Reviews for Conex
Conex by kesselborn
50 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by moz, 7 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by bdeshi, 7 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by fdwarrior, 7 years agoAs a Panorama/TabGroups user i was waiting for an addon that would have the same core functionality. The wait is over. I've finally been able to switch from ff56 to new ff Quantum with introduction of tab hiding API and the help of Conex.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13363945, 7 years ago[UPDATE March 2018] With the last updates, most of the bugs and weird behaviours are gone, and this little tips list is now unnecessary. I'll leave it for future reference, to show how much work went into making this excellent add-on.
[Original Post]
Hello all,
I switched from Firefox ESR to Firefox Beta to try out Conex when it seemed to be a proper replacement for Tab Groups. I'm satisfied with Conex and will not move back, but if you're in the same situation, I would suggest waiting a little bit more than I did, at least until Firefox 59 goes to the normal release channel. Conex is working fine and getting better quickly, but there are still a few UX issues to be ironed out. Still, it is already a good solution for those who want to update to Quantum and keep their tab groups.
If you want to make the same switch, first you'll need to get Firefox 59, which is the current Beta version:
1. first, backup your Firefox profile, just in case something goes wrong: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles
2. backup your Tab Groups data in the options of Tab Groups
3. download and install Firefox Beta: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/
Now to Conex:
4. install Conex from this page, and accept all the permissions (including the extra ones in the Conex settings screen that will appear after installation)
5. manually enable tab hiding in Firefox: in the location bar, type in "about:config", filter for "extensions.webextensions.tabhide.enabled" and set the value to "true"
6. Use the "Import Tab Groups backup file" tool, found in the Conex Settings (right-click on the new multicolor icon, top right of Firefox)
You're all set! All your groups are back, with all of the right tabs, even in the right order! When you open a new tab, it will stay in the current group, everything works fine with the context menu or middle-click methods, just like you'd expect.
Some other things work differently, so to use Conex to actively manage your tabs there are a few tricks you will need to know:
- Groups are now renamed "containers", a new feature of Firefox Quantum that allows some of the same uses. Conex builds on that to make them actually useful. But from this default feature, you will find a new option in the links contextual menu named "Open Link In New Container Tab". It lets you open the new tab in any existing container, but you cannot create a new container/group from this option, despite the name. It interacts in a funny way with Conex (the tab takes on a "quantum" nature, by being in a superposition of two containers at once until you click on it), but it is functional.
- To remove the default empty containers created by Firefox, to add new containers or to rename them, the only way I found was through the containers preferences menu. Type "about:preferences#containers" in the Firefox address bar to access it.
- to move tabs between containers is tricky. There is no access to this option through the right-click menu on the tab, and the Conex shortcut (CTRL + SHIFT + e) is in conflict with the Windows global "change keyboard language" shortcut. It doesn't work in my case, it switches my keyborad between AZERTY and QWERTY instead. The only way to move a tab between containers at the moment is to right-click the tab in the Conex list (left-click on the Conex icon to access this list), go to the Conex contextual menu that is only found there, and move your tab.
To conclude, my sincere thanks go to Kesselborn for creating Conex, which is really helping out the last of the Panorama (remember that?) users, who already had to exile themselves once to Tab Groups when Mozilla killed their own feature for no reason. Quicksaver (creator of Tab Groups) and Kesselborn are doing us a huge favor with their add-ons, with all the work they represent, and have all my gratitude!Developer response
posted 7 years agoThanks for the review and the constructive feedback. Some of the points you are mentioning are already issues I'll be working on at http://github.com/kesselborn/conex . Please feel free to create more issues if you are familiar with github. Otherwise I'll eventually create issues for the points you mentioned. - Rated 5 out of 5by grin, 7 years agoFabulous. Lifesaver. Sanity keeper. Thre are no words.
