon join the dark side of minimalism where neither tabs nor stacks are an option. That's where tiling WM push you eventually ;) I use librewolf (fork of Firefox) with no bars whatsoever so I can benefit of the entire screen space to show me what matters: the content. I've coupled it with the tridactyl extension for a lot of reasons, one being that it can show me the list of tabs with a keybinding (simply pressing "T" in my case).