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I want to switch to Firefox, but I can't.

PowerPCFan

PowerPCFan

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 5, 2022
308
106
(This is a problem I have on PC and Mac but it's the same on both so it doesn't really matter.)

I hate Chrome. Sure, it's a nice browser, but the only thing keeping me on Chrome was Tab Groups and Extensions. I just found out that Firefox has all of my extensions. So I switched to FF! But I hate it for one reason: THERE'S NO TAB GROUPS!! I am a tab hoarder. With 16GB RAM on my Mac and 32GB RAM on my PC, I hoard hundreds of tabs. But I need organization, and the Simple Tab Groups extension wouldn't cut it for me.

So can someone please recommend a really good privacy-conscious browser like Firefox, that looks a lot like Chrome's beautiful UI?
Well guess what? I can answer my own question. How about Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Microsoft Edge, and all of these??

But no.

This won't work.

Because...

I need:

- Good tab groups that look like Chrome's

- Fast, lightweight experience

- The following extensions available for download:
Grammarly
LastPass
uBlock Origin or similar
vidIQ Vision for YouTube
Vetted AI
Any sort of "dark mode reader" extension

Someone, anyone, please help me solve the mystery of a good privacy browser with extensions and tab groups.
 
PowerPCFan said:
(This is a problem I have on PC and Mac but it's the same on both so it doesn't really matter.)

I hate Chrome. Sure, it's a nice browser, but the only thing keeping me on Chrome was Tab Groups and Extensions. I just found out that Firefox has all of my extensions. So I switched to FF! But I hate it for one reason: THERE'S NO TAB GROUPS!! I am a tab hoarder. With 16GB RAM on my Mac and 32GB RAM on my PC, I hoard hundreds of tabs. But I need organization, and the Simple Tab Groups extension wouldn't cut it for me.

So can someone please recommend a really good privacy-conscious browser like Firefox, that looks a lot like Chrome's beautiful UI?
Well guess what? I can answer my own question. How about Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Microsoft Edge, and all of these??

But no.

This won't work.

Because...

I need:

- Good tab groups that look like Chrome's

- Fast, lightweight experience

- The following extensions available for download:
Grammarly
LastPass
uBlock Origin or similar
vidIQ Vision for YouTube
Vetted AI
Any sort of "dark mode reader" extension

Someone, anyone, please help me solve the mystery of a good privacy browser with extensions and tab groups.
Click to expand...
Have you heard of this new feature to browsers called bookmarks? You can organize sites into collections inside of folders. You can even have your browser show a bookmarks bar where you can place regularly accessed groups of bookmarks. With a right click and open in tabs, it will even open every bookmarked site in a folder in its own tab. Best of all you can close down those tabs when not in use, and not have to worry about losing track of them. It truly is a miraculous feature.

Yes, the tone is meant to sound like a bit of a smart a--, but the feature you are looking for has been built into browsers for decades, and provides a directory structure for organizing sites, making finding a 'tab' as easy as finding a file in a well organized file system.
 
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meson said:
Have you heard of this new feature to browsers called bookmarks? You can organize sites into collections inside of folders. You can even have your browser show a bookmarks bar where you can place regularly accessed groups of bookmarks. With a right click and open in tabs, it will even open every bookmarked site in a folder in its own tab. Best of all you can close down those tabs when not in use, and not have to worry about losing track of them. It truly is a miraculous feature.

Yes, the tone is meant to sound like a bit of a smart a--, but the feature you are looking for has been built into browsers for decades, and provides a directory structure for organizing sites, making finding a 'tab' as easy as finding a file in a well organized file system.
Click to expand...
Yes, I have heard of bookmarks 🤣
The only reason why I like Chrome's tab groups is because you can leave the tabs always open and click on the tab group and it will hide all the tabs. With bookmarked folders, it's a pain to add and remove folders, and you can't just collapse the group, you'd need to close each tab and open the folder again when you want to access them.

So thanks for the suggestion and the hilarious post. But that won't work for my purposes.
 
