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Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

azarask.in

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Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#41

Post by mbrubeck »

yason wrote: post #11

I group my tabs in separate windows and let my window manager take care of managing them. Maybe this is good in some Chrome OS style netbook? Sure, the contextual search (or whatever it was) seemed cool but elementary tasks like organizing my tabs/windows should be simple. Soon I'll have to switch my mental mode just to get my head to this fancy tab-organize mode.

> Soon I'll have to switch my mental mode just to get my head to this fancy tab-organize mode.

One nice thing about Tab Candy is that it's invisible until you choose to use it. You can use tabs and windows just like you always have, and nothing will change.

Watch ten different people use web browsers, and you'll see they have very different usage styles. Tab Candy addresses some problems experienced by many but not all users, and does it without impacting the others. (You could say the same about virtual desktops in X11 or Spaces in Mac OS X.)

Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#42

Post by abp »

jamesbritt wrote: post #33

"We need a way to organize browsing, to see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand. In short, we need a way to get back control of our online lives." Will power? Priorities? Reducing friction or eliminating annoyances is not always a good thing, and may not accomplish what you want. Worse, it may give you undesirable side-effects. For example, people complain about freeway traffic, how it takes too lo…

Will power? Priorities?

Likewise, maybe the annoyance of managing large numbers of tabs is a good thing. It's a reminder that maybe you're getting carried away and need to adjust your focus.

What does these three(will power, priorities, focus) help you with information organization? With this thing i actually can, for example, map a plan of a learning trial and resources therefor into a priotized tree structure. Thats to nice. Any external management of that gets obsolete.

A step further this could be the exobrain on steroids. Other people are using personal wikis for such things, for example. Here you get graphs(later probably even mindmaps) with screencaps for free (while wiki users need tools for graphing into images or the like). Also, writing little conclusions on nodes you've covered aren't impossible.

Don't think about the possible problems, think about the possibilities and advantages. With your points(will power, priorities, focus) you can then easiliý archieve the latter two.

Just to admit, I've thought about something similiar for Google Chrome for a while now. My thougts just weren't gone so far, until now. But basically I was thinking and sketching in the same direction. :)

Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#43

Post by abp »

malnourish wrote: post #38
TrevorBramble wrote: post #37

"Worse, how many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later?" Indeed I do. One of these days I'll get around to adding an extension that allows me to queue links without opening them in tabs. Anyway, I don't understand why Tab Candy is an improvement over simple window management. Since the introduction of tabs, I've grouped tabs by purpose into separate windows, and rather assumed tha…

I definitely understand the windowing you do. I, on the other hand, despise multiple windows for firefox. It's hate learned from IE I suppose. In my case, I use TreeStyle Tabs. The tree function is vital to working. I think Tab Candy can combine these two concepts somewhat effectively, however, Mozilla should focus on speed, reliability, and accessibility. It's much more difficult to appease the average browser with…

I think Tab Candy can combine these two concepts somewhat effectively, however, Mozilla should focus on speed, reliability, and accessibility. It's much more difficult to appease the average browser with hard facts compared to pretty videos and features, I suppose.

Thats just not what Aza Raskin is working on.. And no, I'm not one of the guys who has switched to chrome for performnace.. Damn I'am.

Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#44

Post by abp »

TrevorBramble wrote: post #37

"Worse, how many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later?" Indeed I do. One of these days I'll get around to adding an extension that allows me to queue links without opening them in tabs. Anyway, I don't understand why Tab Candy is an improvement over simple window management. Since the introduction of tabs, I've grouped tabs by purpose into separate windows, and rather assumed tha…

Uh, I massively dislike working with a fat bunch of windows. How can the title of one Firefox window as tab group can be as expressive as a group of tabs you've persisted in Tab Candy with your own label?

Indeed I do. One of these days I'll get around to adding an extension that allows me to queue links without opening them in tabs.

If you don't know any, i like Read it Later(http://readitlaterlist.com/). Anything better out there?

Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#45

Post by abp »

mbrubeck wrote: post #20
onewland wrote: post #16

Why isn't this automatic? Maybe it's a privacy issue, but it seems to me that some sort of neural-networky thing (excuse my AI ignorance) could automatically group these. Especially with some training from the user, I bet a program could determine for 99% of cases what 'tab group' a tab should go in with broad enough categories (development, camera shopping, photo browsing, social networking, etc.).

