12mo ago

Firefox Devs Working on Tab Previews

www.omgubuntu.co.uk Firefox Devs Working on Tab Previews - OMG! Ubuntu

Tab previews are in the works for a future release of Mozilla Firefox. In current versions of Firefox you hover your mouse over a non-active tab (i.e. any

169 comments

Please work on tab grouping instead!
- Now this would be useful.
  
  It was useful 8 years ago when they removed it, that’s for sure.
- Or vertical icon-only tabs!
  
  Genuinely the only good thing about Microsoft Edge. I wish other browsers had this.
- Or tabs not crashing when you want to move them between different windows.

I really hope you can turn this off
- There'll be a setting in about:config no doubt.
- 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".
  
  ...especially when they don't bother to fix years (sometimes decades) old bugs.
- why? It's objectively better?
  it also shows the url of the page, super convinient
  
  It's objectively worse. Fancier but objectively worse.
  Another big, distracting pop-up that has no benefit over the existing tool tip which is still distracting when it pops up unintentionally. Also the preview will use more system resources.

Here I'm still waiting for an official vertical tabs feature.
- In the meantime, Floorp has it built-in to the browser.
  
  I was aware of Floorp and had no particular interest in trying it until now. On my way to install it now!
  Last time I looked at Floorp was when it was first announced and it seemed to just be hardened Firefox, similar to Librewolf. It's gained a ton of features since then!
  
  @SeekPie @Olifant that's the whole reason I use it

If this defaults to on, I’m turning it off.
- 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
  
  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
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  I think it’s more that there really isn’t a need for this. If I’m not sure what a tab is I can always click on it. Chromium got this a while back and (even with minimal exposure to Chromium) I didn’t like it, it weirdly felt annoying and unnecessary.
  
  Tree style tabs makes this feature entirely useless.
  
  stop resisting!
- This has been people's reactions to anything good that comes into Firefox for close to 20 years now
  
  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
  
  I am a longtime Firefox user. I absolutely love many innovative feature Firefox has implemented (such as container tabs). Firefox does so many things better than other browsers, such as allowing CTRL-clicking tabular data for copy-and-paste.
  However, I’m usually annoyed by features they add that seem like they’re just doing it to be like the dominant browser.
  The worst was when they reassigned CTRL+I from getting page info to match IE’s behavior of viewing favorites. Thankfully, they’ve gone back to the sane behavior.
  
  It's a good feature, and probably makes sense to default to on. But I know I'll find it more distracting than useful, so I'll turn it off.
  Large tooltips on mouseover are usually distracting. Facicons, text, and additional windows do enough to remind me what my tabs are.
  New features often aren't helpful to each and every user, but as long as I can turn off the ones that are actively unhelpful to me, I'm perfectly happy to see them.
  
  This is just a clear sign of struggling with change adaptation bruh.
  Gladly Lemmy userbase is so tiny compared with FF userbase that it won't influence Mozilla decisions to not implement this at all...
  And you'll probably be able to deactivate it as they say so... ¯(ツ)/¯
- If this defaults to off, I'm turning it on.
- Mozilla look for most useless stuff to implement.
- Some people in the comments here seem really hostile towards those who want to disable the feature, but I support your "right" to customize your Firefox exactly to your liking. I'm just happy that we can even do that.
  Getting this feature is awesome, and being able to turn it off is also awesome.

Tab. Groups.
- Yes
  
  Not a fan of Edge, but absolutely love the tab groups. Use them at work all the time.
- Tab groups, vertical tabs, synced Workspaces. I've hacked together most of it, but being able to have separated pages of tabs synced through my account would be a godsend. Only thing keeping me on MS Edge.
  
  I don't know why I never vibed with vertical tabs, but I've just never been able to make it work mentally. And I could see a double-edged sword with synced workspaces (I think having a button to click and see open tabs on other devices is a perfect middle ground). Personally, tab groups is the only thing I miss from Chromium. I used the feature for grouping, but also for labeling tabs: "Check back Tuesday," or "Don't forget to follow up," or whatever. If they gave us tab groups and then never updated Firefox again, I think I would be pretty happy.
  EDIT: well okay not happy, but I would be satisfied with the browser we ended up with.

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)
- engine performance improvements
  Absolutely. Firefox is so slow compared to Chrome. Switching tabs, scrolling, video calls, ... sure. Sure, Chrome/Chromium is a memory hog, but come on Mozilla, just invest in Servo already and stop adding useless features.
  
  Firefox desktop performance is on par with Chromium. Also Servo is now a project under the Linux Foundation, and likely Mozilla Corp doesn't have enough employees to contribute to external projects.

