You asked, we built it: Firefox tab groups are here

Hoping someone might be able to help me out with this info, I've tried looking and can't find a solid answer.
When you use the "Save and close group" feature of tab groups, do they
Stay forever, no matter if you close Firefox, restart your pc, not used that group in months etc.
Allow an unlimited, or at least a high number, of saved and closed tab groups.
I mainly ask because it specifically puts closed and saved tab groups in a section called "recent tab groups" which sounds suspiciously temporary.

Me using the Tiled Tab groups add-on for 2 years now... Good-morning

This is mostly useless to me; I already enforce all tabs into unique containers to isolate browsing and website contexts from one another; while still allowing me to make exceptions to the rule and "unbreak" things if that's causing an issue, but still keeping things isolated from the rest of the browsing.
As for Tab Management; I use two windows and a plugin; Tab Stash Plus; which collapses tabs I stash into a bookmark.
Every so often when I reach a critical mass of tabs I personally go through them and play "Keep/Toss" with more odds on Toss. Only useful tabs get stashed and are then searchable from the plugin.
In general; since this feature now presents a possibility of an extremely UNWANTED AI integration I will be setting the config to off and leaving it off...using a relevant config policy tool or plugin to enforce this to off if needed. I hate AI features that I didn't ask for and this one definitely doesn't seem like it's going to be helpful nor compatible with my current workflow.

Not something I'll ever use, but cool regardless
- I already used it three times accidentally while rearranging tabs. Mostly annoying, I haven't used them yet
  
  I got a Stroke reading that. You used it 3 times but haven’t used it?
  
  Happened to me too, but I really liked it so far

"You asked, we built it" --> "People keep shitting on us for our terrible decisions... Quick let's do something people actually want to compensate ! Wait let's also slap AI on it, I'm sure everyone will love that" (Mozilla being Mozilla I guess...)
- People love to hate on Mozilla without knowing shit. Some of it is literally 4Chan grade manipulation as well.
  Like the whole ToS debacle. People just aren't interested in truth just rage 24/7

So they're reintroducing a feature in 2025 that they added to Firefox in 2010 and subsequently removed in 2013. Such progress. Much wow.

So uhh, when are you introducing PWAs and easier profile management?
- Isn't profile management introduced like right now in the same release?
  
  Is it? I will check when I am on my PC again.

Noooo it has AI garbage, what the hell.
I really need this feature, I have over 500 tabs open right now, I just hope it works well.

Desktop only? Sigh...
- Yeah pretty sad. It would be a much more useful feature for me on mobile.
  On desktop, I usually just create a new window for different types of stuff.
  No easy way to organize my infinite tabs on mobile (as far as im aware).
  Chromium browsers on mobile do this, but it's also a bit weirdly complicated/frustrating to work with at times, I hope of Firefox get to it, they can make it super simple.
- The folks over on IOS are waiting very patiently for extension support. Firefox folks taking their time.
  
  Gave up waiting and use Orion for that. iOS is an after thought to them.
  
  Apple won't allow extensions for web browsers on their app store.
  
  All browsers on iOS are Safari in disguise
  
  I'm sure it's much more complicated on iOS considering they are forced to use Webkit instead of Gecko.
  
  Try the Orion browser for that, I like it

smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.
Yeah sure ok. Did the community ask for this too?
- I mean, why not?
  They integrated accessibility focused, local, AI pretty well.
  Loads of folks bitched about it because they were triggered by "AI", but it's essentially invisible, as it should be.
  I hate naming things, that's actually something AI is good at, hell yeah, let it name my shit for me please.
  Then again, these communities are always full of Debby downers who hate on everything.
  
  [Dr. Who meme format]
  Is AI bad?
  It Depends. Large corporate AI hosted at a data centre that consumes a nuclear reactor's worth of power and a lake's worth of water for cooling for the purpose of generating slop stolen from Artists and Writers? Yes.
  Locally run embedded AI designed for a specific task to automate small processes or enhance the UI experience with little cost to local computing resources because it's been properly optimised? No.
  
