Tab workspaces (Simple Tab Groups à la Firefox Panorama, but without the need for thumbnails)
The current posterchild of this feature is the "Simple Tab Groups" Firefox extension, the most reliable and well-rounded successor to the defunct built-in feature that was called Panorama.
Note that I don't need/want the free-form Exposé-like canvas with thumbnails (they look great in the demonstration video in the above Panorama link, but they are counterproductive in practice "at scale"); I don't want to be managing stuff spatially because I have too much to fit on a screen anyway), I "just" want:
- Tab groups/workspaces in the form of lists, with the ability to search through them and switch between them as if these lists were workspaces.
- The ability for tabs from anything outside the currently shown tab workspace to automatically be "carbon frozen" (hidden and unloaded from memory/CPU) for performance and power savings. The Simple Tab Groups extension on Firefox allows me to do exactly that, which means that even if I have thousands of tabs spread across 70 groups, my browser typically uses less than 1 GB of RAM at any given time. It makes a night-and-day difference, otherwise even 24 GB of RAM wouldn't really be enough.
- The ability to select multiple tabs (#1126 (closed) which was moved to libadwaita#288) and to move/reassign them to another tab workspace (and suspend them to free the memory, as per above) for me to work with them later in that other context/workspace.
To me, this feature is an absolute must-have for my usage type nowadays, especially if you’re a chaos warrior in terms of workflow. It's the only way I can stay sane with dozens of multi-month concurrent projects and hundreds (if not thousands) of tabs spread across those groups, and so it's one of the critical features that keeps me hooked to Firefox for my day-to-day use. I'm sure many GNOME users would enjoy having that sort of powerful workflow available to them in Epiphany.
Epiphany can do it better, by:
- Being built-in and better-integrated (it would have more control over the UI than a web extension, as seen/summarized here), avoiding plugin problems.
- Offering better performance (ex: startup times, switching times, etc.). No need to generate/show/arrange thumbnails, I just want lists of tabs, not thumbnails (that's the first thing I turn off in STG for performance and UI compactness), and you can do search faster and better than what's been possible in STG.