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When I saw the title of the blog I misread and was so excited-- thinking they finally came to their senses and were building in something like Tree-Style Tabs.

by thorax 16y ago

When I saw the title of the blog I misread and was so excited-- thinking they finally came to their senses and were building in something like Tree-Style Tabs. It makes me so much more productive and able to coordinate so many different tabs. I have 47 tabs open in Firefox currently, with trees of different research. That may seem like a lot, but it's really quite natural to manage that many with that extension. With tabs at the top, when you start getting to 15 tabs , you can't read titles and it becomes so much messier. You close stuff down just to make the current tasks simpler. That extension is the primary reason I don't use Chrome for anything but a few Google services. It's so much more natural to coordinate them in FF until some other browser catches on and adds support.

seltzered 16y ago
good lord thanks for telling me about tree-style tabs, it seems great for researching a bunch of code frameworks
- frossie 16y ago
  good lord thanks for telling me about tree-style tabs, it seems great for researching a bunch of code frameworks Well, since I'm sharing the love... Tree Style Tabs in combination with Selection Links is a killer combo. Say somebody points you to a page (or sends you an email which you read through a web interface) with a bunch of links in it. So you select the text and use a one click Selection Links function to open all the links in the selected text. With Tree Style, that loads all the links as children of your original tab. Then if you want to monitor the content of those links (say each link shows the status of some activity), you use Tree Style Tab's "Reload children" to get firefox to reload only that part of the hierarchy. I love it.
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  Another Firefox addon I've found ridiculously helpful is Vimperator. You can do everything from the keyboard except deal with Flash, pretty much.
mbrubeck 16y ago
Yes, the Firefox UX team is working on more radical solutions for dealing with lots of tabs, too. One such experiment is http://azarask.in/projects/tabcandy/ http://azarask.in/projects/tabcandy/ - but be warned, this is a rough sketch. It's not clear what shape it will ultimately take, or when it will be ready for production. (That's why we haven't been publicizing it.) The current concept/demo isn't something we are planning to ship yet, but I wanted to point it out anyway because it's so relevant to your comment. Hopefully with this disclaimer Aza won't be too mad at me for linking to his work before it's ready. :)
- Qz 16y ago
  That's the best browsing innovation I've seen in years -- and not uncoincidentally similar to some ideas I've had but haven't quite gotten around to implementing. The meta groups mentioned at the end definitely seems like the right track.
- thorax 16y ago
  A friend of mine who works at Mozilla showed me this some time ago. While I like to see the innovation and spirit (as always with Aza's work), Here I think they overshot and made the problem somewhat more complicated than it needs to be. I don't understand why it would be considered an improvement to have to go to a different screen to manage tabs. Scanning a chessboard of icons/pics versus a bullet list seems like a small step backwards. I tend to believe that simplicity wins over prettiness. I'd love to find out if Aza has done user testing with the tree-style tab approach and what feedback he got back. There simply has to be a reason why Mozilla hasn't considered that approach. My perfect browser would do this to bridge the two worlds: * Start out with tabs across the top. * As soon as the tab count increases to make titles less than five-six characters, offer a popup that says "For managing lots of tabs, we recommend using the tab tree sidebar" and points to the button. * User presses the button and they get the behavior of the Tree Style Tab extension instead of tabs at top or it asks the same question when you start rather than waiting, so power users can put tabs on the side if needed.

by thorax 16y ago

seltzered 16y ago

good lord thanks for telling me about tree-style tabs, it seems great for researching a bunch of code frameworks

frossie 16y ago
good lord thanks for telling me about tree-style tabs, it seems great for researching a bunch of code frameworks Well, since I'm sharing the love... Tree Style Tabs in combination with Selection Links is a killer combo. Say somebody points you to a page (or sends you an email which you read through a web interface) with a bunch of links in it. So you select the text and use a one click Selection Links function to open all the links in the selected text. With Tree Style, that loads all the links as children of your original tab. Then if you want to monitor the content of those links (say each link shows the status of some activity), you use Tree Style Tab's "Reload children" to get firefox to reload only that part of the hierarchy. I love it.
jokermatt999 16y ago
Another Firefox addon I've found ridiculously helpful is Vimperator. You can do everything from the keyboard except deal with Flash, pretty much.

mbrubeck 16y ago

Yes, the Firefox UX team is working on more radical solutions for dealing with lots of tabs, too. One such experiment is http://azarask.in/projects/tabcandy/ http://azarask.in/projects/tabcandy/ - but be warned, this is a rough sketch. It's not clear what shape it will ultimately take, or when it will be ready for production. (That's why we haven't been publicizing it.) The current concept/demo isn't something we are planning to ship yet, but I wanted to point it out anyway because it's so relevant to your comment. Hopefully with this disclaimer Aza won't be too mad at me for linking to his work before it's ready. :)

Qz 16y ago
That's the best browsing innovation I've seen in years -- and not uncoincidentally similar to some ideas I've had but haven't quite gotten around to implementing. The meta groups mentioned at the end definitely seems like the right track.
thorax 16y ago
A friend of mine who works at Mozilla showed me this some time ago. While I like to see the innovation and spirit (as always with Aza's work), Here I think they overshot and made the problem somewhat more complicated than it needs to be. I don't understand why it would be considered an improvement to have to go to a different screen to manage tabs. Scanning a chessboard of icons/pics versus a bullet list seems like a small step backwards. I tend to believe that simplicity wins over prettiness. I'd love to find out if Aza has done user testing with the tree-style tab approach and what feedback he got back. There simply has to be a reason why Mozilla hasn't considered that approach. My perfect browser would do this to bridge the two worlds: * Start out with tabs across the top. * As soon as the tab count increases to make titles less than five-six characters, offer a popup that says "For managing lots of tabs, we recommend using the tab tree sidebar" and points to the button. * User presses the button and they get the behavior of the Tree Style Tab extension instead of tabs at top or it asks the same question when you start rather than waiting, so power users can put tabs on the side if needed.