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  So, a toggle in accessibility settings, default off?
  Wait, FF doesn't have separate accessibility settings anymore?
- I suspect the small delay is just to prevent them from going crazy if you swing your mouse over the tab bar, it's not going to be like a second or something. Sounds useful for the case of multiple tabs on the same site with similar titles, especially at higher resolutions.
  
  It's a second https://sopuli.xyz/comment/6926705
- came here looking for this exact comment. Agree with all point (last one most importantly).
  Firefox team should look at what Arc browser is doing.

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.
- 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
  
  This person said XUL is insecure! Any Palemoon users here? Anyone wanting to tell them that Mozilla is totally taking away user Freedom and that Palemoon is a totally secure Browser? XD
  
  Admittedly, yes, XUL was a complete shitfest. Though I remember that it was more due to security patches and poor memory management that caused the apparent poor performance, not so much for addons. I was on waterfox classic at the time of writing of this article and had like 30 addons enabled, including TST, CRT, and TileTabs. all non-e10s-blocking, and, I assure you, it was just as fast(and slow) as quantum.
  But, that's besides the point. Customization, especially via addon's, was one of the defining features of Firefox. Before, you had opera, which you could customize it within certain limits, Firefox if you want full control, and IE if you're a dummy. Now, you have Vivaldi if you want customization within certain limits, Chrome if you're a dummy, and Firefox is... just... not chrome? I'd say the addons should've been kept at all costs, maybe in a different way, without amputating the whole browser. But they did and it lost it's appeal to a major portion of people. Of course there are still exclusive features like container tabs and min vid, but those are not exclusive to quantum either. The whole ordeal sounds just like that time when Yandex, in order to solve a support ticket overflow, just removed the contact support button.

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

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.
- The gestures were amazing. Some are ingrained in my muscle memory after all these years.
  
  Same here. And the single-key shortcuts for switching tabs. Modern browsers don't even come close.
  
  You can get the same in firefox (mostly) with the Gesturefy addon
- Missing the days when developing a new browser was possible.

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.
- 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.
- How is hovering over a tab and waiting for a preview faster than clicking it?
  
  Again, in my opinion you approach the problem like a power user. Using a browser is not a speedrun where every millisecond matters. Here is why I think it provides more comfort to an average user:
  No need to divert attention and look around the monitor. When you're not well versed with a mouse, it's easier to click and look at the same place
  Nothing distracts you unlike when you click through pages. Imagine going from dark theme page to a light theme page, the entire screen suddenly lights up
  Depending on the way it is implemented (perhaps by keeping compressed page screenshots?), it might be faster to show a preview than to render the page again on a weak machine
- Oh great. As if my life doesn't have enough curses on it.
- I don't understand how someone can have 10 or more tabs open. The times when I have "many" tabs open is when I'm looking for references while doing art, and that still hardly ever surpasses 5 tabs! XD
  
  Currently have 23 tabs open, 7 are youtube, 3 lemmies, and i guess the rest are docs I cant tell I'd greatly benefit from the tab previewer
  
  I think it's much easier to have more than to have less. Most people I encounter have such a mess of pages in their browser, makes my hair stand on end. If we continue to approach this as an accessibility feature, it starts to make even more sense since tons of users have so many tabs they only see icons, not page names
  
  I often get myself into a position where I have 50+ tabs open, but then I get annoyed with all the damn tabs and go on a purge.. furiously clicking X on tabs down the line until I have it down to something manageable. This happens every couple of days. I wish there was a setting where one had the option of limiting themselves to x amount of tabs and if you hit the limit you know it's time for a purge. I've seen where chromium browsers also have tab groups... I'm not sure if that helps for tab hoarding, I guess it could be more organized that way, but also sounds like it just enables more tab hoarding.

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.
- By vertical tabs do you mean tabs on the side instead of the top? If so, check out the tree-style tabs extension, it's great.
  
  The extension is awkward to use imo. The way Vivaldi has it integrated for example is miles better and I really want to see Firefox do same.
- I find that Firefox manages tabs better. So eveb though i use side tabs on vivaldi, I prefer them on top in Firefox, and it's just a keystroke away to see the list vertically, but not stay that way.
- For what it's worth vertical tabs is currently 3rd most rated suggestion

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?

Nice! I remember using an extension for that back in the day
- Actually I was going to look up such an extension, but then I read this news (some days ago here... This is Lemmy after all...) But then I'd rather wait for the official implementation.

"We're super excited to announce that we're working on a feature that has been requested by no one ever".
- Not a bad feature IMO....
- Chrome has it for some reason so I guess they're just copying them
  
  being chrome but slightly worse at some things and slightly better at other things certainly sounds like a winning move..
- I requested it

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.

