Firefox Tab Focus Groups Related Tabs, Hides Everything Else

Tab management, as browsers get faster and the web gets, well, bigger, is an ever increasing problem. Despite people having tens of tabs open at a time, splitting them to several windows and so on, no browser has really solved the problem.

In fact, it's just Firefox that's trying with Panorama. But even this breaks down with too many tabs. It also needs users constantly grouping and 'curating' their tabs.

Mozilla is working on something better, it's just a very early stage project, part of Mozilla Labs' Prospector, but it's a really promising approach, if only because it's so simple.

Dubbed Tab Focus, the feature, which is just an extension at this point, at the click of a button, picks the tabs you're currently focusing on, based on how they related, puts them in a Panorama group and then only displays them.

"We love using Panorama to organize our tabs, but sometimes, we add and remove tabs and move around so quickly that before we know it we already have too many tabs open to want to fire up Panorama and reorganize things by hand. This is where Tab Focus steps in," Abhinav Sharma, a Mozilla Labs intern working with the Prospector team, wrote.

This works because people, while they may have many tabs open, are actually just using a few at a time. Tab Focus looks at how you arrived at a certain page, which are the parent tabs and groups tabs based on that.

With Tab Focus installed, it's easy to leave open just the tabs you're working with at a time. However, this only works for tabs which can be clearly linked to each other, i.e. the links all come from the same parent page.

But that is not always the case, so the feature won't always work. Which is why Mozilla is asking for help and ideas on how tabs are related.

"This is currently a really early idea and we would love to have your feedback on how it works for you and how you would make this better. Are we losing track of links, would you rather carry over everything in that domain, etc. We’d like to know how you think of tabs as “related” when you have one too many open," Mozilla said.