https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/02/firefox-devs-working-on-tab-hover-previews
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
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.
Simple tab groups works better tbh. It uses the features to hide, list and manage tabs.
But a native in-line implementation would be best.
I actually prefer Chrome’s tab groups, preferring to have groups visible and one click away. Ideally the user would be able to choose whether to show or hide inactive groups.
True. That is an entirely different UI and also underlying browser issue. Mobile does not have Containers or process isolation.
Closest thing to that feature is this add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/
Yeah it's kinda laggy but does its job. I guess that was the reason why did they remove it from Firefox, it was slowing things down.
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".
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.
It's objectively worse. Fancier but objectively worse.
It isn't though, Firefox stock tab management is awful, when you pile up a decent number of tabs you can't even see the name of the tab properly, this happens in all the browsers ofc, but at least you can have more tabs opened without this being an obstacle.
You really need 3rd party add-ons to manage your tabs with Firefox, unlike in Chrome, Vivaldi, or even Safari.
With this feature at least you can have a quick look at your tabs easily, just like with the aforementioned browsers... Now I really hope they could add a button like Safari where you can see all your tabs too...
It’s not objectively better or worse. Some people will prefer it and some people won’t.
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
If you have many tabs opened:
I can already read the cropped title of the page and see the multiple favicon
cropped title of the page
To be super pedantic (sorry), that depends on how they've customized their UI. You can define a larger minimum tab width, if you'd like. Almost everything in Firefox is customizable.
That is nice and yeah, I'm talking about the default experience you can get with Firefox for macOS, if it is any different in any other OS I wouldn't know, now if you know about a good customizing guide I'd appreciate it...
There's a bunch of different ways you can customize it.
EDIT: Oh and there are of course addons and themes too
When I shop online, I have many tabs from the same site open. The tab title is the store name + the item name, so the item name never fits. A bunch of identical ebay icons is way worse than this.
But that’s not what you wrote. You claimed that it doesn’t show new information because you can see the favicon and title. It does show new information.
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.
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.
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.
Interference with workflow of window-switching. Painful experience with other tools that do this.
Because stock tab management is entirely useless...
With this feature you can manage your tabs at least a bit better.
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.
Actually a decent amount of people were pissed at Quantum, process per tab, discontinuation of XUL, and the new extension system. There is like a whole project to restore the ancient Firefox, and it's slow as fuck (it's called Palemoon)
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)_/¯
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.
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.
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!
I think it has better customization than librewolf and (beta iirc) integration with tree style tabs and vertical tabs. Although I haven't used it for long (2-3 months) the experience has been great. It has been my recommendation for anyone coming from Chrome.
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.
Do you mean never updated, or never adding new features? Because Firefox would be unusuable within 6 months because of how the web works if it stopped being updated
Yes, I was speaking hyperbolically.
My hyperbole also presumes that Gecko continues to be updated, though the browser would get no further updates.
This hyperbolic hypothetical is truly impossible, since Firefox is open-source. It would continue to be maintained by SOMEone.
Six months might be a bit pessimistic. It might start being less reliable within six months, but the pace of WHATWG RFCs has been dwindling gradually since the mid-2000s. Honestly, I think operating system changes would be more likely to render Firefox's codebase obsolete before web standards do.
I get that you were being hyperbolic, I'm honestly not sure why I left my previous comment, you're absolutely right
If nothing else, you have given me the gift of "hyperbolic hypothetical," so thank you for that
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.
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:
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.
Tooltips show the full title of the tab, which is useful if the title is long, the tabs are small because there are a lot of them, or it's a pinned tab
The page title isn't necessarily visible on the web page that sets the title.
Clicking is not always a simple task.
I shouldn't have to leave my current page just to figure out what another tab is.
Again, just because you feel something is useless or easily avoided doesn't mean that all internet users feel the same.
So, a toggle in accessibility settings, default off?
Wait, FF doesn't have separate accessibility settings anymore?
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.
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.
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.
Same here. And the single-key shortcuts for switching tabs. Modern browsers don't even come close.
Brave has configurable keybinds, you can set any key you want to do anything.
However I still need to use the vimium extension to have proper keyboard only web navigation, because with the exception of qutebrowser none of the "popular" web browsers have the select link mode with the f key.
I never got used to the f-key navigation, if i can't use shift+arrows i fall back to mouse.
I don't know, maybe Brave has this, unfortunately some time before Opera 9 and now I became one of these annoying people who only use FOSS.
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.
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?
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.
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:
I'm not sure how clicking can be considered "power user"... Had I said "just install tree style tabs, it's much better", you might've had a point, but you're arguing that clicking is worse than hovering. Really can't agree with you.
But hey, I don't give money to Mozilla and the chance is very low that I ever will, so they can do what they want. If they think this is how they want to spend the 500 million they get from Google, that's their prerogative.
I'm sorry, but did you... read my comment?
I didn't say clicking is power user, I said that you assessing features in terms of speed ("Is hovering faster than clicking?") is a power user approach. It's deeper than just bare speed and accessibility features are not developed to provide physically faster experience, but one that is more comfortable for some group of users.
Hovering preview does not even take ability to click through tabs away, but could provide comfort for a user who is not as browser proficient, for the reasons I outlined above.
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
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
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 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.
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.
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".
being chrome but slightly worse at some things and slightly better at other things certainly sounds like a winning move..
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.
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 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
How about if I go away from the mobile app and then go back into it, then it doesn't reload the page I was just on. I can still see where I was until I click it, why do you need to reload it? Fuckin' bullshit.
I don't see this behavior on android. Is it impossible that there is some kind of phone battery or memory usage process that's causing the sessions to be discarded?
When the OS tells Android Firefox that the phone is running out of ram, it murders any tabs it thinks you might not be looking at, to avoid being murdered by Android for its ram.
Does discord happen to have similar behavior? Your phone may just be underpowered, I mean, so is mine.
My phone has this problem. It's RAM.
My phone is literally never not using the full 8 GB it has, and it's constantly juggling. Even when I have next to nothing open.
What's eating it all? Fuck if I know. My phone also has a system memory leak that has eaten up 90% of the onboard storage with modem crash dumps I can't delete without root, and this phone has no custom firmware to do that. Got what I paid for, I guess...
