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Shit, I remember seeing requests for tab groups for like 20 years under an assortment of names and descriptions. Neat to see. Useless for me, but neat to see.
Next they'll implement DownThemAll natively. Really putting their finger on the pulse of 2008.
This is a nice feature when you have a group of multiple sites you need quick access to on the regular. For me, I manage around 12 websites in three environments ; dev, test, and prod. Being able to group the websites by environment keeps things organized and somewhat readily available at two clicks (maybe three if you count collapsing a group before opening another group).
Now, the team is experimenting with smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.
I bet you one cheap bottle of mineral water they'll implement this like tomorrow
I had to enable them: about:config -> browser.tabs.groups.enabled -> true
smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.
Yeah sure ok. Did the community ask for this too?
I mean, why not?
They integrated accessibility focused, local, AI pretty well.
Loads of folks bitched about it because they were triggered by "AI", but it's essentially invisible, as it should be.
I hate naming things, that's actually something AI is good at, hell yeah, let it name my shit for me please.
Then again, these communities are always full of Debby downers who hate on everything.
[Dr. Who meme format]
Is AI bad?
It Depends. Large corporate AI hosted at a data centre that consumes a nuclear reactor's worth of power and a lake's worth of water for cooling for the purpose of generating slop stolen from Artists and Writers? Yes.
Locally run embedded AI designed for a specific task to automate small processes or enhance the UI experience with little cost to local computing resources because it's been properly optimised? No.
I don't care about AI when it's doing minor things like this it's when they're shoving it down our throats and we don't want it.
So they're reintroducing a feature in 2025 that they added to Firefox in 2010 and subsequently removed in 2013. Such progress. Much wow.
Now, the team is experimenting with smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.
Off course, they found a way to integrate more Ai features.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the inclusion of some small AI feature is what justified the rest of this work being done. As in, someone got approval for tab groups only because they were smart enough to describe it as “AI powered tab groups“. Just speculation
I feel like this feature is a good idea that has come too late for me. I already "group" stuff via windows. That'll be a hard habit to break.
Do you use an add-on to prevent that from wiping out all but one window's worth of tabs when you close them? That's what originally made me get a tab grouping addon, after losing a ton of tabs when I broke some out into their own window and then later closed the main tab window before the secondary one. Realized immediately what happened but it was already too late to save that entire generation of precious tabs. Who knows what articles I didn't feel like reading at the time but was totally going to read later I lost forever.
Ctrl+Q terminates the whole program at once and you don't lose any windows.
Oh btw, just like Ctrl+shift+t reopens closed tabs, so Ctrl+shift+n reopens whole windows, with all tabs.
Was I signed up for some beta? I've had firefox groups for a few weeks now.
And holy shit do I need em.

Tab groups are built for open tabs, bookmarks are built for revisiting things. Their use cases are quite different in my opinion.
just moving them to a dedicated window.
That's the key, it's like having a separate window, but without the separate window.
At work I'll open anywhere between 40 and 100 tabs at a time, but I want to keep them near my existing tabs and not in another window. I have an extension that opens them all in a new tab group. I typically work from the left edge of the group and close out of tabs as I get through them. I can still hop between my non grouped and grouped tabs without having to change windows. And if I want to pause it for a bit then I "minimize" the group like a window.
Most of what web browsers do is the same feature multiple times just presented differently
instead of having 12984 tabs open, you can have 345 groups with only a few dozen tabs in each one.
Multitasking, preparing for meetings/workshops, not having to make bookmarks that are only relevant for the duration of a project/task.
There are many valid uses of tab groups that need to be kept open for quick accessibility without waiting for pages to load or finding specific groups of links that will not be relevant in a week
I don't know about groups specifically, but keeping a tab open retains its history, so you can go back (and forward) later.
am i the only one who like, closes all tabs when done? i have tabs I'll come back to when working on something not when it's all finished i close it all the fuck down.
i know 'am i the only one' is a cliche n shit but I'm starting to think i really am. everyone i know has all these tabs open all the time.
I do this as well - the only exception is work, where I pin a few tabs. Out of curiosity are you an “inbox zero” person? Because I am, and the only parallel I can draw is between that and my similar tab management.
All that article and they don’t say how to use it it turn it on, smh.
"You asked, we built it" --> "People keep shitting on us for our terrible decisions... Quick let's do something people actually want to compensate ! Wait let's also slap AI on it, I'm sure everyone will love that" (Mozilla being Mozilla I guess...)
I would much rather see Tree Style Tab be integrated.
Can't wait for Ironfox to implement this.
Desktop only? Sigh...
*here again. Let's see how long it takes them this time to remove it again.
Not something I'll ever use, but cool regardless
Been using it for a couple of months now at work. It's good.
I also appreciate how intuitively it works. I wasn't aware of this feature when it first landed in developer edition, but after I accidentally created a group with drag and drop, the feature just clicked.
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