Years have passed by (was it really 2018?) and still I am indebted for this addon. It is the bread and butter for my life breakfast, it's my morning sunshine and red evening clouds! - Rated 5 out of 5by NikonMike, 7 years agoI became totally dependent on Panorama/Tab Groups functionality, so I really welcome the effort to bring it back in webextensions! A major milestone has been reached as tab hiding now works without any hacks in Firefox 59 Beta 3! No need to fiddle with a Nightly build anymore, Beta is almost release quality! And I can finally retire the ESR version that I kept for compatibility with old Tab Groups...
The only tweak I'd do now is to enable switching to another group/container by simply clicking on it, without the need to "unwrap" it and pick a particular tab (just like the old Tab Groups - left part of the list item goes to group, right part with number of tabs unwraps it).
Thanks for this invaluable tool!
Edit: Just realized that Fx59b3 is not officially out yet, I tried a candidate build. But it will be released soon.
Edit2: Thanks for promptly implementing my suggestion, upgrading my rating from 4 to 5 stars!Developer response
posted 7 years agoyeah ... probably makes sense. Never thought about that as I use it exclusively by keyboard which has the shortcut ctrl-enter for this. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13518738, 7 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13591974, 7 years agoDoes what it says on the box. Not buggy even though it's in active development. I'm running the fully enabled Nightly version, and it's a great replacement for Tab Groups. Not quite as user friendly but it's manageable. I would love the ability to move multiple tabs at once to a different container/group without having to switch to that new group immediately. Starting off trying to organize a couple hundred tabs initially lumped in default is quite a task when it has to be done one by one with 5 clicks each, but once that's over with it's not bad except for the odd time I forget to switch groups before opening more tabs then I have to move a few over at once. Functioning keyboard shortcuts would also be nice, I would prefer that to the big GUI organization screen that the old tab groups had. Another thing is I'd like the private tabs container to not be visible on the container selection interface by default, I don't use it and I don't appreciate people looking at my screen being able to see that and assume that I often do. Overall: good shit, keep it coming.
Edit in 2019-05: Also when there's more than 11 tab groups (including 'default') you have to scroll down to see the last one, the tab group selector window doesn't just get longer, which is kinda annoying, it looks like it should be able to hold 4 more within the length of the firefox window if the menu was as long as that. I'm using a standard 1920x1080 screen - Rated 5 out of 5by PedroVin., 7 years agoGreat Extension. Gives ME all that I was missing from tabsgroups( even if mozilla says container arent the same - you made it the SAME - THANK YOU). Just waiting for the webextensionAPI be "extended" by mozilla to Hide the containers;).
Once AGAIN GREAT WORK and a big thanks - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13512323, 7 years agoIgnoring the yet missing webapi that prevents hiding this has everything I need including a way to search your groups.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Cri85, 7 years agoPlease correct this bug and let us use it in FF57+ so we have an alternatives for TAB GROUPS extension
Edit: info for the developer, I have 500+ opened tab with FF57, and tab groups plugin disabled after ugrading from previous FF version, I can only see one groups, but other tabs are opened and hidden.
Thanks, for your reply, I know there is a firefox bug, I give you 5 stars waiting the bugfix from mozilla. - Rated 5 out of 5by sate5232, 7 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by qwertyk, 7 years agoNice try of tab group.
How do you assess the chances of hiding the tabs at this moment?Developer response
posted 7 years agoSo: it'll eventually land in Firefox, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding -- in order to be close to tabgroups, we would need Milestone 2 to be completed.
With FirefoxNightly and some fiddling, tab hiding works already (see https://github.com/kesselborn/conex#getting-a-version-that-can-really-hide-tabs ) ... however: you only want to do this if you are open to experiments ;) - Rated 5 out of 5by b_b, 7 years agoNice job on this one and thx a lot for making import from tabgroup :)
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13455850, 7 years agoIt saved my day - after update to FF 57 all my pages from TabGroups were lost, but after installing this plugin they appeared again in the "Default" group!
Thank you very much, I'm now going to learn to live with the "Containers" idea, it looks like with Conex it could work...Developer response
posted 7 years agoDid you import a tab-groups backup? It should actually create a container per tab-group and re-create the respective tabs in this container ... so: when importing, tabs shouldn't be in the default container, but in a container that has the same name as your previous tab group Developer response
posted 7 years agoIt's unfortunately not possible as this is the default container that Firefox creates and it can not be deleted.
