14 DAY TRIAL // At the beginning of the month, we were reporting on the Firefox project deciding to drop the Tab Groups (Panorama) feature in Firefox 45, mainly because only 0.01% of Firefox's users were using it.
After no official plans had been put forward by the Mozilla Foundation (shame on them!) to support the feature as an add-on, one German developer decided to take this task upon himself and released the first version of the Tab Groups add-on.
This add-on, confusingly and unimaginatively also named Tab Groups, is available on the Mozilla Add-Ons portal, but only works for Firefox Nightly (45.x).
The add-on's developer, Dennis Schubert, says that the extension was created to replace the Tab Groups, not to work together with it. This means you won't have access to the "panorama" feature inside the browser window, and tab groups would be accessed via drop-down panels (see screenshot below).
The add-on is not quite ready for the limelight
Since this is only an experimental version, the developer also warns not to open the Tab Groups Firefox feature with this add-on installed. Basically, the idea is that there is an add-on "in the works" for replacing Firefox's Tag Groups, but you should probably wait until Firefox removes the feature from its browser, since it may cause some loss of data if used right now.
Don't worry, you won't lose all your current Tab Groups links. Mozilla plans to move all your tab groups to a bookmarks folder, from where you'll be able to move them back into the add-on after the Firefox Tab Groups feature is removed in version 45.
Let's hope that until Firefox 45 comes out, Mr. Schubert will find a way to make the add-on work and easily import tab groups into the add-on before Firefox disables the feature.
