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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

#71
post #59

"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…

Too many tabs has never been an issue for me. Can anyone actually read more than one tab at once? If you're thinking of buying a DSLR, then focus on researching cameras. Close those tabs when you're done. Exercise restraint, guys. Tab grouping is the classic engineer's solution to a non-problem.

"Not a problem for me" is not the same thing as "not a problem."

People's browsing habits differ. Some of us do use multiple windows and tabs so we can switch our focus away from a task and return to it later. Mozilla's user studies and large-scale data mining through Test Pilot bear this out, e.g. http://surfmind.com/muzings/?p=505 - among other things, that analysis of several thousand Firefox users found that tab opening/closing behavior among the participants followed a bimodal distribution.

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

#72

This whole effort is misguided. I can't fathom wanting to name a group of tabs. As it is I barely ever take the initiative to organize bookmarks, and those are permanent. People don't need a filing cabinet for something that should be ephemeral and self-limiting. When your desk gets buried under a skin of receipts, junk mail envelopes, and water-ringed Economists from last May, the only proper organizational tool is…

I don't have a bunch of tabs I want to throw away - I have a load of them that I'm using, for different purposes.

Being able to separate them out from each other would be fantastic. Naming them is less necessary.

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

#74

I AM DROWNING IN INFOGUILT! Now I know the name. This looks great.

I persist my infoguilt in the form of starred Google Reader items. Depending on their worthiness/boringness ratio they can sit in that 'starred items' list for weeks until I finally unstar them.

Anyway, this looks very cool. I do have a slight concern that I'd want to put things in these folders other than webpages, which I suppose means that I want the facility to be 'bigger' than the browser, but it just isn't comparable to using the existing features of a window manager as a lot of people seem to be claiming. Perhaps if I want to take notes and add them to a group, I need to put those notes in the cloud.

Also, could this be the start of Mozilla Firefox OS?

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

#75

This whole effort is misguided. I can't fathom wanting to name a group of tabs. As it is I barely ever take the initiative to organize bookmarks, and those are permanent. People don't need a filing cabinet for something that should be ephemeral and self-limiting. When your desk gets buried under a skin of receipts, junk mail envelopes, and water-ringed Economists from last May, the only proper organizational tool is…

Presumably, a system like this would ultimately replace bookmarks and eliminate the distinction between an open page and a saved one. Naturally, background pages would have to be swapped out of memory in some intelligent way, which Aza did mention.

Personally, I'd say this thing fits my browsing habits perfectly. It's been obvious to me that things would go in this direction since I started using Tree Style Tabs.

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

#76
Passing the word along: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890/

Tree style tabs! Organize your tabs into a tree! I've been using the addon for a while (previously used the multi-row feature of tab mix plus), and it is awesome. They should standardize on this instead of more useless eye candy.

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

#77
post #61
post #29

The fisheyetabs extension has similar goals, at least for avoiding scrolling and making tabs easier to locate (no grouping though). The implementation might not be flawless, but I'd like to think that the concept is sound. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4845/ Disclaimer: I'm the author of f.e.t.

It's not compatible with Firefox 3.6.7. Will you be updating it?

Should work now, I updated it 1.5 - 4.0b3pre, I haven't tested it yet though, as I have 3.5.9.

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

#78
post #60

I just realized that Aza Raskin is Jef Raskin's son. One of Jef's main locus of attention was the zooming user interface (ZUI). This centers around the fact that an interface doesn't really have to have borders at all, just the ability to zoom. Zoom in to get detail; zoom out to view more of the world. Tab Candy is Jef's ZUI brought to the web browser. Cool!

This zooming paradigm appears to be what has been superfluously part-implemented in KDE4 on the desktop in the form of activities?

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

#79

This whole effort is misguided. I can't fathom wanting to name a group of tabs. As it is I barely ever take the initiative to organize bookmarks, and those are permanent. People don't need a filing cabinet for something that should be ephemeral and self-limiting. When your desk gets buried under a skin of receipts, junk mail envelopes, and water-ringed Economists from last May, the only proper organizational tool is…

I don't have a bunch of tabs I want to throw away - I have a load of them that I'm using, for different purposes. Being able to separate them out from each other would be fantastic. Naming them is less necessary.

Tab Kit is a plugin worth looking at.

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

#80
post #59

"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…

Too many tabs has never been an issue for me. Can anyone actually read more than one tab at once? If you're thinking of buying a DSLR, then focus on researching cameras. Close those tabs when you're done. Exercise restraint, guys. Tab grouping is the classic engineer's solution to a non-problem.

counts open tabs

43.

It would be horrible to manage without any grouping mechanism and hierarchical organisation. Thanks Tab Kit.

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