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.

  • [email protected]
    15•6 months ago

    You can just put bookmarks in folders.
    Pretty sure that’s a been a feature of nearly every browser I’ve used since Netscape.
    Nowadays you can use whatever context menu to open all bookmarks in a folder in tabs.

    • @[email protected]
      1•6 months ago

      Bookmarks are very clunky to use. Plus now as you close the tabs, you need to delete the bookmarks or move them to the “done” folder. Very labour intensive and flow breaking. I really wish there were something better.

    • [email protected]
      1•6 months ago

      Firefox mobile:

      • 3 dots (…)
      • Bookmarks
      • 3 dots on the folder you wanna open
      • open all in New tabs (or choose private tabs if that’s your thing)

      My guess is you’re trying to open tabs by opening the tab manager (square icon with number in it), adding an empty tab, then go from there?
      That would bring you to the “home” tab or whatever they call it… a mishmash of a small number of favorites and recent stuff, and yea that’s kinda convoluted.
      In your case, you know you wanna open a bookmark, go to bookmarks directly from your current tab (… menu/bookmarks), then just use open in new tab from there.
      Open in new tab works on single bookmarks and to open all bookmarks within a folder.

    • @TheTwelveYearOldOPEnglish
      0•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

      • @[email protected]
        3•6 months ago

        Nowadays you can use whatever context menu to open all bookmarks in a folder in tabs.

        Re-read this.

  • @SanctusEnglish
    12•6 months ago

    A bookmark folder called “Read Later”

  • @fart_pickle
    6•6 months ago

    I know you said you’re not looking for a Pocket like solution but honestly it’s the best solution for your problem. With tabs you might lose it all when the browser crashes and for some reason you’re not able to restore the session. If you don’t want to use cloud based solutions like mentioned before, check Linkwarden which can be selfhosted.

    /edit typo

  • @Meltrax
    5•6 months ago

    Firefox has “Collections” I believe. And you can sync them between all Firefox instances you’re signed in to.

  • @[email protected]
    3•6 months ago

    If I’m not mistaken, are you referring to Tab groups or tab stacks (Vivaldi has that feature)? If yes, then that’s one of the best must-have features. I wish Mozilla would bring that to Firefox.