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.
Am I the only one that opens up tabs to read the content and then closes the tab after doing so? I don't really see why someone would have like 20+ tabs constantly just sitting open.
Now, give me a feature which autosizes the thumbnails on the thumbnail view automatically, weighted by how often I go to the site.
When I want to group tabs, I make new windows. In fact i rarely have more than 5 tabs per window, then 2-3 windows open. It's easy to navigate and organized, and also happens to be the way it's supposed to be done in current operating systems.
Maybe I"m just old school.
The "Tree Style Tabs" add on is great for managing your browsing. It gives your tabs context, lets you collapse groups of tabs and move tabs from one group to another. That, and having the tabs vertically arranged lets you have far more on screen at once and make better use of a widescreen monitor. Solving many of the problems addressed by Tab Candy.
I'm really surprised more people don't use it. It's the one thing now preventing me from switching to Chrome.
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
I've never used bookmarks properly. I just type in the topmost URL and then navigate to the page I want. Terrible, I know. There are many different ways to use the web, I've personally seen a lot of the following with friends and family:
One problem I have with bookmarks is that it's so 'open' and available to people to browse. I wouldn't want my bookmarks to be seen by everyone. What I want is a 'super lightweight tab' architecture where a tab actually represents the bookmark and only loads if I click it, which definitely beats loading 100s of tabs on startup...
I switch between browsers and computers so much that keeping my bookmarks sycned would be too hard to be worth it. A few years ago I was more of a explorative surfer, now I tend to limit myself to very few daily websites and go from there.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Saw the video of TFA and it seems Showcase does The Job, and is 'mature' as well; while not requiring so much manual intervention (which others might value as a Good Thing). I've been using it for at least a year and really like Showcase.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1810
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
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.
I'm really surprised more people don't use it.
Vertical tab lists and other sidebars really need a monitor at least 1280px wide. Some people such as myself have an old 1024x768px monitor or a netbook with a 1024x600px monitor, and more and more web sites are designed to run maximized across the entire width of such a monitor.
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/
This is a good example of a solution devised by an engineer. Somehow they think that peering at icons, dragging and dropping them, and organizing them into a hierarchy is really something the average user would want to do. The average user will find this solution worse than the problem. A better solution is to simply do what Chrome does and open new tabs next to the originating tab. It doesn't solve all the world's problems, but it's automatic and solves a couple of them.
While I like the idea and can easily imagine the fun/productivity of this on a touch based machine, what happens when a single tab goes haywire and crashes everything? I wish the Firefox devs would take the idea from Chrome and implement individual tab processes. With multi-core machines ever on the rise I can't see why not.
Undo closed tab is there: Ctrl-shift-t
Also, in History menu: Recently Closed Tabs submenu.
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.
To me, tabs are a part of my reading workflow - somewhere between bookmarks and speed dial. Tab Candy, if implemented, would be somewhere between bookmarks and normal tabs: permanent storage, but for task-specific purposes.
The reason why I use piles of tabs (50+ per window if necessary) is that I prefer not to do mental task switching between searching for something and looking for a solution/an idea/reading.
So I will do a search on something, open new tabs until I am satisfied that I have opened all the promising links, then close the search and start reading the tabs I have open. I will first glance at the content, and will just close the tabs that don't look like they are worth reading. Then I just read, leave the best tabs open for reference and start doing whatever the search was for (coding, writing etc.).
I currently use different windows to keep separate tab groups for each different task (e.g. email, coding, search for best widget). Whatever I use a lot or whatever I think I should look at again soon gets added to Speed Dial (e.g. Slashdot, interesting articles), and less frequent stuff that I want to keep for reference goes to the bookmarks pile. The only problem is that closing a browser window means I either lose all the stuff I haven't read in that window or I have to bookmark them.
Tab Candy would seem perfect for temporarily storing a window (e.g. reference material for project X) for later without the hassle of bookmark management.
I know it's "just a different kind of bookmark management system" from some perspective, but so is Speed Dial - which I consider essential.