View thumbnails of your tabs and organize them with Panorama Tab Groups for Firefox

Tab Management in Firefox and other web browsers is not overly comfortable by default. That's why some use add-ons to improve tab management in the browser.

Who remembers Panorama in Firefox? Mozilla removed it for economic reasons, but an add-on brought the feature back, before it was inevitably killed when WebExtensions replaced "legacy add-ons".

Panorama Tab Groups is the perfect alternative for a feature long-lost to us. The extension places an icon on the Toolbar, clicking on which switches to a speed dial-like interface. This shows you every tab in that window, it displays the website's favicon, a mini-preview (of active tabs), and the partial title of each tab; this is the Panorama view. The visual representation of each tab is the reason why the add-on is named Panorama Tab Groups. This is a lot more convenient than just having a list of tabs.

Mouse over a tab to view the tab's full title. If you don't want to switch tabs, hit the toolbar icon again to return to the normal view. You can switch to and from the Panorama View using the hotkey Ctrl + Shift + F. Selecting a tab in Panorama Tab Groups jumps to the tab's position (and loads it if it was idle). You can close tabs by using the x button in the tab's dial. Rearrange tabs by clicking and dragging them. The + button inside a tab group can be used to open a new tab.

Managing Tab Groups

Panorama Tab Groups allows you to create new tab groups, this can be done by using on the + button in the extension's interface. To name a group, click on the text at the top of the tab dials to name your group. You can have several tab groups, but remember that tab groups are stored in the window you opened them in.

Say for example, you have a few tab groups, and the current active group has four tabs. Just because you see a single tab group in a window doesn't mean that the window contains only the four from that group. The point is, when you close the window, all tab groups created in it are lost.

Also, if you opened two windows and created one tab group in each, you can't access them together. You'll have to switch windows to manage/view the other group.

To create a new group, click the + button on the add-on's toolbar. You can drag it to an empty space in the Panorama View to place it. See that blank space in the corner? You can drag a new tab group there.

The second button on the toolbar is a shortcut to the extension's Settings page. It allows you to change the hotkeys for switching to Panorama View, and to activate the next Tab Group.

Panorama Tab Groups has an optional dark theme to choose from. The add-on has a backup option that lets you save your tab groups (as a JSON file). You can import saved backups to restore them. There is a message that says the backup feature could be removed when proper session management is available in Firefox.

Click the third icon on the toolbar to resize the tab groups. Personally, I liked manually resizing the groups. To do so, mouse over a corner of the tab group and drag it to the size you want it to. Not sure where the tab you want is? Use the search box in the toolbar to enter the name of the website or a word in the title of the tab, and hit enter. The extension will switch to the corresponding tab if a match is found.

Panorama Tab Groups is an open source extension.

Do I have to create new tab groups to use the add-on? No, you can use Firefox with a single window and still use Panorama Tab Groups.

If you don't like the add-on, but want a similar and minimal alternative, you might want to try Tab Manager Plus.

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