How are collections intended to be used?

Firefox On Android
#1

Hi all,

This is something I’ve wondered for a while, something I would like to know from the dev team but until now I didn’t know what the suitable way to do this would be. This might still be the wrong place, but here goes.

Collections.
I can see the potential, because I think I recall that in the distant past they were referred to as “sessions” (I may be wrong on this though) and that gave me a vision of being able to quickly and painlessly switch between sessions of tabs to continue working on a specific topic or subject.

However, the way they are currently implemented makes me think I might have misunderstood the use case. Switching between collections is laborious. If I have a set of tabs open and I want to switch to another set I have to:

  1. Save the current tabs to a collection
  2. Close all tabs
  3. Open all tabs from a new collection.

If I then want to save this collection to the same collection as I opened it from, I have to:

  1. Save all open tabs to that collection
  2. Delete all previous tabs in that collection.

Or

  1. Save all open tabs to a new collection
  2. Delete the previous collection entirely.

I would prefer a workflow like with Simple Tab Groups extension on desktop, where I can quickly switch between tab groups and don’t have to faff around with saving, closing, opening, saving again and deleting.

There’s also the downside that collections aren’t synced yet (are they?) so tabs saved to collection can be lost, whereas tabs saved to bookmarks (or just kept open) are not. The absence of sync undermines the utility of collections for me.

That’s what I’d prefer, but maybe that’s not how collections are meant to be used, maybe I misunderstood the use case. Did I?

So, dev team (and any contributors who are privy to internal discussions), please can you explain how to you intend the current workflow for collections to be used?

Cheers :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
#2

I came across this just now which might elucidate the developers’ intentions, if you follow the comments and the links therein:

#3

Hi

This support article may help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/collections-firefox

#4

Hi @DaveRo,

Yes I’ve been following that bug for several months. I believe that behaviour has been changed so that collections no longer show cached content but they do continue to save the history stack. Unfortunately the devs who contributed to that discussion did not provide much insight into how they expect collections to be used.

@plwt, I wish that support article was helpful but unfortunately it doesn’t address my questions at all. Why is switching between collections so laborious? Why aren’t they synced?

The continued absence of any proper explanation for the utility of the Collections feature is very confusing. If it’s supposed to be a great feature then why isn’t it being championed and promoted? Why do these usability issues remain?

If any actual developers of Fenix can explain I would greatly appreciate it. I know there are plenty here on Discourse but I won’t disturb them by tagging them.

Cheers :slightly_smiling_face: