858931 - add essential functionality in TabGroups Manager to Firefox

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[ultrafox]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
Build ID: 20130326150557

Steps to reproduce:

I am a longtime user of Firefox, and I consider my usage advanced. (I use many add-ons and frequently use Firefox for web development debugging, etc.) I'm a proponent of Mozilla products and encourage people to use them.

There is a solution already produced (and highly popular) that absolutely takes Firefox to the next level. If you haven't seen it, you need to.

Background: Firefox is great, except for one thing: advanced users really must use Tab Groups, but default Tab Groups Panorama implementation is near useless with large volumes of tabs and groups. We don't want to switch back and forth between a screen of squares visualizing bookmarks. Panorama is slow and doesn't scale well for large numbers of tab groups. (It becomes disorganized and visually disorienting quickly.)

The functionality in this add-on was absolutely perfect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tabgroups-manager/
I know you are busy, but seriously, if you have never seen this add-on in action, please take the time to grab this add-on and test it in an old version of Firefox that it worked in. It is well worth your time.

The add-on is no longer maintained, and given all the architectural changes in Firefox, I would think that any developer trying to keep such an add-on maintained would face daunting challenges.

I would like to suggest that having this functionality available in the default version of Firefox would continue to propel Firefox to the forefront of browser technology. Just look at the feedback - people who have found and use this add-on find it essential. 

DISCLAIMER: I am posting this here because I think this is highly important to the success of the Firefox project but I have not found a way to communicate this request in detail via other channels. The "feature request" system requires extreme brevity, and all other communication channels don't seem to reach the development team.


Actual results:

With the add-on in the past...
(1) The most important feature: The add-on allowed the user to organize Tab Groups directly in the main browser window view, without having to flip to a secondary "Panorama" screen. The user could create hierarchy and manage tabs in a quick, convenient way that provided visual context at all times.
(2) Secondary feature: The add-on allowed the user to hibernate tabs to improve performance.



Expected results:

What should happen is...
Improve and streamline the UI and interactive behavior, and then the essential features of the add-on should be added into the newest version of Firefox.

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Feature proposals like this should be posted to the firefox-dev list: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev

Comment 2

[u597032]

Tab-Groups are no longer supported.