11
votes
Tab viewer/organizer?
Weird question, but does anyone know of a simple tab viewer or organizer for Firefox (bonus points if it works on iOS)? I have... way too many tabs open, and I want to see what I can bookmark before closing rather than having to either close everything or manually check each tab.
Tree Style Tabs? I see a lot of people recommend it, I never found myself remembering to use it enough for it to be useful, but if you’re an organized kind of person it may work better
Edit: See crdpa's comment below, which made me aware of some potential problems with Tree Tabs, and as a result I am going to stop recommending it now, so ignore the rest of this comment.
I'm personally not a fan of Tree Style Tabs, since there is too much fiddling with third-party addons required to get it functioning adequately, IMO. So I personally use Tree Tabs instead, which has adequate functionality out of the box (unlike TST which is very barebones to start), and also doesn't require much fiddling in settings to get working/looking the way I want it to.That Tree Tabs is really cool, but it doesn't have an update in two years. My fear is getting used to it and breaking in the future. Is it still being developed? Tree Style Tabs is still going.
EDIT: Just found Sidebery and i'm liking it more than Tree Style Tabs.
Thanks for the discovery !
As a lifelong user of TST, on a first glance this looks like a serious contender to TST. I miss the algorithmic colouring of [TST Colored Tabs] though(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tst-colored-tabs/).
Those colorful tabs are cool indeed.
The only thing i miss from TST is left click > send tab to device so i can send the tab to my phone, but i can do that by clicking on the account icon in the address bar.
Hmmm. Yeah, sadly it looks like the developer of Tree Tabs pretty much ghosted a few years ago, so there is definitely the risk of it breaking eventually. And looking into it further, the worst part seems to be that they also chose a "no-derivative" license, so if/when something critical does eventually break with the addon nobody can even share their fixed fork of it. So use at your own risk, I guess. I haven't had any issues whatsoever with it yet though, despite using it pretty extensively for quite a few years now. But based on all that, I am actually going to stop recommending it from now on, and probably even start looking for an alternative myself too.
Speaking of... I have never heard of Sidebery before, but it looks nice, and reasonably feature rich too, so I will have to give it a try.
Okay, Sidebery is awesome. Not only does it have all the features that Tree Tabs does, but it also has even more incredibly useful ones as well. E.g. Container support with custom user-agent and proxy settings for each, a bookmark panel, cookie clearing (which allows me to get rid of the cookie addon I was using), and a bunch more minor QoL improvements. It also has a much more useful and well laid out settings menu as well, with way more context menu customization options, and minor tweaks for changing the addon layout and behavior.
Thanks so much for making me aware of it. I already removed Tree Tabs, and will be using Sidebery from now on.
That's interesting. I don't have anything customized inside of Tree Style Tabs, so I guess the defaults must just work for me. What are some of the things you expect from it that you get from Tree Tabs?
One thing I have customized is a small plugin (install it and be done) that adds the option of grouping tabs into folders. The point is that sometimes I have 3 different tabs to a topic, but neither one would accurately represent the content of the subtree, so you create a folder.
It's been a while since I last used TST, so maybe it has changed since then and some of this functionality is in the base addon now. But it was mostly the little QoL things that Tree Style Tabs lacked and required addons to enable, that TT has by default, e.g. multi-tab selection/closure, mouse wheel scrolling between tabs, multi-tab unloading (esp useful with how many tabs I often have open) and muting, tree bookmarking, folder/group organization, session management/syncing/restoration, etc.
I used css to remove the default tab bar and only use Tree Style Tabs. For the most part it allows me to have a bread crumb trail of how I ended up somewhere. Very handy when researching a topic.
I maintain a mod for TreeStyleTabs that enables dynamic indentation and cleans up the FF UI to match: https://github.com/drannex42/linux-utils/tree/main/firefox
There's a video on how it looks and works: https://m.imgur.com/HaLvkFc?r
I use simple tab groups to group things together. I think it's particularly useful if you have certain use cases you use a browser for.
I just installed this a few days ago and I'm liking it, wanted to say thanks for the suggestion!
Tab Stats is maintained by a longtime Mozilla developer. It's very bare-bones (and might in fact be too plain for what you're looking for), but it does give you the ability to see stats and de-duplicate your tabs.
I find OneTab to be convenient for such purposes. All tabs go into a list, then I can export and process the list (Eg: remove all lines with wikipedia) and re-import the list and open all tabs.
If you're a little more technically adept, TabFS is quite fantastic.
As for iOS, my solution so far is to transfer all iOS tabs to my laptop (through Firefox Sync) and then handle it the same way.
Thanks for this.
I’ve used Workona for that before
Just found Sidebery and i'm liking it more than Tree Style Tabs.
I know it's not quite the solution you're looking for and I'm not trying to convert you to use another browser, but the Vivaldi Browser has an extensive feature set for Tab Management. It supports a ton of the stuff mentioned in here natively and they also have a short video introducing some of them.
I'm using both Firefox and Vivaldi, and sadly I have yet to find a satisfactory solution for Firefox. I wish it would just support Tab Stacking like Vivaldi :/ Maybe I'm also just a messy person and should clean my tabs more often...
Yes, this is exactly what I want in Firefox! I only used Vivaldi for a few weeks but I got SO used to tab stacking, and I've been fiending for the same thing in firefox.
I don't use Vivaldi but I wonder, what made you switch back to Firefox?
I actually used to use Chrome, then switched to Vivaldi, then most recently found my way to Firefox. I was in desperate need of a new laptop a few months ago, and Chrome was eating up all my RAM. I started looking around for alternatives and tried out Vivaldi because I was drawn in by the customization, but then I realized it ran on Chromium and wasn't much better for my poor RAM. I heard that Firefox was less memory-intensive, so I made the switch and learned the ropes pretty quickly. Now I have a new laptop that could handle Vivaldi or Chrome with no issues, but I'm honestly put off by the hassle of transferring stuff back over to Vivaldi at this point. Plus, at some point this shiny new laptop will be old and slow, and hopefully using Firefox at that point will be much less insufferable than waiting 90 seconds for a new tab to load in Chrome.