TLDR: I want to easily have a bunch of tabs somehow synchronized on both my desktop and mobile devices and in different groups. Safari and other iOS browsers haven’t worked well for me.

This has actually been a hard problem I’ve been trying to solve for over 2 years now. Despite having used Firefox as my main browser the whole time, I had relied on Safari to sync tabs between my MBP and iOS devices since the UX for opening desktop tabs in the Firefox mobile app is really clunky: you have to do lots of taps and to get a list of tabs and you can only open one at a time, to open just one tab you have to do the whole dance all over again (this was from last time I tried it months ago, is it any different now?).

The problem with Safari is that lose a whole bunch of tabs can suddenly disappear open on all devices, replacing the pages with blank tabs, you can image how pissed off I was at that. I tried a bunch of iOS browsers, but none of them came close to having a UI as good as Safari in my opinion, and honestly iOS Safari feels much nicer than Firefox. Later I found Orion, but if I have many tabs open, the browser lags really hard on my M1 iPad Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, when all of them except for the current tab are unloaded. I don’t get why mobile browsers are generally unpolished compared to desktop ones.

I was opposed to read it later apps like Pocket and Omnivore, because I can’t open a bunch of pages quickly and switch between them, like I can with browser tabs, but I think I have to suck it up. I could use the Omnivore iOS app and have a tab open on Firefox desktop, to save page and open them in the browser by default, and it has labels which I can filter pages by, since I like to have pages or tabs in groups like Safari Tab groups.

Having long lists of pages wouldn’t lag, or suddenly disappear, and I can mark the pages as read when I’m done with them. I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on this or have other ideas that might work better.

  • @Acid2688English
    8•6 months ago

    I don’t get why people are so resistant to using bookmarks. This is literally their purpose.
    This isn’t a hard problem. Nobody needs to keep 400 tabs open. You aren’t reading them all at the same time.

    Bookmarks are synchronized, grouped by folders, and don’t disappear unless deleted.
    You can open an entire folder with a couple taps. You can switch between tabs with a couple taps or a swipe on the toolbar.

    • hswolf
      3•6 months ago

      I can see a problem with bookmarking for things such as comics, manga, series, etc

      The url changes between each episode/chapter, so you would’ve to remove the previous bookmark and add the new one, which is a hassle if you read a lot of stuff (my case)

      • @Acid2688English
        1•6 months ago

        I used to have an addon for this exact scenario that would auto-update the bookmarks as I read. It may have been this one, but it doesn’t appear to support mobile.

    • @TheTwelveYearOldOPEnglish
      1•6 months ago

      The issue with bookmarks is that it takes too much navigation to open one and browsers don’t allow to select multiple in a folder to open

      • @Acid2688English
        4•6 months ago

        Firefox on Android allows selecting multiple bookmarks or a folder to open all at once, and its 3 taps from the Firefox mobile start page to get to my desktop’s bookmarks toolbar.