Mozilla Preparing To Scrap Tabbed Browsing?

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)."

Comments

Re:Innovation is lacking in the browser market...

[andi75]

The 'awesome bar' in firefox automagically searches your bookmarks.

Re:I can see it now

[mspohr]

Tree Style Tab does this... it's a very nice Add-on.

Tree Style Tab

Re:I can see it now

[wolrahnaes]

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.

Re:We need a taskbar

[Firethorn]

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.