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.

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

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.
- 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.
  
  I saw that later, I guess I forgot to save the edit.
  150 ms feels alright.

I want to view multiple tabs at once, in a split-page view where I can scroll on one tab, then mouse-over to another and start independently scrolling on that one. It's probably the key feature I miss from Vivaldi. Is there some insurmountable obstacle in the engine that prevents implementation, or is it stubborn devs?
- You can do this easily with Tile Tabs WE https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/tile-tabs-we/ Works great, I've been using it for years
  Example
  
  You can also use FancyZone part of the opensource microsoft power toys
  example
  
  What I want is a better version of Tab Manager Plus in Own tab mode that can handle more than 1500 tabs and 30 windows without glitching as much

Catching up to Opera circa 2006. Opera added this feature in Opera 9, released June 2006.
I still miss the old Opera. The Chromium-based version just isn't the same.
- I still have a copy of Opera 12 on one of my old machines. Good times. Presto!
  
  I wish it still worked well on modern sites. I used Opera from around 2000 until when they switched to Chromium in 2012ish. The first version I ever used predated the Presto engine. I used it for everything except web development (which I did using Firefox and Firebug) and sites that needed ActiveX (where I had to use IE).
  These days I usually use Firefox, except I use Chrome for web development since its dev tools are a bit more responsive on complex sites compared to Firefox's.

Tab groups dying in a ditch

This is a useless feature. Here are some purely UI features that are more important, and exist in Chromium:
more compact hight, saving space (make browser.compactmode.show official!)
CSD decorations (_ 🔳 x) in the top right, hitbox at the very edge, f**k GNOME for this
Tab groups natively in the Tab bar, its the most organic
Apart from that Firefoxes UI is way better than Chromiums and doesnt need to copy anything.
Then work on performance, process isolation etc.
- more compact tab bar, saving space
  Not sure if you're aware, but there's a hidden setting to make Firefox's toolbars more compact:
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround-firefox
  @Pantherina @linux
  
  Cool, will try that!
  
  I still use this one:
  https://github.com/dannycolin/fx-compact-mode
- As I said somewhere else, to get more compact tabs you can go to about:config and search for a setting called browser.tabs.tabMinWidth, I usually change the number to 20 (the default minimum width is like 70) and tabs are allowed to become roughly as narrow as in chrome. And if by "more compact tab bar" you meant how tall tabs are, there's the browser.compactmode.show setting, put it to "true" and then in the Firefox menu under More Tools → Customize Toolbars you can select "compact mode" in the "Density" menu on the bottom, which makes the tab bar and toolbars shorter
  
  No I meant vertical hight. The horizontal width is way better than in Chromium, same with the "scroll tab feature" which works well better.
  That second setting ~~is beta~~ is no longer supported so its not shown

I don’t care about any new tab features except making Tab Mix Plus work effortlessly in the current Firefox.
Right now it’s a game of restriction-whack-a-mole in trying to canopener Firefox into making TMP work again.
TMP is one of the main reasons why I still use any variant of Firefox.

hover your mouse
gross

Having Cloudflare work with Firefox would be much more useful. Having horrendous problems with CF+Firefox this past month, always get stuck in the infinite captcha loop.
Cloudflare has pretty much banned me using FF as of late and it sucks ass in a bad way.
- Works fine for me. Have you made sure it's not caused by an extension?
  
  Yeah, spoofing user agent can cause this for instance.
- cloudflare is kinda aggressive lately for me, this happens in both chrome/ium and firefox. the solution is to pass the captcha once from a different browser or device on the same network
- I had that issue for a while and it turns out I forgot I had an extension changing my user agent. After I changed it back to default everything worked fine.
  
  I did that too but it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, it's nuts
- I don't have an issue wit cloudfare and ff
- Its happening on both my laptop and big computer. FF updated to latest on both, only extensions Ublock Origin, Block HTML5 Autoplay and Zotero. Doesnt work in different networks.
  Accessing the same sites with Brave or Vivaldi, no problems. It sucks ass and I'm certainly not the only one with this problem. Why the heck does this problem keep popping up with FF periodically, judging by both FF and CF support forums?
  
  CF's captcha works by activating obscure browser features banking that bots haven't implemented them or behave just differently enough to stick out as unusual. Try creating a new profile with default settings, and if that works try adding your customizations back one by one until you find the one breaking CF.
- Is there a bug already reported for this?
  
  I have no idea, but the issue has been periodically reported in FF forums at least since '22.

169 comments