Container Tab Groups: group sites securely in Firefox

Container Tab Groups is a browser extension for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. It extends Firefox's partitioning feature Containers with a tab grouping feature.

Firefox's Container feature is a unique feature of the browser that allows users to separate sites into containers. It is ideal for limiting tracking and may also be used to group sites into categories.

Extensions may improve the core Container functionality. Container Tab Group does so by adding better grouping and management options to the feature, including for the browser's private browsing mode.

The open source extension displays all available tabs and containers in Firefox's sidebar upon installation and as a single menu icon in the main Firefox toolbar. Both elements can be closed to hide them on the screen to display them only when required. The sidebar listing may be displayed or hidden using the shortcut Ctrl-Alt-S.

Sites may be loaded in any existing container, and they are displayed in the main Firefox tab bar then. Individual groups may be hidden with a click on elements in the sidebar or the main menu, which hides them entirely from the tab bar of the browser.

Many Chromium-based browsers support tab groups and the collapsing of these groups as well; an indicator of the group remains open however in Chrome.

Both menus provided by the extension give Firefox users full control over tabs and containers. Opening, closing, reordering or moving tabs requires minimal effort. A search is provided to find specific tabs quickly, and there is a panorama-like interface for managing all open tabs and container groups in the browser window.

Speaking of windows, controls to manage multiple windows, each with distinct sets of container groups and open websites, are provided as well.

Container Tab Groups includes a handful of extra features that users may find useful. New tabs are opened in the active container by default, but this can be changed in the settings. Similarly, when a tab is opened through an external application, a prompt is displayed by default to pick a container.

There is also a setting for having cookies of specific containers cleared automatically, and to enable first-party isolation.

Closing Words

Container Tab Groups is an interesting extension for the Firefox web browser. It adds a tab grouping feature to Firefox and combines it with the browser's Containers feature for that extra bit of security and privacy.

Managing tabs and groups via the sidebar or the main menu works, but some users may feel that it is not as intuitive as the tab collapsing feature of the Chrome browser. Collapsed tabs in Chrome display an indicator that a tab group exists all the time, whereas no indicator is displayed in Firefox's tab bar.

Now You: do you use Containers in Firefox? Would you like to see the feature supported in other browsers?

Container Tab Groups: group sites securely in Firefox