The recent release of Firefox 57 is pretty nice in many ways, but the loss of certain extensions is probably going to keep my primary browser from upgrading until they’re updated or suitable replacements are found.
Continue reading post "Firefox 57 and Tab Groups: downgrading to ESR for now"browser posts page 2
Opera Mini now supports fixed position (sometimes)
Looks like an update to Opera Mini brought support for position: fixed at last (in high savings mode, or sometimes extreme). I’ll finally be able to remove my JS test for it.
Once again had to recover some of my Firefox tabs after an update (this happened before). I haven’t reduced my tab count since last time as planned (currently at 570). Gonna have to work on that. I think having so many makes Firefox more unstable and slow.
After a recent OS and Firefox update, I found myself with a window with 120+ empty tabs in place of several hundred non-empty tabs that I’ve built up over the years. I thought they were gone. Luckily, the Tab Groups plugin that I use (formerly built into the browser) automatically backs up the tabs when it is updated, which had happened 6 days before. I was able to recover 465 tabs. Yes, I have a tab problem. I find articles daily, and often don’t have the time to read through them right away, so I save them. I leave open pages I find in searching for solutions to problems I’m not yet ready to solve. I’m trying to read through or bookmark tabs over time, but I think I’m adding faster than subtracting. I must say, Firefox was super fast with 465 less tabs, and I would feel less scattered if I got them under control, so I will try to put more effort into reduction. I think a better bookmarking system would help a lot with that.
Firefox tag groups removed
Firefox tag groups / panorama has been removed from Firefox proper. Luckily, they’ve moved the official source to a separate project as an extension called Tab Groups. The extension seems to function the same and migrated my existing tab groups to without trouble.
I guess there is benefit to having less code in the core Firefox project to maintain, but this is one of those cool features that sort of set Firefox apart from other browser. There is a Chrome bug requesting a similar feature that has 356 stars and comments praising the feature. Development apparently stopped in Firefox years ago, so maybe this split could actually increase development, but there’s always the chance that it doesn’t get updated to work with a new Firefox version at some point and disappears. At least the code is on Github.
I think the features has issues, such as slowness, moving around of groups when resizing windows, and a bit clunky of a UI, but is the best option I’ve seen for dealing with large numbers of web pages and multiple topics, particularly in the short term. Right now, I have 383 tabs in 28 groups, plus a dozen or so tabs in two other windows. Some of them I probably haven’t looked at in years. I think for long-term storage, local or “cloud” bookmarks are the best way to go. I’d like to work on moving most of my tabs to my delicious account, or better yet, my own site, but even then, I will want tab groups for day-to-day organization.