Mozilla tames Firefox tab monster with Candy Mozilla is testing a new Firefox interface designed to tame that seemingly endless string of tabs stretching across the top of your browser – and beyond. Known as Tab Candy, this alpha prototype provides a separate window where you can lay out your tabs like playing cards and sort them into groups. You can move tabs from group …
While that's an interesting idea, you're going to be wasting more time organizing tabs than actually doing stuff...now if there was a mouse gesture, it might be better... I still think that chrome is great because i never seem to have this problem...and that's with around 12 tabs open at any time...Just pop them around, and if i get tired of the clutter, i pop one out and pop other ones onto it...
Just what I've always thought Firefox's UI was lacking: something to make it a bit more like the GIMP. I have been literally *begging* the devs to dispense with this silly repetitious Ctrl+Tab method of tab switching, and the prospect of switching to a different window, pissing about with another absurd visual metaphor, then switching back to the actual browser to see what my flailings have wrought sounds like just the tonic!
And please guys, don't even *think* of making it optional, since it's so obviously something that we'll all fall head-over-heels in love with and simply wonder how we ever got along without it.
Hate to spoil the fun, but there's already an add-on that solves this problem: Tab Control. Just set the width of your tabs to 30 pixels & bingo, your tabs slim down to only show the website icon (which is all you really need).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1480/
As for grouping like-minded websites, just open a new browser window when you expect to launch several similar websites & they will automatically be grouped together.
I guess it's for people who never close their browser, or have it configured it to reopen with all their old tabs, but I never do that so... it's just more bloat. Yuck.
I would like some kind of tree or tier based system, but switching to a whole separate window looks like a waste of time. For now, using a separate browser window like bhotaling said seems to be the most practical solution.
I use Opera: Speed dial , with the tab bar on the right (or left for left-handers :) ) , does a similar job to this Mozilla effort.
I guess the extra complications might appeal to web freaks or web designers who might to keep so many tabs 'live' at one time.
New slogan for laptop users in an energy crisis:
'Save Power! Close a tab ! '
:)
Lets, face, it if we ignore IE (if only we could) then Firefox is the LAST browser to come out with something like this. Though arguably it all started with Foxpose which was pretty great, which pre-dates the features in Safari and Opera, but was itself a blatant rip off of the Expose feature of Apple's OSX.
A tab is a loaded webpage = memory usage. A bookmark is virtually memory free.
Why not make the same feature but for bookmarks - or an option to have the feature use one or the other or either depending on your preference.
I don;t need that many tabs open, ever, but have a great many bookmarks. Being able to order my bookmarks in the same spatial manner would be a definite plus.
" Being able to order my bookmarks in the same spatial manner would be a definite plus. "
You can create named folders in the bookmark container. Those folders can contain more folders and......bookmarks. As you run your cursor down the list of bookmarks folders, they pop out to form their own windowed list, etc. (Have I misunderstood what you were wanting?)
you mean kinda like how Opera has been doing it for a few years?
On my server, i still run 9.64, and I have ~ 300 tabs open, in a bunch of groups. It would be unworkable without this. Ho long has the functionality been there? Well, that Opera's been running the same session since July 2008...
The reason he made the iOS4 reference is because the Tab Candy system creates a container structure when one web page is dragged on top of another, which is exactly the same way iOS4 allows you to group applications. It's the mechanism that is the same, he's not trying to claim Apple invented folders.
You seem to be displaying signs of typical kneejerk anti-Apple fanboyism, where anything that seems vaguely positive about Apple must be stamped on immediately.
A few thoughts:
1. Will I just spend excessive time moving tabs about?
2. I'm already starting a new browser window when I start a new group of related tabs, is this better?
3. A helper extension can start suggesting other pages related to a group... who controls that? Could be a very useful propaganda tool (start a group on evolution, it fills up with "intelligent design" pages, or Tienanmen and it fills up with pro-government analyses), or marketing (search for cameras, the "best deals" page you see is the one that gives the biggest kickback to the extension developer), which, inevitably, leads to tab spam (every group you start gets a "buy viagra" page).
