Firefox workspaces do not exist, so what do you use instead

Firefox on the desktop has no feature called workspaces. There is no switcher in the sidebar, no menu item and no setting with that name, and the idea lives on as user threads on Mozilla Connect. What Firefox does ship covers the same ground in three separate pieces: tab groups for sorting tabs, profiles for walling off whole browsing lives, and containers for staying signed in to two accounts on one site. If what you want is the Opera or Vivaldi model, where one click swaps the entire tab bar for a different set, you need either an extension or a browser built on Firefox that adds it. This page goes through each route with what it actually does today, checked on October 18, 2026.

This site is run by the maker of SpaceDeck, a browser in the same broad category, so read the last section with that in mind.

What people mean when they say workspace

The word arrived from other browsers. Opera puts Workspaces at the top of its sidebar, each with its own name and icon, and you can hide a workspace you are not using. Vivaldi has Workspaces that sit alongside its Tab Stacks and Tab Tiling, saves them automatically when the browser closes, and removes any workspace created in a private window once that window closes. In both, a workspace is a named set of tabs that replaces what you see in the tab bar when you switch to it.

That one word hides three different needs, and it helps to know which one you have before choosing a tool:

• Less clutter. Forty tabs from three projects in one bar, and you want to see only the project in front of you.
• Separate contexts. Work and personal browsing should not share history, bookmarks or extensions.
• Separate logins. You need a client's Google account and your own open at the same time on the same site.

Opera and Vivaldi workspaces solve the first. They do not separate cookies, so they do not solve the third on their own. Firefox happens to be strong on the second and third and was, until 2025, weak on the first. That is why the gap feels larger than it is.

What Firefox ships today

Three Firefox releases in early 2025 changed the picture, and the release notes are the clearest record of what arrived when.

Firefox 136 (March 2025) added vertical tabs. Right-click the toolbar near the top of the window and choose Turn on Vertical Tabs, and open and pinned tabs move into the sidebar. This is not a workspace, but long tab lists become readable, which is half of what many people wanted.

Firefox 137 (April 1, 2025) began rolling out tab groups. Drag one tab onto another, pause until the highlight appears, and drop. Groups can be named and color-coded, they are always saved, and a closed group can be reopened later.

Firefox 138 (April 29, 2025) made tab groups available to all users and introduced the new profile management. Profiles can be named and given avatars and color themes, and you switch between them while bookmarks, tabs and history stay separate. Mozilla describes profile management as a progressive rollout, so some installs saw it later than others.

Containers predate all of this. They come from the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension, published by Mozilla, which separates cookies by container so that two accounts on the same site can stay signed in in two different tabs. On October 18, 2026 its listing showed 427,600 users and a 4.6 rating from 8,077 reviews.

Need	Firefox tool	What stays separate	What is shared
Less clutter	Tab groups	Nothing, it only sorts	Cookies, history, extensions
Separate contexts	Profiles	Bookmarks, tabs, history, extensions	Nothing
Separate logins	Containers	Cookies and site storage	History, bookmarks, extensions

Tab groups: the closest built-in thing

Tab groups are the nearest native answer to "show me only this project." A collapsed group shrinks to a single labeled chip in the tab bar, so three projects become three chips instead of forty tabs. Collapse the two you are not working on and the bar shows one project.

The difference from a real workspace is that the other groups are still in the bar. They are folded, not hidden. With five or six groups the chips themselves start to crowd, and nothing swaps the bar for a different set in one move. Groups also live inside the window they belong to, so a second window starts with its own bar.

A practical setup that gets close:

1. Turn on vertical tabs, so group names read as a list instead of a row of truncated chips.
2. Create one group per project and give each a distinct color.
3. Keep everything that is not part of a project, such as mail or a calendar, as pinned tabs, which stay visible regardless of which group is open.
4. At the end of the day, close a finished project's group instead of leaving it collapsed. It is saved and can be reopened later.

That last point is the one people miss. A closed group is the Firefox equivalent of putting a workspace away, and it costs nothing in memory while it is closed.

Profiles and containers: the parts Firefox does better

Opera and Vivaldi workspaces share everything underneath. A Firefox profile shares nothing. Each profile has its own bookmarks, history, saved logins and extensions, which is the right tool when work and personal browsing should not touch at all, for instance when a work machine policy requires a clean separation or a password manager extension belongs only to the work side.

