this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 204 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Please work on tab grouping instead!

[–] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 54 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It was useful 8 years ago when they removed it, that’s for sure.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (10 children)

Tab groups where natively implemented?

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Yes, they worked differently than the way Edge or Chrome do now and were in many ways superior for tab management, much more like Vivaldi’s sessions but more intuitive. I was a heavy user and so am biased. They said “just use an extension!” but it would crash and lose your session (and imo the extension works even worse today). It was really ahead of its time.

Few people used it because they didn’t advertise it or make it easily discoverable. You had to know the shortcut already through osmosis or drag the button out of the customize menu.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1221050#c0

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[–] kryllic 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Or vertical icon-only tabs!

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 9 months ago (8 children)

I really hope you can turn this off

[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 months ago

There'll be a setting in about:config no doubt.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Indeed. I get there are people who probably like this feature, but not me.

I'm tired of Mozilla pushing UI changes on people just for the sake of "progress".

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

...especially when they don't bother to fix years (sometimes decades) old bugs.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 9 months ago (5 children)

If this defaults to on, I’m turning it off.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 9 months ago (8 children)

Out of curiosity, why? If it's a knee-jerk reaction to change that's completely understandable, but I can't see anything to dislike about the feature itself

[–] [email protected] 54 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I can already read the title of the page and see the favicon, so it actually doesn't show new information. If I accidentally move my mouse there it covers a big part of the page i'm looking at

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

If you have many tabs opened:

I can already read the cropped title of the page and see the multiple favicon

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 9 months ago

Not OP but I’d do the same, for the simple reason that I find most overlays super distracting. It immediately triggers a need to see what’s underneath.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

On top of the fact that those previews are annoying as hell as other comments pointed out, I want to add that this kind of feature also uses a fair amount of processing + memory.

I think that is a nice opt-in feature for those who wants it but I like my default light and simple.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (5 children)

This has been people's reactions to anything good that comes into Firefox for close to 20 years now

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Really? AV1 & webp support, Quantum engine, process-per-tab, reader mode, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 support, cross-site tracking protection...?
Browsers have a lot of features. Some convenient, some come and go. That's ok.
Firefox is an ideological choice for some people so both cynicism and unconditional support is expected.

@AMDIsOurLord @linux

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If this defaults to off, I'm turning it on.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Here I'm still waiting for an official vertical tabs feature.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (8 children)
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (5 children)

In current versions of Firefox you hover your mouse over a non-active tab [...] to see (after a small delay) a tooltip containing the web page title.

Uh... what is the point of that? If I am looking for a specific tab then:

  • I probably want to switch to the tab that I am looking for, so staying on the current one is not required
  • if there are a few tabs from different pages from the same domain the difference might be hard to see on a thumbnail (similar page headings with logos)
  • and most importantly: opening the tab is faster than waiting for the delay anyway

This sounds like a "cool" feature that's looking for an actual problem to solve.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Tooltips are a standard accessibility feature. Just because you may not find them helpful doesn't mean others do not benefit. The delay is to ensure they don't get in the way unintentionally (but still allow usage) for those who do not need the accessibility benefit at all times.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

In the vast overwhelming amount of cases tooltips show additional information that you cannot see from clicking on something or provide an explanation to an option that isn't available without scrounging through a manual. None of those apply here.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (5 children)

This is not even close to the worst thing they have ever done, but stuff like this is a waste of resources. People mostly want official vertical tabs and more than anything engine performance improvements. (and the ability to pretend to be Chrome in Youtube)

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This was already a thing for ages until they killed it, but it is still possible if you are okay with tweaking userChrome.css

Why Mozilla wastes resources on their own implementation instead of providing API's to third party developers is beyond me.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Your first link is based on XUL, which was deprecated because it was wasting resources being unmaintainable and insecure.

Here's a great article about that

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

This is quite useful, especially for those sites without meaningful or distinctive names.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (6 children)

I miss the days with Opera. Not only could it group tabs, but it had previews too. Mouse gestures. Keyword searches. Page link filters and batch operations. RSS-reader. Chrome didn't even exist back then, and IE and Firefox are still playing catch up. Kinda amazing to think about it.

Vivaldi is the spiritual successor, but having to use chromium rendering engine, it's so many concessions and steps back. Has the mouse gestures, tho.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (11 children)

I think many people in the comments suffer from some version of curse of knowledge.

Sure, this feature us quite irrelevant for a power user who is quick to navigate the browser and needs a split second to remember what tab it is simply by reading the header and seeing the icon.

However, many less proficient people can benefit from this feature. Not once I saw how someone who has 10 tabs open and needs to go to a different webpage, starts meticulously clicking through every single one of them because they have no idea how the page they are looking for is called, they are too overwhelmed by using web as a whole to take notice.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of "I don't need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!"

Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It's more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.

There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.

Also the firefox dev team isn't tiny. This isn't blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it's a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there's no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Have they ever said if vertical-tabs is a feature they will add? Vivaldi and Edge both support it by default and it's awesome.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

1000ms delay seems to be little too much to my liking, changed browser.tabs.cardPreview.delayMs to 500 and it feels much better.

Preview is pretty short for some reason, it might be related to my monitor (32:9) aspect ratio?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Nice! I remember using an extension for that back in the day

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

I'd rather have them work on fingerprint spoofing, and getting rid of the tracking from google they put into it

Librewolf, if you want to use a firefox based browser, use librewolf instead.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

"We're super excited to announce that we're working on a feature that has been requested by no one ever".

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Not a bad feature IMO....

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Chrome has it for some reason so I guess they're just copying them

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

I love tab previews, but I would hate to give up vertical tabs for it. If they would implement vertical tabs + previews, I for one would be happy.

Anyone know a way to mimic Brave vertical tabs with preview? I can get close, but without preview images and that's what I'm after.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Yeah I always turn off that previi crap immediately as it usually gets in my way of doing things. Please don't even spend time on this feature, I don't really see the use

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

I think this is a good idea, not because I'd use it but because it's the sort of thing people will want if we are to expect them to migrate from Ch***e (which already has this feature). It's just the sort of thing Mozilla should be introducing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't see the point personally but I enabled it just because and while it does work it's currently very slow for me. It takes around 1 sec for the preview to appear so finding something by moving the cursor quickly across the tabs is impossible unless you slow way down.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

From the article:

To control how fast/slow tooltips appear modify browser.tabs.cardPreview.delayMs. This is set to 1000 (milliseconds) by default, meaning tooltips only appear once you’ve hovered over a tab for at least a second.

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