4. Security. You can zoom out and see your friends' tab groups?! You'll have to be able to control who sees what, but it will be a pain to remember to do it all the time, and how will organisations control what "friends" of their employees see? It's not just in the workplace, your R&D staff might casually browse something related to your top secret project while at home or in a coffee shop. At the moment, that's a risk a spy would have to be lucky to exploit, candy could make it a lot easier and more reliable.
This seems like a nifty idea. I frequently now find my browsing goes off the end of the strip and there are lots of cases where I have a dozen tabs or more on one particular topic, which I'd like to put away as one thing and come back to later.
The UI seems fair enough - provided it's only a keystroke away - and really, what's not to like? It's something different, worth a try, see how it works out.
@Havin_it ("And please guys, don't even *think* of making it optional...") - of course it's optional. Just don't hit the keystroke and you'll never see it.
@Steven Knox - I agree it's unlikely you're paying attention to more than five tabs at a time (well, perhaps a dozen). But I often find I'm paying attention to a particular dozen now, and in five minutes I'm looking at a different dozen, so I could see this working very well (for me, anyway).
It's hard work to be firefox just now. Do an evolutionary change and you're slapped for copying other browsers; suggest something new and you're slapped for being new. I'm starting to wonder if El Reg's readers are getting on a bit - our comments pages do make us sound like a bunch of reactionary old farts sometimes...
Alastair
How many people insist on thinking that their way is best? Go read De Bono on thinking.
Fab ideas - nothing on the video that I find any concerns with - all 6 hats off to Mozilla!
The productivity gain for researchers and teams of researchers is tangible even without running the alpha version.
To be clear:
"Trees are..." NOT better - visual methods of organising things can benefit how the human brain works; see Buzan on mindmaps
"just open a new browser window", "30 pixel tab width" WTF? You want 8 windows - fighting for screen real estate due to multiple windows everywhere?? Or tabs that give no clue to their contents due to miniscule sizing?? get your coat or engage your brain!
@ Knox - I am so glad that your web searching needs are so simple, but this innovation will not adversely affect you, so why are you being negative? Stretch your mind and think of someone busy researching multiple threads/topics/ and finding a dozen more whilst researching the first 10... Of course! many of these will be URLs that the researcher needs to return/give time to later: Candy will be of immense benefit for these people. And then there is the ability to share researches with collaborators... lots of innovation whose relevance to others you need only imagine.
@mlo0352 - if 12 tabs is the limit of your needs, then there is no problem in Firefox either... things get less manageable, as the video described, when 12 becomes 25 becomes 35+ ... the Chrome tab/pop-out functionality is present in Firefox too - it is screen area and human ability to remember and organise researches that limit the outcome of tab use above a certain threshold.
""""30 pixel tab width" WTF? You want ... tabs that give no clue to their contents due to miniscule sizing??"""
I regularly run ~80 tabs on a 1280 pixel wide laptop screen, all Opera shows me is scaled down versions of the fav icon. And guess what, I still know which tabs to click. On a desktop, my web browser is currently 1925x1214 pixels, and I have about 100 tabs open, and I can easily find them because of 2 of Opera's features: Open new tab next to current - keeps my various tasks clustered in regions of the task bar, and the right click + scroll menu that pops up with tab titles (and optionally thumbnails, but I don't need that.)
I haven't seen the text on my tabs in months, and that spatial memory they talk about in the video lets me go right back to where I was. And if a tab or two get separated from their mates, I can drag and drop them into place, have been able to for years, no extensions.
Firefox's 12 tab limit is fully self-imposed, not some law of screen real estate, and this feature seems to be to be a bizarre and over-complicated approach to fixing it. Firefox's default tab behavior has been for years poor enough for me to choose IE7 over FF 2/3 on other people's machines, where I don't have time to install and configure all the extensions required to make FF mimic Opera's sane tab handling. I don't think this feature will change that, especially since IE8 is about the same speed as firefox these days.
"and I have about 100 tabs open, and I can easily find them because of 2 of Opera's features: Open new tab next to current - keeps my various tasks clustered in regions of the task bar, and the right click + scroll menu that pops up with tab titles (and optionally thumbnails, but I don't need that.)"
FF does the new tab next to current and does the right click scroll bit.
while this is interesting, i wonder when it will ever be possible to release it since the things are so screwed up with software patents in america.
