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Orion Team,

One feature I find myself missing from Orion that exits in other browsers like Firefox, Arc, and Brave is the ability to send a tab from the mobile browser to a specific desktop instance of that same browser.

Usage scenario:
I'm doing research on a topic on my phone and pull a particular site that will be useful tomorrow at work or a site that I need to use in combination with something on my mac. In Firefox or Arc, I can send that site via the mobile app to my personal or work mac desktop browser. When I open up that mac desktop in the morning, my tab is there open as the last tab in the list for the active browser window ready for me.

What this request is not

  • Handoff - Orion's handoff feature works great but requires both devices to be in proximity and requires me to be on my Mac and open the mobile tab via my Mac. My proposed feature uses the browser sync mechanism and does not require physical proximity between the machines.
  • Orion Sync - Orion's synced tabs are a great feature for me to manually open tabs on different devices running Orion. The problem with this approach is its a "pull" request, I must remember that there was a tab I wanted to open on my Mac the next day and pull it from my open mobile tabs. My request is a "push" action, I push the tab I want from mobile to desktop Orion and then close it on mobile. I don't have to remember anything, the tab is there waiting for me on the correct device next time I open Orion.

Bonus feature
Firefox and Arc both also have the option for their iOS apps to act as share sheet targets for other iOS apps. When selected, they prompt the user to send a shared URL to any synced browser on any other device.

Implementation examples
Below are screenshots of the Firefox implementation of sending tabs.


    Example showing the receiving Firefox (Floorp in this case as a Firefox fork) browser getting the sent tab. To clarify, the act of automatically opening the sent tab on the desktop browser is what makes this feature great. It means I never have to remeber top open the tab from a bookmark, reading list, etc. Firefox also opens a small toast in the top right corner to notify you of the new tab.

    Thanks for the feature suggestion. This is a good example of what a great feature suggestions looks like. Couple of things to iron out:

    • sending should probably list device/profile combo?
    • is there any animation/interaction on the receiving end?
    • where would you expect this to be in orion ios?

      Vlad sending should probably list device/profile combo? - Profiles adds a complexity I hadn't considered as I do not use that feature. I do not want to speak for those that do, but I would imagine using the default profile would work, or once you select the device having a sub-selection of profiles. Regarding your second question, yes when sending a tab from a device, all other devices in your Orion sync should show up as destinations.

      Vlad is there any animation/interaction on the receiving end? - My Floorp screenshot above is static, but it shows all UI indicators that happen on the receiving end for firefox. To the best of my knowledge none of these are animated. A new background tab appears and has an unread indicator on it. At the same time Firefox displays a brief toast in the top right with the URL received. While there is probably room to improve on this, I do not feel like it is needed to make the feature successful.

      Vlad where would you expect this to be in orion ios? - IMO at the root level of the triple dot menu in the bottom right next to history, bookmarks, downloads, etc.

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