@Jon I think the extent to which new users are signing up specifically in order to post on this issue reflects a pretty big disconnect between the community and the developers.
"Exploring potential ways to improve tab management" would be great for 2018, but it's 2023 and there already is a design that improves tab management from the current Firefox implementation. No one is asking for a reinvented wheel here — let's not let perfect be the enemy of good. Good already exists, it's time to get off the pot and implement.
I've wanted to try and switch to Firefox again after having used Brave for years, and now I remembered why I skipped to Brave entirely - the tab grouping is a must and, unfortunately, the collections are kind of useless and look like some sort of weird reimagining of bookmarks. The point of groups is to see them in the list of tabs, not having to open the homepage all the time, which is not elegant at all. Chrome does it perfectly, the simple tabs extension for FF is also great, but it's missing on mobile unfortunately.
For me, there's also a lot of pain points when using the mobile FF app on a tablet with a keyboard (just barely keyboard friendly for the most basic scrolling, touchpad and typing usecases), but that's a whole other discussion and not likely to make it if these tab groups haven't appeared in years now. I hope you figure this out, at the very least. Till then.
@JonYet another person here who's made a mobile account just to say I'm baffled this isn't a feature yet.
I want to switch to FF mobile so bad, but I can't without tab grouping. This isn't exactly a new feature for mobile apps, and it's a massive deal-breaker.
Please, like someone else said, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Whatever Chrome is doing is perfect. I'm incredibly disappointed that users have been begging for this very simple feature for years. I love you guys, I've been an avid supporter since 2006. I know you can do this.
It's really disheartening to see that it's been over 18 months since this was first suggested and there's still nothing implemented or even promised. Seriously, just expand the inactive tabs functionality; organized folders at the top of the tab list would be a dream. Please, for so many of us that want to get away from Chrome, make this a priority! @Jon
I was thinking something along the lines of some of the previous comments: after so much time, it's impossible that no one from Mozilla said yes, no or whatever.
In fact, that would make Mozilla a company that is not able to decide even on relatively small things like this, aka a dead company.
Even if we can infer that Mozilla would probably be dead a long time ago without Google covering them of money for nothing (read: to save their face of quasi-monopolists), we cannot say Mozilla is not doing anything at all, that would be unfair and factually wrong.
On the other hand, this complete absence of feedback from management about this feature tells us something, something that to me is clear: they don't want to implement this idea or they don't want to say anything about it yet.
Honestly, I can think to a few reasons for this:
they simply don't want to implement it because of some gods forsaken reason (eg. security)
they are really a company that is more a corpse than a working body, so they aren't actually able to do anything about it, they're just surviving
they are abandoning Firefox to its destiny, not explicitly, but they are not investing heavily in it anymore
they are going to implement it but they cannot tell anything about it because this would reveal their future plans but they're not ready yet
I love to think the real reason is point 4, I cannot think about the other hypotheses because that would put the entire web (and all of us) in big trouble.
agree, seems it's look like major IMPORTANT feature that make consider for users who want to change browser or not. It should take more action not just change status to exploring more and archive it... I don't know how much time need for explore since it already has sample for this feature and it not make any disadvantage to browser. make it like high priority please. Just active status to improve that your team didn't throw it to trash...
Also just signed up specifically to comment on this feature.
I switched back to Firefox this week on desktop and tonight on my phone also. The moment I realised these was no Tab grouping on Firefox mobile halted my entire shift over to Firefox and I'm going back to Chrome on my phone.
Once you've used a mobile browser with Tab grouping you cannot do without it. The user experience is too good to live without.
From the 2 year long post here on this forum it seems obvious that Mozilla will not implement this feature soon which gives Google a massive advantage in the mobile browser market.
I for one hope they realise this soon. Until then, adiós.
On my phone, I currently depend on having two browsers installed: Firefox & Vivaldi. Every time whatever I'm doing becomes "serious" (e.g. researching something on the go, looking to buy something), I have to upgrade from Firefox to Vivaldi, because it's just too much of a pain without the ability to manually group tabs.
I've convinced multiple people among friends and family to switch to Firefox on the desktop—I'm really happy they were willing to give it a chance! But I'd be a fool to even dream of doing anything similar for mobile, since I know those people use tab groups. Firefox will be a horrible experience for them there. That's kinda sad, both for these people and for Firefox.