Firefox Tab Candy Alpha 189
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.
Open? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Open? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
(If that's all we wanted to do we'd have stuck with the 'back' button).
Reinventing the window? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Sidebars need a wider screen (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Reinventing the window? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tab itself are already a reinvention of the window, what this add-on does looks closer to reinventing the bookmark. As the way one can organize the tabs into categories and stuff is much closer to what you get today with bookmarks, then what you can do with tabs. Which raises the question how that is going to work in practice, as in practice I don't consider tabs to be permanent 'links' to webpages, but temporary containers, i.e. does your whole carefully created layout go down the toiled if you decide to use your "research" window for searching for the newest video game or whatever? Do you have to remember to always use a new window for a new webpage? Or is there magic working that makes webpages 'stick' to a tab? I think for this to work properly one might need to not only reinvent the tab, but also the way the forward/back buttons work, as their use doesn't really make much sense if you lay all tabs flat on a 2D plane.
Anyway, overall it looks like an interesting add-on and like an implementation of a zoomable interface that actually might work very well for some use cases and for those looking for a simpler enhancement for tabs there is always Tree Style Tabs.
This is a good example... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Stability? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Open? (Score:3, Insightful)
AMEN to that. I watched this guy wantonly open tabs to things he probably would only glance at, and then complain there's too many tabs.
Hey, instead of Tab Candy(which seems like a hell of a lot of work to organize tabs while browsing) how about you just learn to properly use a tabbed browser?
Most people can manage information well enough in their head that they don't need 15-25 tabs open at once.
On top of that, it's actually faster to just open a second copy of the browser with a different group of tabs than it is to organize with Tab Candy.
Re:I don't see the point of this (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Hi! This is reality speaking. You know what? There are users who know what they're doing but do things in a way that makes you think they don't. Another thing you might not be aware of is that you don't have monopoly on deciding what's right or not.
Twit.
(Sorry for that, but people like you are simply annoying to me.)