Let's start a timer to receiving a patent infringement notice because i think it will definitely happen.
some aspects of this demo are already patented. On a quick & dirty search i can find this:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7747626.html
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7673233.html
both by Microsoft
It looks pretty cool, but a lot of what was presented in that video seems to be confusing bookmarks and tabs. Tabs should be what I'm looking at right now, or have queued up to read shortly.
Organising groups of related subject matter to return to is more of a bookmarks thing, surely? Most of the groups in the video would be more appropriate as bookmarks than open tabs, until you are actually wanting to read them.
On the other hand, this does provide an opportunity to combine the two concepts into a single UI metaphor of 'pages I am interested in', but I have doubts as to whether the browser will get it right about which ones should be in memory and which should not, and which should persist after being closed and which should be forgotten.
I would think that having one concept for 'bookmark' and another concept for 'tab' would be enough reason to have a management tool for both. We've had a bookmark management tool for years, before tabs even evolved. Name them, attach descriptions, organise them into folders, and these days, sync them to remote servers and add metadata and whatnot.
Tabs evolved, but the management tools for these are evolving separately to those for bookmarks, and currently the meta-information tools relating to tabs are pretty simple. So I don't think there's any confusion going on; I believe there's a good reason to keep the concept of 'bookmark' and 'tab' separate, because of the way we use each.
Everyone likes a metaphor, so I hope this is a good one. Imagine your browser bookmarks (linking to websites) are the books on your shelf. You own them, but you're not reading them right now. Imagine your tabs (websites you have open) are books you are reading right now. I often have a couple of books on the go, and I'm reading them for different reasons (Jim recommended this one, my brother lent me this one, etc). You want to manage the books you're currently reading, which are probably scattered around your life (home, work etc) close at hand, and think about them differently to the much larger list of books on your shelf. I have many more open tabs at any time than books on the go, so a management tool would be a worthy thing to have.
Having said all this, I agree with another poster here, I just keeps tabs organised into groups by opening a new Firefox window and grouping tabs in each window. For me, it's a benefit that when I restart the browser all those tabs go away, clearing up system memory giving me a fresh start. I have 4 virtual desktops (under Linux) which makes it simple to keep entire Firefox windows, and all their tabs, organised so they don't conflict on my screen.
Things I do currently miss, having seen Tab Candy, is an ability to easily move tabs between windows (when you've started browsing news and now have 6 tabs open in the same window you had your work in and want to separate the two - you can drag each tab but I usually find this quite cumbersome), and an ability to share a browsing session with another person so they see the same tabs open that you do. Integration with an instant messaging API or social networking API would be favourite.
That's just the thing this is addressing: the fact that a lot of people end up using tabs just like bookmarks, because bookmarking is more of an archiving activity with no capability of saying "this is what's currently on my radar." There needs to be a happy medium available for things that are still "open" but not "actively being looked at this second".
I myself experience this conundrum all the time, but the difference is that if i run out of time/desire to look at all of my open tabs, i neither leave them open nor properly bookmark them, but rather drag them into my Bookmarks Toolbar, which is the closest thing to the tab bar but of course doesn't bog down the performance :). Needless to say, my solution is also quite disorganized and unsatisfactory.
I think you make a quite valid point however that there is a lot of overlap between this new interface and good old bookmarks. In fact, once this thing matures sufficiently, I wouldn't be surprised if it negates the need for bookmarks entirely for many users. However, it is undoubtedly better to let the users ease into this new paradigm and then realize that bookmarks are no longer needed, than to force them into it by removing bookmarks from the browser at this early stage.
You move through windows with Alt-Tab and through tabs with Ctrl-Tab, other that that the only difference between tabs and windows is that with tabs all the sites are shown the same size, which is a bad idea. I normally have 30 to 50 windows open and it's really easy to control - tabs would just be a mess. For a clean desktop, just go to another one. Basically only people with a limited number of desktops are going to have a use for this.
... but I just open several instances of Firefox each for different uses: financial, news, IT crap, hobbies, porn, and etc. Clunkiest solution I could come up with but it works ... when I use it. Other than That I just shut down and start over. Since I save no saved passwords or IDs and I have everything of interest bookmarked it works for me. But then I'm simple.
