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.
Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, give me a feature which autosizes the thumbnails on the thumbnail view automatically, weighted by how often I go to the site.
What about the Firefox Showcase extension? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [mozilla.org]
Not only TV Tropes but other wikis as well (Score:4, Interesting)
Thus speaks a man who has never experienced the addictive tab-craziness of TV Tropes [tvtropes.org] ;)
Or Wikipedia. Or Encyclopedia Dramatica. Or Ward's Wiki and Everything2, which were probably the originators of this densely hyperlinked style that encourages hyperbrowsing [everything2.com].
Re:Reinventing the window? (Score:3, Interesting)
After thinking about what they were doing for a bit, I realized that what they just came up with is essentially a spacial manager for the bookmark menu that makes adding and removing bookmarks and groups of bookmarks easy and rapid. Let's say you have three folders in your bookmark menu, the tab candy seems to give you a way to see and manage the contents of all those folders rapidly. I think it'll be cool, but it's hard to say how useful it will be. The only other thing like it that I know of for browsers is Safari's "Top Sites" feature. I find that fairly useful, often if it's a site I use often I don't even bother looking for the site in my menubar, I just open a new tab (which shows the top site window) and click on the thumbnail. It requires less thinking than finding something in a bookmark menu.
Tab Mix Plus (Score:4, Interesting)
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/ [mozilla.org]
Reinventing Opera (Score:1, Interesting)
Opera have had this since I first started to use it in 1996. Except they called it "Multiple document interface" (but it is still a bit more advanced then most other applications with MDI). And yes, you can group windows/tabs together.
Firefox users used to complain about Operas MDI being to complicated (but other applications have become more and more like Opera, so this is perhaps not true any longer), on the other hand, they also used to complain about Operas tabs.
Re:Open? (Score:2, Interesting)
Same here. In fact, I have long ago given up on organising my bookmarks. There was a time when I used to spend some time categorising them into a hierarchy that made sense to me, but it was quite a big job. But now that Firefox automatically searches bookmarks by whatever keywords I set, there's no longer any point.
Truth is, I could probably ditch my bookmarks file with little pain - there's a big chunk of it that dates back to the mid '90s (when I was using Nutscrape and/or Mozilla), and I've never got around to verifying how many of those URLs actually exist any more. I just leave it there as a little piece of history.
I don't see the point of this (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
How I would use it (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Open? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mix it in with the awesome bar, and bookmarks are almost useless.