Support Closing Groups on Chrome

[SamuelRCrider]

Hello!

I use Google Chrome and organize my tabs via the group feature. I am wondering how useful it would be to add Vimium support for closing groups as I'm always forced to use the mouse/touchpad to click on and close them. Other than that, I don't think Vimium needs to support any other group related things.

Before I open an issue/code against this, I'm interested in hearing some thoughts from y'all.

Final note

I didn't know if I should open an issue or a discussion for this as it is my first time interacting with a codebase in this manner. Definitely lmk if this post is in the wrong place!

[philg-dev]

I think a discussion is a good start for a topic like this.

Unfortunately tab groups don't seem to have a uniform API across different browsers yet.

Firefox based browsers

Some years ago Firefox had native tab grouping implemented (2011-2016), but then they gave up and removed the feature due to low demand.

Firefox is currently rolling out their new native tab grouping feature, coming in Firefox 136, which has been available on Nightly / Beta / Developer Edition for a few weeks already. As of now I couldn't find information about an API for webextensions to control the new native tab groups in Firefox. Since native tab grouping is just making it's way back into the stable release, it seems reasonable to expect an API for webextensions in the fairly near future.

Chromium browsers

In Chrome closing a tab group through a webextension doesn't seem to have a specific method to do so, but would be fairly easy to implement with the chrome.tabs API:

• tabs have a groupId property to indicate the tab group they belong to
• chrome.tabs.query() can be used to get all tabs with the same groupId as the active tab
• chrome.tabs.remove() could then be called with all relevant tabIDs and when the tab group no longer contains any tabs, it will be implicitly removed

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So maybe there's hope that Firefox will soon offer a groupId property in their tabs API as well, then this could be implemented in Vimium across browsers. As long as this is only available in Chromium browsers, it's probably not a super great fit for Vimium. Maybe there's existing extensions that let you set a key binding to close a group? That way you might be able to just use that alongside Vimium without much friction.