  Yeah for now I remain cautiously optimistic. I have not used their ai stuff once but it was also never shoved down my throat and my browsing experience has not been affected at all, and them finally listening to the community and implementing tabs grouping is just great. If they keep it that way I think we'll be fine
- I don't care about AI when it's doing minor things like this it's when they're shoving it down our throats and we don't want it.
  
  AI as a tool? Hell yeah.
  AI to replace people? Fuck no.
- For one second I thought Mozilla might have made something that wasn't anti-feature... But OF COURSE it's going to need to have AI 😑
- Real.

ok, mozilla is at least doing stuff we want along with ai garbage now.
- Thankfully, the useful changes trickle downstream to Waterfox, LibreWolf, Floorp, etc.
  
  the beauty of foss
- AI garbage seemingly pays the bills...
  
  Seems like it creates bills, but also has enough hype behind it to generate investment/donation interest.
- Except right now you lose all of your open tabs if you close the browser with the "X" on pc or if you shut the computer down.
  To make it save your open tabs right now, you have to click the ... and then select "exit".
  
  I think that's an issue with your install, when I shut down my computer or press the x it restores tabs fine next time I open it.
  
  When I click history in the menu after reopening firefox, I have an option to restore previous session.
  
  Can't you restore them with Ctrl + shift + T or maybe Ctrl + shift + N ?

I had to enable them: about:config -> browser.tabs.groups.enabled -> true
- Thank you for this. Now I know hire to turn them off.
  
  But they're off by default so I'm not sure what you're talking about

Shit, I remember seeing requests for tab groups for like 20 years under an assortment of names and descriptions. Neat to see. Useless for me, but neat to see.
- Next they'll implement DownThemAll natively. Really putting their finger on the pulse of 2008.
  
  OpenSUSE added parallel downloading to zypper a month ago, so anything is possible.
- This is a nice feature when you have a group of multiple sites you need quick access to on the regular. For me, I manage around 12 websites in three environments ; dev, test, and prod. Being able to group the websites by environment keeps things organized and somewhat readily available at two clicks (maybe three if you count collapsing a group before opening another group).
- Now, the team is experimenting with smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.
  I bet you one cheap bottle of mineral water they'll implement this like tomorrow

Was I signed up for some beta? I've had firefox groups for a few weeks now.
And holy shit do I need em.
- They do A/B testing for everything now. Why? No clue.
  
  A/B testing a very effective mass testing ground, I’m surprised some people don’t do it. Amazon is probably doing a few dozen a/b tests constsntly

Now, the team is experimenting with smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.
Off course, they found a way to integrate more Ai features.
- Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the inclusion of some small AI feature is what justified the rest of this work being done. As in, someone got approval for tab groups only because they were smart enough to describe it as “AI powered tab groups“. Just speculation
- Because you know it’s really hard naming your group yourself
- ffs. Of course they had to slap AI on top of it. Goddammit.

Still waiting for mobile, tab groups missing from Firefox mobile is the only reason I'm still using chrome

Awesome!
Can you now please make it so that of I have over 100 tabs open that Firefox makes my computer die, even if all those tabs are all pre-killed by a tab closer?

All that article and they don’t say how to use it it turn it on, smh.
- I got a big banner page that asked me if I wanted to turn it on once I updated. Can't miss that really.
  
