Mozilla tames Firefox tab monster with Candy

Could be better...

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...

Hot damn!

WANT!

Or...

..you could simply browse a few sites at a time. If you have more than 5 tabs open, how much attention are you giving to any one tab anyway? What's the point of adding another layer of tab management, which will simply take more time away from actually reading the pages?

Tab Control add-on solves tab bar clutter already

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.

Looks overcomplicated

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 think I may have just fallen in love...

...only worry is that they're gonna have to follow through on the bit about removing some tabs from the memory or my system is going to permanently grind to a halt!

Usefulness and security

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.

Seems reasonable to me

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

applaud innovation - perceive the potential benefits

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.

countdown to infringement notice

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

I don't eve.

I don't get it; I've only ever got like 3 or 4 tabs open at a time...?

Clunky as all H3ll ....

... 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.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

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

Open source Rip

Oh this is _so_ a rip off the Microsoft table GUI where the person can use their fingers to separate pictures into groups and stacks.

Nice though!

Tab Bar still sucks

And I already have extensions to search my tabs. This seems like more pointless cruft that I don't need - My tree tab bar already can deal with hundreds of Tabs.

Also...

It's sad when Mozilla developers don't know you can open a new tab next to the active one.

Out of mind...

out of sight?

So if I stop thinking about something it'll disappear?

Reinventing the wheel?

IE, for all its flaws, has had a tile view of open tabs for *years*. Opera has tabs + thumbnails + speed dial + easy access to recently closed tabs.

Most incisive criticism is that this is confusing tabs with bookmarks.

I won't use it

The time it would take me to organise my pages in this tool, I could just have closed them. If I want a page again I'll go back to it - bookmarks or whatever. I can't keep track of _reading_ 10 pages at once, more than that means I just need to close the ones I don't want.

tabs becoming bookmarks in a folder kind of way

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)

Actually, it's not bad.

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

i really don't want this in my browser

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!

like IE 8

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!!

Needs work really

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.

This is the most stupid idea I have seen on El Reg in 5 years...

...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.

UNNECESSARY EXTRA COMPLICATION

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.

Re: 30px tabs

Great, until you need the same site open in more than one tab?

TabKit is 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.