The cost is that a profile is a separate window with its own state. You switch by opening the other profile, not by clicking a tab in the same bar, and a link clicked in an email client opens in whichever profile the system hands it to.

Containers sit between the two. All container tabs share one history and one set of extensions, but cookies and site storage are kept per container. The listing for Multi-Account Containers gives the standard example: work email in one container tab and home email in another, both signed in. Firefox provides default containers such as Personal, Work, Banking and Shopping, and you can rename them, recolor them and add your own. Long-click the new tab button to open a tab in a chosen container.

For the separate logins need, containers are the most precise tool in any mainstream browser, and they are something the Chromium-based browsers with workspaces do not offer in the same form.

Extensions that copy the Opera model

If you specifically want one click to swap the visible tabs, an extension is the way to get it inside Firefox. Two examples show the range, and the details matter more than the names.

Tab Workspaces puts every tab into a workspace, switches from a toolbar icon, keeps pinned tabs visible everywhere, and opens its list with Ctrl+E followed by 1 to 9. Its own description is candid about the cost: because it was written before Firefox let extensions hide tabs, switching workspaces actually closes the tabs and reopens them, so tab history is lost and anything running in a tab stops. On October 18, 2026 the listing showed 679 users, a 2.8 rating from 66 reviews, and a last update on April 26, 2024.

The Workspaces extension by fm-sys takes the newer route. It uses Firefox's tab show and hide APIs, so tabs in other workspaces are hidden rather than closed, and it asks for the permission to keep tabs hidden. The project notes that you can still create tab groups while using it and move tabs between workspaces.

Before installing any workspace extension, check three things on its listing: the date of the last update, whether it hides tabs or closes them, and the permissions it requests. An extension that has not been updated since before Firefox shipped native tab groups may not know that groups exist, and two tools rearranging the same tab bar can conflict.

Browsers built on Firefox that already have workspaces

The third route is to keep Firefox's engine and containers and get workspaces from a different browser built on top of it. Zen Browser is the best known. It is free and open source, and it lists Workspaces alongside Compact Mode, Glance and Split View as headline features.

What makes Zen relevant here is the combination its workspace documentation describes. Each workspace can be given a default container, so a "Client A" workspace can open every tab inside the Client A container automatically. There is also a setting under Settings, Tab Management, Workspaces that moves a container tab to the workspace assigned to that container when you open it elsewhere. On a fresh install you add a workspace by clicking "Default" in the sidebar and then the plus icon, and the workspace icons then sit at the bottom of the sidebar.

Zen's documentation also states the limit plainly: containers separate cookies and browsing sessions, but they do not separate browsing history or extensions. So a Zen workspace with a container solves clutter and logins together, and still shares history.

Route	Swaps the tab bar	Separates logins	Separates history
Firefox tab groups	No, folds groups	No	No
Firefox profiles	Yes, as a separate window	Yes	Yes
Multi-Account Containers	No	Yes	No
Workspace extension	Yes	No, unless paired with containers	No
Zen workspaces with containers	Yes	Yes	No

When the tab bar is the wrong unit

Every option above organizes tabs. That works when the things you juggle really are pages: research, documentation, a few articles per project. It works less well when most of the day is spent in a handful of web apps that never close, such as mail, chat, a project board and a calendar, often with two accounts each.

In that case the friction is not the number of tabs. It is that a Slack link opens in whichever window happens to be in front, that notifications from six apps arrive through one browser icon, and that switching to the second Gmail account means finding the right container tab first. Firefox containers handle the login separation well, but routing links to the right account and gathering notifications are not what a tab manager is for.

That is the problem app aggregation browsers on macOS are built around. Each web app gets its own place in a sidebar with its own cookie container, links are routed to the app and account they belong to, and alerts arrive in one notification center. The comparison pages for Wavebox and Shift show how far the free plans in that category go, using each vendor's published pricing. None of them is a replacement for Firefox as a reading browser. They sit beside it and hold the apps.

What to change first

If clutter is the problem, turn on vertical tabs and tab groups in Firefox today and close finished groups instead of folding them. If logins are the problem, install Multi-Account Containers, or try Zen if you also want a workspace switcher on top. If the problem is a set of always-open web apps with several accounts each, try an app aggregation browser such as SpaceDeck, whose free plan covers one workspace with up to three apps.