  It's being rolled out in waves over the next week or so.
  I haven't seen the banner and don't have the feature yet. Should be there by May 6th(ish), IIRC.

am i the only one who like, closes all tabs when done? i have tabs I'll come back to when working on something not when it's all finished i close it all the fuck down.
i know 'am i the only one' is a cliche n shit but I'm starting to think i really am. everyone i know has all these tabs open all the time.
- My LibreWolf config purges all data session (history, open tabs, search,cookies...) on quite/exit !
  If there's something I need to keep or read-later, or work-on readeck/zotero/karakeep makes everything easier to find !
  If I need to bookmark something important linkding !
  All those browser tabs, history, search results are a privacy nightmare !!
- I do this as well - the only exception is work, where I pin a few tabs. Out of curiosity are you an “inbox zero” person? Because I am, and the only parallel I can draw is between that and my similar tab management.
  
  inbox zero
  absolutely :D
- You are among your people friend
- Me too. I hate having lots of tabs. Makes it so much harder to find the tab I want.

I feel like this feature is a good idea that has come too late for me. I already "group" stuff via windows. That'll be a hard habit to break.
- I miss Panorama so much!
- Do you use an add-on to prevent that from wiping out all but one window's worth of tabs when you close them? That's what originally made me get a tab grouping addon, after losing a ton of tabs when I broke some out into their own window and then later closed the main tab window before the secondary one. Realized immediately what happened but it was already too late to save that entire generation of precious tabs. Who knows what articles I didn't feel like reading at the time but was totally going to read later I lost forever.
  
  Ctrl+Q terminates the whole program at once and you don't lose any windows.
  Oh btw, just like Ctrl+shift+t reopens closed tabs, so Ctrl+shift+n reopens whole windows, with all tabs.
  
  I either let the OS close firefox and then it opens all windows when I next start firefox. Or I use ctrl+shift+n to reopen the last closed window
  
  I close all windows at once via the Quit feature, then it re-opens all of them. You can trigger that from the menubar (press Alt to unhide it) in the "File" menu at the bottom.
  You can also re-open a closed window from the "History" menu in that menubar.
  These might also be available in the hamburger menu. I've got that hidden, so can't check easily...

*here again. Let's see how long it takes them this time to remove it again.

welcome Firefox to 2021

Finally! Thank you!
Now do vertical tab groups pleeease
edit: turns out the tab group flag was set to false when I switched to vertical tabs. Toggling it to true enabled them
- What do you mean by vertical tab groups? Cause we just got tab groups and a while ago we got vertical tabs. And you can ofc use them together. Isn't that vertical tab groups?
  
  ~~I don't think you can~~ OMG You are right
- Try using Zen, it's basically Firefox with vertical tab groups.

Please help me understand how to use tab groups and how to use bookmarks and why they are different things.
- Tab groups are built for open tabs, bookmarks are built for revisiting things. Their use cases are quite different in my opinion.
  
  Ok but when do you make the decision to invest in organizing open tabs into groups versus bookmarking them or just moving them to a dedicated window. When do you close the tab or tab group -- only when the initiative is over? Do you "archive" those tabs as bookmarks?
  And then there's the profile variable
- Most of what web browsers do is the same feature multiple times just presented differently
  
  Yeah, thought the same with vertical tabs already. It's extremely cool that it's there now for folks who want it, but if you have a strategy for putting tabs into multiple windows and then dealing with those windows appropriately, then there's really no point in making it a vertical list for the handful of tabs per window you'll likely have...
- instead of having 12984 tabs open, you can have 345 groups with only a few dozen tabs in each one.
- Multitasking, preparing for meetings/workshops, not having to make bookmarks that are only relevant for the duration of a project/task.
  There are many valid uses of tab groups that need to be kept open for quick accessibility without waiting for pages to load or finding specific groups of links that will not be relevant in a week
- I don't know about groups specifically, but keeping a tab open retains its history, so you can go back (and forward) later.
  
  Yes, tab groups maintain history, even across save & reopen operations.
- For me, open tabs and bookmarks are different levels of the same thing. I'll open a bunch of tabs researching some task I want to do, and leave them open because I want to come back to that. Bookmarks do the same thing, but with lower visibility and higher permanence.
  Tab groups let me group a handful of things to reduce the clutter. Similar to the way that folders are useful within the bookmarks manager.
  To use them, just drag one tab on top of another, it'll make a new group. Give it a name, and you can now expand/collapse. So 10 tabs all related to one task can stay in-sight to remind you, but only take up 1 tab's worth of space in the bar.