Don't really see the point, there are about a dozen tab organising extensions, several of which do more than this (I use Tab Mix Plus, myself).
Why do Mozilla developers insist on sticking things in core Firefox? Remember when it was supposed to be lean and mean? Implement the damn thing as an extension. By all means ship it with Firefox, but allow us to turn it off or un-install if we want
Whilst it looks nice and seems to work well, I don't actually see it as a problem that needs solving.
If I have too many tabs open in FireFox and want to group similar ones together, I just drag one off to the task bar which pops it into a new window on it's own, and then drag the similar ones to that window. Different tabs in different groups (windows). Done.
Simply drag a tab onto another to group it in to a super tab....
Clicking this tab reveals a new tab line underneath. Then in this tab line....
Simply drag a tab onto another to group it in to a super tab....
Clicking this tab reveals a new tab line underneath. Then in this tab line....
Simply drag a tab onto another to group it in to a super tab....
Clicking this tab reveals a new tab line underneath. Then in this tab line....
Simply drag a tab onto another to group it in to a super tab....
Clicking this tab reveals a new tab line underneath. Then in this tab line....
Simply drag a tab onto another to group it in to a super tab....
Clicking this tab reveals a new tab line underneath. Then in this tab line....
tab tastic.
I like the idea. I currently group tabs in a window and save the window as a named session in Opera. When you open a session, all the tabs in that session open. I have sessions like 'bills' , 'financial', etc. Unfortunately it doesn't work as smooth as I just described.
I remember when Mozilla asked publicly for ideas about organizing tabs and I flippantly said wait to see what Opera does. Now I hope Opera is watching Mozilla. (btw, this is somehow reminds me of the workplace shell in OS/2)
It's replicating existing functionality for no readily apparent reason.
The desperation to justify this new interface in the video is shocking: it deliberately throws up a 'straw-man' argument: inventing a 'problem' for which trivial solutions already exist without requiring that the user learn yet another pointless new GUI feature. The 'problem' posed is that new tabs only ever appear at the far end of the tab list, often a long way from the tab that spawned them.
This is simply not true in most browsers, and is trivial to resolve without creating yet more duplication of existing functionality: Work out which tab a new tab is being spawned from and simply group the new tab with that source tab. Job done.
As others have pointed out: if you're regularly playing with umpteen tabs, the obvious solution is to display these tabs *vertically*, in a hierarchical tree structure. Indeed, you could use the exact same UI to combine both tabs and bookmarks into one simple solution. Again, job done.
There is no need for this additional bloat. End users have only so much desire and capacity for learning how to *master* a tool. Browsers should be simple, not complex.
Using it just now - yes, that's right, I'm passing comment on it *based on experience* unlike, I suspect, 90% of the posters above.
Tabs are real time representations (so I got notification of a facebook chat thingy in the TabCandy preview), I have my social/work/research/for a laugh stuff grouped up, and it's not bad.
Going to fiddle with it over the next few days and see how it goes. I don't think it's revolutionary, but it beats trying to scroll back and forth between forty tabs, or four windows with between five and fifteen tabs apiece, so that's an improvement already.
Performance is no worse than before that I can tell, although being on Atom and lacking a chunky GPU for the animations, it can look a *little* scratchy, but no worse than anything else graphically pretty on this machine.
This is on an Samsung N130 (atom) with 1gb of RAM running Ubuntu 10.04
Steven R
just another piece of resource-hungry eye-candy nobody needs. tree style tab can do the same job a lot easier and eating up a lot less resources. make it an extension for those who want it (well, they probably have got a mac so who cares anyway) and don't bug everybody else!
This is like current IE 8 summary window. Making groups is an improvement but do I really want so many windows anyway to really need to group them together and spend my time doing it? I don't think I ever needed more than 5-6 websites open at the same time, i fact I don't know more than 12 websites worth visiting daily!!
My big issue with this is it's going outside it's initial plan to sort out tabs, and into actually replacing the bookmarks list and bookmarks bar now with a new interface. All well and good, but as he mentions, this actually all consumes memory and that's not good!