The Tab Candy team has plans for "rules" that would work kind of like mail filters for placing new tabs into groups automatically. And these would be exposed to add-ons, if someone wants to write more complicated classification code.

Thats the point. It's alpha state. I see endless possibilities and extreme nice information organization at the horizon.

Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#46

Post by abp »

thorax wrote: post #31

Please just add tree-style tabs feature to Firefox (and Chrome). This is a stellar way to handle tabs on modern wide monitors. It's much, much easier to scan a list than it is to scan a bunch of icons, page images, or (as today) trying to scan two-character scrunched titles across the top.

It's open source. Developers should be listening if you tell them. Also it's alpha. And at least, what about a nice, little extension? ;)

Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#47

Post by abp »

naner wrote: post #26
jluxenberg wrote: post #3

Looks like they've re-invented the concept of "windows." Isn't there a nifty piece of software provided by the OS called a window manager that's supposed to do this sort of thing?

They haven't exactly reinvented desktop windows, it is just that the browser is turning into a full-fledged desktop. First you just had single windows and "multi-tasking" wasn't possible, you just opened new browser for every new thing you wanted to do and had history. Then they added the tab bar which is basically a taskbar. Now they're getting into virtual desktops and using zooming for navigating hierarchies. Of c…

They haven't exactly reinvented desktop windows, it is just that the browser is turning into a full-fledged desktop.

Lol. I just imagined Chrome OS delivering all the niceness, smashing all other OS'es.

Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#48

Post by abp »

mbrubeck wrote: post #22
jluxenberg wrote: post #3

Looks like they've re-invented the concept of "windows." Isn't there a nifty piece of software provided by the OS called a window manager that's supposed to do this sort of thing?

But unlike normal OS-level window managers - even ones with very nice features like Exposé - Tab Candy gives you a single overview of all your "windows" and the sub-windows (tabs) nested inside them. And you can interact with the "windows" and change their contents from the Tab Candy overview, which you can't do from Exposé or similar. And the naming, the simple physics for arranging spatial groups, etc., make this s…

In fact, I would love to see an operating system with a window manager that had more of Tab Candy's features. (GNOME hacker Jeff Waugh agrees: http://twitter.com/jdub/status/19052579869)

Damn. Thats so awesome to read.

Thank you.

Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#49

Post by mbrubeck »

malnourish wrote: post #38
TrevorBramble wrote: post #37

"Worse, how many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later?" Indeed I do. One of these days I'll get around to adding an extension that allows me to queue links without opening them in tabs. Anyway, I don't understand why Tab Candy is an improvement over simple window management. Since the introduction of tabs, I've grouped tabs by purpose into separate windows, and rather assumed tha…

I definitely understand the windowing you do. I, on the other hand, despise multiple windows for firefox. It's hate learned from IE I suppose. In my case, I use TreeStyle Tabs. The tree function is vital to working. I think Tab Candy can combine these two concepts somewhat effectively, however, Mozilla should focus on speed, reliability, and accessibility. It's much more difficult to appease the average browser with…

> Mozilla should focus on speed, reliability, and accessibility.

You'll be happy to know that our Firefox 4 Vision document contains several pages of plans for speed and stability and usability, and just one line about Tab Candy:

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/10/firefox-4-vision-fas...

Re: Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

#50

Post by seancron »

abp wrote: post #44
TrevorBramble wrote: post #37

"Worse, how many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later?" Indeed I do. One of these days I'll get around to adding an extension that allows me to queue links without opening them in tabs. Anyway, I don't understand why Tab Candy is an improvement over simple window management. Since the introduction of tabs, I've grouped tabs by purpose into separate windows, and rather assumed tha…

Uh, I massively dislike working with a fat bunch of windows. How can the title of one Firefox window as tab group can be as expressive as a group of tabs you've persisted in Tab Candy with your own label? Indeed I do. One of these days I'll get around to adding an extension that allows me to queue links without opening them in tabs. If you don't know any, i like Read it Later( http://readitlaterlist.com/ ). Anything…

Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/) is another option.
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