Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Tab Candy Alpha
Nunavut writes in with a note from TechCrunch on Aza Raskin's latest Mozilla goodie, Tab Candy. "Be sure to watch the video for a full overview — from the looks of it, it seems as if Tab Candy is sort of like Apple's Expose feature mixed with their Spaces feature, both of which are baked into OS X. For those who don't use a Mac, basically these features allow you to zoom out and get a bird's-eye-view of all your windows (or tabs, in this case) that are open — and you can also arrange open windows (or again, tabs, in this case) in certain spaces so they're clumped together. This allows you to more easily find what you're looking for with so many tabs open." Here's Raskin's blog post, the download link, and the FAQ.
Thus speaks a man who has never experienced the addictive tab-craziness of TV Tropes ;)
Or Wikipedia. Or Encyclopedia Dramatica. Or Ward's Wiki and Everything2, which were probably the originators of this densely hyperlinked style that encourages hyperbrowsing.
Until recently, my internet experience called for no more than 10 tabs to be open, ever. I've started a new job which calls for a lot of browsing on a lot of websites. The other day I got up to 80 tabs open at the same time.
I'm a huge fan of the Tab Mix Plus Firefox add-on. It allows you to have multiple rows of tabs, and even set unread tabs and current tab to a different colors. Very helpful for visually seeing what's been read, where the new tabs are, where the actual tab is for the page you're on, etc. Especially when there's 20+ open tabs on your screeen at once.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122/
The example which is given in the video from TFA to try to demonstrate the need for this tab candy nonsense is how a clumsy user can fill a tab bar with countless unrelated tabs. Yet, from the example which was presented, there is absolutely no need for that sort of crap. Let me explain.
In the example the user starts off with a browser window which already has tons of tabs, which is already in itself a sign that the user doesn't know what he is doing. From there, a case is presented where the user suddenly feels the need to start a new search, which happens to be completely unrelated to anything that he was already doing. Well, in that scenario, the user could very well do the very same thing that any semi-rational user does when he finds himself on that very same situation: open a new browser window dedicated to that search and go crazy with the search results. There, fixed. There is no need for this tab candy crap, searches/online tasks are perfectly compartmentalized, the tab bar is clean and cluttered, the navigation to/from opened pages becomes simpler... Everyone wins.
Now, let's look at what this tab candy crap brings to the table. So a clueless user who is perfectly incapable of organizing his workflow finds himself with a single browser window with dozens of opened tabs. He suddenly feels the need to open another dozen tabs to perform a completely independent task. According to TFA, the solution to his problems comes in the form of this tab candy crap. Yet, the only thing that it is capable of doing is offering yet another needlessly cumbersome step to do nothing more than provide a different, resource-expensive way to present to the user the tabs which he has opened.
So, in other words, this tab candy crap is nothing more than a window manager built into a browser. I mean, manually group tabs? List the tab groups which are currently opened? Put some tabs on the foreground while putting others on the background? Present the user with small icons representing the opened tab? If you replace "tabs" with "windows" you are describing pretty much any window manager out there. So why exactly is it a good idea to build a window manager into a browser?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.