These extensions could expose communication protocols of their own, like container extensions and some others do if interaction is so complicated. (Other examples for cross-extension communication can be found at https://github.com/freaktechnik/awesome-extension-apis)
Thanks. I’ll try to rope in thoughts from developers at https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups/issues/535, which seems to be a favoured meeting place for developers of possible alternative extensions.
Generally
I see pockets of brilliance, but the overview seems to lack cohesion, in places. Things such as:
how groups can/should complement containers.
A brief comparison
For Firefox containers:
emphasis on containment (think: restriction) and privacy, without movement from one container to another
a significant user base requires movement, so we have extensions such as Conex that may require a careless approach to privacy, for movement to be reasonably bug-free
a container can span multiple windows
a variety of extensions can work with any container
– and then, for tab groups, AFAICT (correct me please if I’m wrong):
no groups API
limited freedom of movement
group restriction to a single window
a group that is created by one extension is not usable by an another extension – so there’s diversity without complementarity, although things such as awesome-extension-apis might help to plug the gap(s)
Dropping a few notes. You don’t need a specific “group” API to implement something like tab groups. In fact, there previously also was no API for groups.
When your extension needs to switches tabs, it can iterate over all tabs, check if each tab should be visible and hide/show them as required. That’s how I did it, and that’s also how Panorama did it. The only tricky part is to find some kind of unique tab identifier, as you cannot use the URL of a tab for obvious reasons. Quickly glancing over the current APIs, using the tab ID shold be fine, but I have not looked into more detail.
Also, just for the record:
I created this extension as a replacement for Panorama, which was removed due to really low usage numbers. Removing it from the core was the right decision, but I depended on tab grouping for my workflow back then, so I created something that got the job done for me. These days, I simply don’t need it anymore.
Although I am indeed a Mozilla staff, what I do in my free time stays there. This extension was not related to my work in any way, and in fact, writing UI features couldn’t be further away from what I actually do for my living.
Tabspace is still under development, but I don’t spend any time on it since 3 months or so.
This is my first attempt at creating a webextension, so I’m not sure I can have good insights here (and I’m not from the extension team).
However, it feels to me that all the grouping logic can be made by the extension itself, without having a grouping API in FF.
Then it’s up to you to mix that up with containers or not.
