Why did it take so long? It was their number one request for 3 years and chrome pushed this feature nearly 5 years ago. The design looks like a straight copy of chrome so it's not like there was a large design process to work out. It feels like it was finally prioritized so that they could "improve" it with ai, similar to what chrome is doing.
I think it was just stubbornness, pure and simple.
Firefox actually had a feature like tab groups a long time ago. It was removed for "low usage" and ever since then they have been resisting reimplementing it.
Anyways it still needs improvement but I am very happy to see this finally land. At work we have been moving everyone off of chrome after the manifest v3 shenanigans and the lack of tabs groups was a long standing sticking point for some users.
This sums up my experience with everything Firefox. It's why it slowly fell behind in UX and stopped being my primary browser ages ago. I keep giving it a try every year, but the gap between FF and other browsers just keeps getting wider and wider. This is a nice small step, but FF has a long way to go to catchup.
Probably a mix of layoffs (multiple handoffs from people who was working on it), typical beauracracy of a large company, and company politics for personal gain (a requested feature but not some impactful technical feat that would get you promoted). Typical acts of a large tech company
Yea crazy how long it took. Zen browser users have been waiting for them to ship this so it can be used in Zen. Of course they announce this the day I switch to Orion.
