Mozilla Preparing To Scrap Tabbed Browsing? 554
Barence writes "Mozilla Labs has launched a design competition that aims to find an alternative to tabbed browsing. 'Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin internet, where ten browser sessions were "many browser sessions,"' Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website. 'Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless.' Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces)."
Re:Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:5, Informative)
The 'awesome bar' in firefox automagically searches your bookmarks.
Re:Not quite right (Score:3, Informative)
You can already do this.
I use the "tree style tab" extension on the side on my widescreen desktop, and it works well.
On my smaller laptop screen I use the normal tabs on the top.
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
That's clearly an artifact of lazy mock up screenshot generation. Screenshot of browser, move the web page part across a bit and stick in the new "frame". Note, no scrollbar at the bottom.
There is a minimum width gmail requires to not scroll horizontally, but that's google's fault (since it's bigger than what is actually needed).
It is too wide in that mock up, but usually there's more space across than up/down - though my browser is in a pane that is 837x1028...
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Informative)
Tree Style Tab [mozilla.org]
Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Informative)
while you did admit it. As a point of refrence I load up all my news, and web comics first thing in the morning. I click three buttons and 30 odd tabs begin to load. I read and close each tab.
Given the amount of images,flash and javascript in the average webpage 30 second load and render times with even 15mbs connection isn't abnormal. By loading many tabs at the same time I can read the webpage instead of waiting for it
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that I'm reading them all at the same time, it's that I can queue up things to read. For example, me on Slashdot back in 2004 when I still used IE:
1. Open Slashdot
2. See interesting headline
3. Click article (*gasp*)
4. Read article
5. Click back
6. If content was interesting and there might be a good discussion, click Comments link
7. Read, reply, repeat.
8. GOTO 1 unless I've gone back far enough to come across stuff I read/commented on yesterday.
Now with tabs I just run through the front pages of all my normal news sites until I hit old articles middle-clicking on everything that looks interesting, then I swing back to the beginning and read through every tab. I know it's technically the same experience as opening multiple windows, but tabs feel cleaner to me as a matter of personal opinion.
And how about... (Score:4, Informative)
...not having 500 tabs open, just because you want to read them in the next 3 years or something? ^^
You know, there is a feature called "bookmarks" for this.
Basically, the only point where I can imagine that it makes sense to open enough tabs to fill the whole bar, is when you open many images, or search results. They could be displayed in a gallery-like manner.
But I have a problem with sidebars: They take away too much space. And still you got no overview.
You basically either create one line per tab, which would usually cut off the most important part of the page title (Making 10 tabs say "Slashdot Comments | Mo..."). And below, you still got 80% of the tab empty.
Or you add line-breaks, and more, and got some huge rows that take away most of the place, while still only allowing some 8 tabs to be visible. Again: Lost space. Filled but still lost.
But the concept of grouping tasks/tabs is not bad. Just please do not implement it in that incredibly disturbing and useless manner that it's implemented in XP.
I would recommend adding a second "level" of tabs. For usability and overview, I would by default (but changable) force the number of tabs per set to 10 max. (average = 7). So you could have one level showing the topics, which would for example contain one topic for each project you are working on, and one for random stuff. And below that, there were the tabs, just like now.
Oh, and I would create a function in the right-click menu of the tabs, that would show a window with the exact details on the memory and CPU usage of that tab. So people could finally see, that most memory eating in Firefox comes from Flash, and huge, html-downscaled pics and animated gifs. Seriously. Flash is the guilty one here.
Re:Group by site? (Score:1, Informative)
The Tree Style Tabs [mozilla.org] addon does exactly that. It rocks.
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Informative)
It's gotta be porn.
Really, porn needs its own dedicated browser to deal with these things. Pornofox, or something.
Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:4, Informative)
Also, the All-In-One Gestures [mozilla.org] and FireGestures [mozilla.org] addons will do this for Firefox.
Default behavior for these is that an initial down-roll opens the tab's history, and up-roll opens the tab list.
Re:We need a taskbar (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I'm just the opposite. As I'm browsing through something, I tend to open up new tabs for stuff that's interesting, because I don't want to interupt my reading of the current page. Then I go through the tabs, closing them when I'm finished.
Then there's the slashdot thing - where I use a new tab to post a comment without losing my place on the thread.
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Firefox, the laptop killer: 200 CPU hogging bug (Score:1, Informative)
"Firefox, the laptop killer"
Easy. Install NoScript and no JavaScript and Flash will drain your battery unnecessarily.
Re:Firefox, the laptop killer: 200 CPU hogging bug (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox has over 10,000 open bugs. Stop using it.
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but at least rephrase what you said so that it sounds like some general Microsoft fud. How many of those are untriaged? How many will turn out to be dups? How many bugs were fixed for firefox 3?
Here are some tips to make Firefox use less memory [forevergeek.com]. And for the love of god and all that is holy, I hope Tab Mix Plus isn't the memory leak it used to be.
Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:3, Informative)
Uhhgg...
No, no, you can't do this... you're underestimating the ignorance of typical users. They will go crazy thinking they've "lost" the page they were on when they don't see it anymore; trust me, I've seen it happen all too often standing behind users who were using my computer that was actually configured that way (open new tabs instead of windows).
Yes, most users really seem to be that ignorant.
Re:Firefox, the laptop killer: 200 CPU hogging bug (Score:1, Informative)
This is exactly why i have moved away from Firefox, and Mozilla in general.
Until they decide to stop being IDIOTS and fix the terrible CPU problems and memory leaks, i will continue to steer clear of them, even if they DO make the "browser of the future"
Haha, not likely, their time is over, Firefox is slowly being finished off by their own stupid additions to the already bloated application.
They have went away from what the original reason for the browser was.
I don't care about half the features in Firefox 2, not even going to mention 3.
As for this problem with tabs.
Bookmarks > Get Bookmarks Add-ons > Find one.
Stop screwing with things that aren't broken, let those who want to browse different ways do so.
Or even better idea, make THAT the first step when installing the browser, select the way you want to browse (or default to tabs)
Make the interface more modular. Don't like tabs? Why have the code there? Bai. Hi there New-Future-Idea-Of Browsing.
And for the love of god, get rid of the "Please restart browser" crap for plugins, we had enough of that crap with OSes.
Re:Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:3, Informative)
safari 4 has coverflow for browsing history and its bookmarks and history are all really searchable now.
Re:Bah (Score:3, Informative)
Have you checked out Opera's dev tool, Dragonfly? It's still an alpha, but...
Re:I can see it now (Score:1, Informative)
99.999% of the desktops in the world use landscape view. Pardon us if we decide to make a design choice that slightly inconveniences you while making things nicer for everyone else. You are statistically insignificant.
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you're just about 100% wrong on that point. Studies on human reading have demonstrated that it is much easier on the reader's eyes if text width is thinner rather than wider:
On the web, vertical space is used for skimming text and scrolling content, and is hence much more important.
Re:Firefox, the laptop killer: 200 CPU hogging bug (Score:3, Informative)
The ghost process problem is almost always a result of Adobe's piss-poor Flash implementation. Flashblock ftw.
Firefox should be a little better at sandboxing plugins, but they can't be blamed for Adobe's crap.