Have any Simple Tab Group users tried out Mozilla’s very overdue revisit to this functionality?
I’m interested in pros and cons before switching over.

I would much rather see Tree Style Tab be integrated.
- Waterfox does this with an improved implementation of tree style tabs. Also zero Mozilla Corp telemetry, opt-in or otherwise.
- I use sidebery, I find it even better
- Doesn't seem to indicate whether groups will work with vertical tabs and unless that's the case, I'm not switching from TST.
  
  I've been using tab groups with vertical tabs. No issues here. I'm on stable.
  
  They do work in vertical tabs, but only one level. You can't have nested tabs as far as I can tell.

This update borked my Sidebery config. It doesn't expand on hover anymore. I will look into it after I wake up but does anyone have an idea what could they changed on CSS?
Edit: Took me some time but it's fixable.
- Pretty much every update screws up my config these days, but it's good because it means they're actually working on improving the interface
  
  I think this update was the first one that brake my config in a long time. I was actually expecting this from vertical tabs update but it went fine. The current UI of Firefox looks too mobile-y. Thankfully we got add-ons and CSS options.

Can't wait for Ironfox to implement this.
- is ironfox a better alternative to librewolf? i too moved offa FF when they changed tos

Been loving the feature.
My next hope is that they'll upgrade tab groups so (when collapsed) I can move them around like normal tabs. Right now it's a little awkward if I start the group in the wrong spot.

Been using it for a couple of months now at work. It's good.
I also appreciate how intuitively it works. I wasn't aware of this feature when it first landed in developer edition, but after I accidentally created a group with drag and drop, the feature just clicked.

Ohhh that's what it is! I was did couple times since the last update; by mistake, didn't know what it was. Now I know.

Vivaldi: laughing in 2019
- Opera had it before they dropped presto back in like 2013.
  
  To be fair, the current Vivaldi team consists of a lot of the ones that made Opera Presto.
- Firefox laughing in 2004 with anything else...
- I am on Vivaldi now but after manifest v3? I'm very happy to see tab ~~stacking~~ grouping come to Firefox based browsers as that's definitely the escape plan, possibly very soon.
- You mean laughing in before COVID

I've been using them for a few weeks now. Lifesaver as I try to organize stupid bullshit that life forces on me.

"You asked, we built it" = "Your data is profitable, so we slapped AI on it and feign altruism".

I also asked for compact mode. Where's that?

smash

Considering I've been screeching this to myself, I wonder how they heard.

I'm saving all my tabs on a regular basis for 3 firefox pages. How does grouping tabs impact saving them? Does it create sub folders in the main saved tab folder?

Why not just using fucking bookmarks? What's the point of all this "organization" when it's ephemeral anyway? I don't get it why most people are so allergic to bookmarks.
- Bookmarks I use for pages I want to store for a longer time. Tab groups I can use for pages I have open at the moment, e.g. because I'm working on X and Y, so I group the tabs based on X or Y. But I don't need to keep the tabs between sessions.
- Scenario: working on two tickets and having some yt/spotify/whatsapp in background. I separate the tickets and tabs related to them in their own tab groups and the social media tabs in another group. I can easily navigate through them and have less mental overhead on where everything is, especially if I color code the groups.
  
  I just open a second window for this.

Great. Now do Guest mode. It's a must-have for places like libraries and internet cafes - if Firefox equalled Chrome in this regard it'd easily gain a percent on the market share scale.
- Is Guest mode different from Private Browsing?
  
  In fact - no, it's just a reskin of incognito to make it not feel like you're not watching porn.
  Which might make it feel like a non-issue and a useless thing to add, but flip that around - it's a low-cost, potentially very high-reward improvement. It really should've been implemented ages ago.
  The only things that need to be changed is the new tab page and the toolbar - both design "improvements".