But, the grouping of tabs into stacks is a good enough idea, they just need on the main browser window to add a way to switch between stacks and it would be perfectly fine. The rest of the stuff can be binned as it's total over load of features looking for a purpose and in the consuming resources for little use.
Personally, only use I can see for now is to have a group saved with the bookmark bar's fave sites in it...oh no, I have that already in FF with urmm, the bookmark bar! Now with better navigation of groups maybe more use. But currently no thanks, not interested.
Having though about it, with modern displays, there's plenty of width and not much height (especially on netbooks), so having tabs in a panel to the left (or right) of the main window, with a scroll bar, would probably be good enough. You could get a significant number of them there without impacting much, and then rearrange them into groups if you so desire.
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That looks... exceedingly clumsy. I'd spend more time organizing the tabs than I'd save.
Whatever happened to keyboard shortcuts?
Guess I'll stick to making each "group" a separate window, opening tabs in that window, and only touching the mouse when I need to convert a tab to a new window/group.
...and thats saying something.
Bookmarks people, bookmarks. Always been there folks. And, for your most viewed sites try Speeddial, standard in Opera and addons for in FF And Chrom(e/ium). Or, one of the 600 other addon solutions already mentioned.
There is nothing clever nor useful about having 35 tabs open on a browser session.
Mozilla do indeed seem to be intending to integrate this into Firefox - if they do I think they are making a foolish mistake - leave it as an add-on.
It's adding extra levels of hierarchy that aren't necessary, and trying to re-write the windowing model of all major OSs. A better idea would be to let users label windows. It's also muddling up tabs and bookmarks. It also keeps referring to open pages as "tabs" - the purpose of a web-browser isn't to view "tabs", it's to view WEB PAGES.
A good solution to this problem is done in IE8 - simple and automatic colouring of tab groups - this could be extended by say allowing different colour saturations for deeper levels of hierarchy of each group; another good move would be to allow the user to move tabs to any side of the screen so such hierarchies can be viewed better.
Nigel 11 finally mentioned TabKit, the greatest add-on ever, if you use a browser for managing accounts, not just email and news reading.
To expand a little - Tabkit automatically groups (and colour codes) tabs by your choice of domain or parent/child relationship, with choices to open to left or right, closest or far end of tab etc. Two clicks make custom groupings within this scheme. Groups can be saved, opened, closed, moved, minimised together., or torn off into a new window.
No need to click, they can be scrolled through, but a corner click also shows a list of the full titles. You can have as many as 10 rows of them, with their own little scrollbar if you don't want all rows showing.
Bookmarks don't do this job...if your work requires referring back and forth across many pages you want them open all the time. The parent/child setup is excellent when drilling down into individual pages...which you can't have bookmarked if it's the first time you're opening them.
I run 27 tabs, which can grow to over 100 while following drill-down paths -- groups let me close them, when done, with 3 clicks. But it's groups I don't have to manage. They build themselves.
I hope the new Candy is either optional, or TabKit will over-ride it. Or I stay with the current version of FF forever.
Remember when they invented MDI? (Multiple document interface). Soon everybody started doing everything in MDI. so if you had multiple word documents open, they all opened in the same application.
They found out it lead to chaos in stead of order, people lost track of the documents they where editing, because they opened so much documents in the same application they spend more time navigating between them then actually working on them.
So they canned it a few versions down the line, to move everything back to SDI (single document interface).
Roll a few years forward. Some goons come up with the idea of tabs in browsers (which basically is an MDI interface). All browsers suddenly need to have tabs.
And lo and behold, the same problem occurs that also occurred 20 years ago.. people lose track of all their tabs.
Ever accidentally opened 2 browsers and had 10 tabs in about each? (or am I the only chaotic one here?). Mayhem awaits...
The taskbar is quite capable of differentiating between different instances of the same program while still grouping them. So tabs are an unneccesairy reinvention of the wheel.
As for the proposed solution: if you are chaotic enough to open 20 tabs, how big is the chance that you can turn that chaotic mode off become the most organized person in the world for a moment and starting to rearrange tabs into neat little groups? Yeah right that chance is about zero.
Save yourself some time and frustration, and do what I do every few hours or so, I just close all browsers and start afresh.
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