PowerPCFan said:
Yes, I have heard of bookmarks 🤣
The only reason why I like Chrome's tab groups is because you can leave the tabs always open and click on the tab group and it will hide all the tabs. With bookmarked folders, it's a pain to add and remove folders, and you can't just collapse the group, you'd need to close each tab and open the folder again when you want to access them.

So thanks for the suggestion and the hilarious post. But that won't work for my purposes.
Click to expand...
Glad you took a little ribbing in stride. Hopefully you find the appropriate Firefox extension.
 
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It's a shame Apple is so against browser extensions, because that's the only thing on your list Safari doesn't check off. Some of them are available, but the others are not and most likely never will be.
 
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MacGizmo said:
It's a shame Apple is so against browser extensions, because that's the only thing on your list Safari doesn't check off. Some of them are available, but the others are not and most likely never will be.
Click to expand...
Yeah, too bad. That wouldn't fix my problem on PC, but at least that would fix my Mac problem of what browser to use. Come on, Apple! LET US USE BROWSER EXTENSIONS!
 
PowerPCFan said:
(This is a problem I have on PC and Mac but it's the same on both so it doesn't really matter.)

I hate Chrome. Sure, it's a nice browser, but the only thing keeping me on Chrome was Tab Groups and Extensions. I just found out that Firefox has all of my extensions. So I switched to FF! But I hate it for one reason: THERE'S NO TAB GROUPS!! I am a tab hoarder. With 16GB RAM on my Mac and 32GB RAM on my PC, I hoard hundreds of tabs. But I need organization, and the Simple Tab Groups extension wouldn't cut it for me.

So can someone please recommend a really good privacy-conscious browser like Firefox, that looks a lot like Chrome's beautiful UI?
Well guess what? I can answer my own question. How about Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Microsoft Edge, and all of these??

But no.

This won't work.

Because...

I need:

- Good tab groups that look like Chrome's

- Fast, lightweight experience

- The following extensions available for download:
Grammarly
LastPass
uBlock Origin or similar
vidIQ Vision for YouTube
Vetted AI
Any sort of "dark mode reader" extension

Someone, anyone, please help me solve the mystery of a good privacy browser with extensions and tab groups.
Click to expand...
I’ve used Panorama Tab Groups plugin for Firefox for a few years now and it works great. It doesn’t have quite the polish that Safari Tab Groups has but it work just fine.
github.com

GitHub - projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups: An add-on for Firefox that implements the old Tab Groups/Panorama functionality

An add-on for Firefox that implements the old Tab Groups/Panorama functionality - projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups
github.com github.com
 
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meson said:
Have you heard of this new feature to browsers called bookmarks? You can organize sites into collections inside of folders. You can even have your browser show a bookmarks bar where you can place regularly accessed groups of bookmarks. With a right click and open in tabs, it will even open every bookmarked site in a folder in its own tab. Best of all you can close down those tabs when not in use, and not have to worry about losing track of them. It truly is a miraculous feature.

Yes, the tone is meant to sound like a bit of a smart a--, but the feature you are looking for has been built into browsers for decades, and provides a directory structure for organizing sites, making finding a 'tab' as easy as finding a file in a well organized file system.
Click to expand...
No, bookmarks do not solve the same problem as tab groups.

On my work setup, I am working on 4-5 projects a day, with a lot of the work done in web pages. I switch between those projects and some status reports and research tabs all day long. I keep each project in a tab group. Each tab group has 5-20 tabs in it. I can switch tab groups and all of the tabs for that project are front and center. The others are hidden. It would be an inefficient use of time to have to load and reload those pages every time I switched between projects. Also, I don’t always want to close and reload tabs as the context is lost or lose some editing that is still ongoing. Bookmarks could never do that.

I use Firefox with Panorama Tab Groups. At home I have been experimenting with Safari Tab Groups.
 
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I've tried many of these extensions that were recommended to me, and they all work perfectly, but not the way I want them too. I'll just stick to chrome for now, but I'm still open to suggestions!!!
 
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