Cheers- Rated 5 out of 5by grahamperrin, 7 years agoFive stars.
Bugs should be expected whilst this extension is explicitly experimental. Some of the technologies used, or to be used, by this extension are quite novel – or not yet provided by Mozilla … and so on.
Whilst it's not intended for use with anything less than Firefox 57.0a1, I do use Conex with 56.0.1 – and expect to continue with 56.x until the August 2018 release of Firefox 62.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar#Future_branch_dates
Special attention to a preference that can be chosen when beginning to use Conex – "don't care about privacy" – I do care. Simply:
- in the Firefox profile where I allow carelessness with Conex, I will not use Firefox containers for anything privacy-related.
(There's just one container – used for testing the new front-end to addons.mozilla.org – entirely unrelated to privacy.)
Conex is, amongst other things, useful for switching tabs. I currently use it with more than one thousand tabs in seventy-something groups (the traditional Tab Groups extension) across fourteen windows. Hint:
- it's sometimes easier to switch tabs with Conex than with Mozilla's address bar.
Seeking grouped tabs in Firefox 56: with Tab Groups, with Mozilla's address bar, and with Conex – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDbLhJJGRQU
Where Firefox 56.0.1 switch to tab fails, Conex 0.0.65 succeeds – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YccPINbCePg - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13160986, 7 years agoI have found alternate web extensions for my favorite addons.But I'm unable to find any other alternative for tab groups.Will this addon be available before firefox 57 launches?
Developer response
posted 7 years agoYou can install it, however: one of the most important functionality (showing / hiding tabs) is not implemented in Firefox >= 57 yet ... so: whether it's fully functional depends on firefox and is out of my hand. I don't think they will add this functionality for 57 ... perhaps 58. - Rated 5 out of 5by mike, 7 years ago"Nice try", some said...
I'd say I won't upgrade Firefox anymore.
I'll stay with 56th version as long as I can.
Because, as others said already, without hiding tabs it is meaningless. We say here, we can't see the forest due to the trees. I have, for my work, around 70-100 tabs open in 7 groups, so it would be a total mess to have them open in the same window, regardless this tool does screenshots to help finding them.
I don't understand Mozilla's plan. I agree they need to go forward, but some features are mandatory. They should provide them or they lose their user base in no time. These features were their power, without these, a warm 'goodbye' and go to oblivion.
Just to point one more thing: I use a WE add-on that injects its things in the page (a weather applet). WE supposed to be safe but I think it is a new major vulnerability if addon's output is not isolated. Fake advertising if you want, or I apologise for misunderstanding WE's purpose.Developer response
posted 7 years agohey, thanks for the review: please note that hiding tabs is already on the way to be implemented by mozilla (see linked bugzilla issue). This is as well why for the time being, this extension is marked as "experimental".
You can already run this extension with the experiment referenced in the bugzilla bug and hiding / showing tabs will already work (that's how I currently run conex) -- however: this is pretty experimental (instructions are on the conex github page).
I think the migration phase for the new extension will be annoying but in the end we will have a better Firefox. - Rated 5 out of 5by Tim, 7 years agoMy productivity was about to drop rapidly with the loss of being able to use Tab Groups. With this I finally got some of it back!
Can't wait for the show/hide groups to be resolved as that would make things so much easier.
Keep up the good work! - Rated 5 out of 5by charles.ee, 7 years agoI like it. Helpful way to get an overview of your tabs and containers via an icon on the toolbar. Very similar in concept/functionality to "Sea containers", except via the toolbar instead of the sidebar. Personally, I use both.
- Rated 5 out of 5by xuyuehang, 7 years agoThis extension should be a lot of people need (If the audit passed ...)
Whether you can provide multi-language translation support with some websites and platforms? Maybe I can be able to contribute Simplified Chinese. - Rated 5 out of 5by eailfly, 8 years agoTo me, the most imported feature of Tab Groups is hide some tabs and show others. sadly container can't do it for now. But this is a good plugin.