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Firefox 45 Will Drop Tab Groups (Panorama)

The end a dear friend like Tab Groups never deserved

Nov 5, 2015 12:55 GMT  ·  By
Tab Groups will be removed starting with Firefox 45
   Tab Groups will be removed starting with Firefox 45

Six years after adding the Tab Groups (Panorama) feature to Firefox, Mozilla has decided to unceremoniously remove it from the browser's code, as of version 45.

Tab Groups, as it was originally known and most people still call it (despite the fact that 50 or so Mozilla engineers and spokespersons continue to use the silly "Panorama" name in their press releases), was truly an innovative feature when it was added to Firefox 4, back in 2009.

Very, very, very few Firefox people used Tab Groups

Using Tab Groups, users could enter a special area of the browser, where they could grab browser tabs and move them to special sections (groups), each representing a different browser window view, just like with virtual desktops on Windows and Linux.

Why did we explain how Tab Groups works? Because as Mozilla's Gijs Kruitbosch details, only 0.01% of Firefox's users are using it, which in turn means that few people know it exists or how to use it.

Removing Tab Groups makes perfect sense in this case, despite the fact that people who use it heavily rely on it and consider it one of Firefox's strongest points.

Tab Groups almost got axed from Firefox in 2013

Mozilla previously proposed to remove Tab Groups from Firefox back in 2013, when it tried to move it into its self-standing add-on. That attempt failed, Tab Groups was left in Firefox, but with an asterisk near its name, meaning it would eventually have to be removed at one point or another.

According to the bug entry opened back then, developers cited Tab Groups as a common source of crashes and bugs, a situation that certainly did not get any better in the following years.

Now with Firefox moving to a completely new internal code structure with the addition of the WebExtensions API, e10s, and possibly a new engine altogether in Servo, this seems the perfect time to ditch that annoying step-child that kept causing all those troubles in previous years (hmm, hmm, Tab Groups).

Right now, Firefox devs are considering two ways of having this done. The first method involves migrating all non-active tab groups into a bookmarks folder while the second option is to migrate all non-active tab groups into individual browser windows.

Unfortunately, they are not considering creating an official Tab Groups (Panorama) extension as they did in 2013, probably because no other developer wanted to take this huge project under its wing back then either.