7 ms·

Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet

115 points by mbrubeck 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jluxenberg 16y ago
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?
- moe 16y ago
  supposed Emphasis mine.
- Qz 16y ago
  Key words: supposed to. nix has a million different options and no clear winner. OSX and Win have static ones that can't really be customized and are only upgraded at a glacially slow pace compared to browser development.
- thefool 16y ago
  I wish you could do all this with regular windows. Its also much more specialized for the type of stuff people do on the internet.
- mbrubeck 16y ago
  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 suitable for different use cases than ordinary windows. Try it out and see. I've been using the internal Tab Candy alphas for a while now (I am a Mozilla employee) and it really adds some useful new possibilities. 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 http://twitter.com/jdub/status/19052579869)
  - jberryman 16y ago
    I would love to see that too.
  - abp 16y ago
    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 http://twitter.com/jdub/status/19052579869) Damn. Thats so awesome to read. Thank you.
- docgnome 16y ago
  That only works if your window manager actually manages your windows instead of just drawing them. StumpWM is a great example of what I'd call, doing it right. Plus it's hackable in CL so that's a plus. :-)
- naner 16y ago
  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 course, virtual desktops are used to some degree in a lot of places (mostly Linux desktops and OSX) and zooming isn't a new idea for the desktop but it hasn't been implemented in any of the big desktop systems like this before (AFAICT). The differences are that all applications (web pages) on this desktop are more or less the same size ("document" shaped) and we tend to have a ton more of them open at once then traditional desktop applications. And they are usually text-searchable. I've got mixed feelings about this. I've always thought tabs were cumbersome and didn't scale well but I don't really want to have to manually sort all of my tabs and push things around with the mouse, either.
  - dekz 16y ago
    Thats why I think I would still continue to use multiple windows and spaces. It's easy to stay in the mindset of work, with work related tabs and an IDE in the space. Theres no temptation to look at "unproductive work" because it doesn't exist. Plus I'm using chrome but that's for other reasons.
  - abp 16y ago
    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.
- jrockway 16y ago
  Most users don't have a usable window manager, though, so they decide to write one inside their pet application instead.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
proee 16y ago
This seems a little 'too much' for me. Though I wouldn't mind having a tab-candy type manager that automatically groups all tabs of the same domain into one group. This way I could close all pages of a particular site at once and clean up the Bazillion tabs I have open in my browser right now.
- moe 16y ago
  Browser tabs are quite a hard problem actually that many have tried to tackle - and many failed. In my firefox days I have tried just about every tab-addon there is, from coloring (with or without aging), over multi-row, to tree-sidebar. None of them did improve the situation enough. In summary the multi-row variant helped the most, but the tab-ordering would still get messed up constantly with unrelated tabs slipping into places where they don't belong (the dreaded "spontaneous google search"). And one thing is for sure, the firefox default of scroll-arrows on the tab bar is probably the worst from all worlds. The chrome-way of squeezing it all into whatever width available beats that hands down, but still leaves a lot to be desired. So, as someone who routinely has 30+ Tabs open in supposedly distinct groups ("Work", "Procrastination", "Research" etc.) - this looks very promising to me. Ideally I'd want this in a slideout side-panel. And in chrome, ofcourse. ;-)
  - proee 16y ago
    Typically I open a new browser window for these sort of groups (work, fun, etc). If a tab needs to move between these ad-hoc groups then with chrome you can of course just drag it between the windows. Since I have a 3 monitor setup this is a no-brainer. The tab-candy setup would be less efficient in this regard because I have to open a third state to arrange tabs. However, if I was forced to work on a laptop this might be a better option than my current setup.
yason 16y ago
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.
- dekz 16y ago
  I agree with yason. I rather enjoy having segregated spaces, for work, normal, university etc. That way I'm looking at articles related to work, I have the ability to switch to an IDE and do work. The only other option is to have everything in 1 space and that's not preferable.
- mbrubeck 16y ago
  > 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.)
  - blasdel 16y ago
    If it really is independent, please keep it an extension and don't bake it into vanilla Firefox. It doesn't just impact bewildered users that never asked for it and devs/users of existing extensions that are now sidelined -- it completely fucks your upstream development cycle, since changes to the chrome are lumped in with and gated by rendering engine changes. It's a fundamental mistake that y'all and many others in the industry have been making for years. Microsoft stopped bundling some of their apps with Win7 for this reason, and Google has finally stopped bundling core user apps with their most recent Android release so that users have any hope of getting current versions.
Charuru 16y ago
Great video. FF learns yet another thing from Chrome. (In Chrome you can drag and drop tabs into distinct windows easily. It's actually easier to do this in Chrome than in Tab Candy.)
- gxti 16y ago
  You can do that in vanilla Firefox 3.6 and I'm pretty sure it's worked since at least 2.x
  - Charuru 16y ago
    No you can't... I just tried dragging a tab into a window. Doesn't work. The whole point of tab candy is to fix this deficiency.
    - mbrubeck 16y ago
      Dragging tabs between windows works for me in both Firefox 3.6 and 4.0b3pre, with a clean profile (no extensions). You have to drop the tab into the tab bar area (just like Chrome 5 - I don't know if other versions of Chrome are different).
      - bruceboughton 16y ago
        Chrome allows you to drag a tab out of a window into a blank space to create a new window.
        mbrubeck 16y ago
        Yup. So does Firefox. (And Opera, for that matter... Chrome did not invent these features.)
        blasdel 16y ago
        The shipping version of Firefox when Chrome was first released absolutely did not have this feature. It was a regular pain in my ass. The ability to poof a tab out into a new window without reloading the contents was added to Firefox in the interim.
mbreese 16y ago
What's wrong with the Chrome method of opening new tabs right next to the current tab? This way related things tend to stay together. This one "feature" was why I switched to Chrome. This seems like an overly complicated solution in search of a problem.
- what 16y ago
  You still have problems when you open LOTS of tabs. You can no longer tell what page is loaded in a given tab.
- ccollins 16y ago
  My biggest problem with this approach is I lose context. I prefer tabs to open on the end of my browser. That way I can open 5 tabs, type Command-9 to to get to the last tab, and quickly deal with my tabs in a LIFO manner. Tab Candy seems awesome to me for power browsing (20+ tabs), as long as there are intuitive keyboard shortcuts.
- fliph 16y ago
  > What's wrong with the Chrome method of opening new tabs right next to the current tab? Firefox already does this.
  - omaranto 16y ago
    It does now? Back when I used Firefox, Firefox did not do that out of the box, so I used the Tabs Open Relative extension.
- kaitnieks 16y ago
  Check Tab Mix Plus extension.
onewland 16y ago
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.).
- mbrubeck 16y ago
  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.
  - abp 16y ago
    Thats the point. It's alpha state. I see endless possibilities and extreme nice information organization at the horizon.
docgnome 16y ago
I like some of the ideas here, but I think my current browser, Conkeror (not to be confused with Konqueror), has already solved this problem. Similar to the way that Quicksilver for OS X works, I just type at it the buffer (tab) I want and it gets it for me. It would be pretty cool for it to be able figure out what the content was so I could say "camera" and it would find all the camera related stuff though...
lkozma 16y ago
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/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4845/ Disclaimer: I'm the author of f.e.t.
- Frump 16y ago
  It's not compatible with Firefox 3.6.7. Will you be updating it?
  - lkozma 16y ago
    Should work now, I updated it 1.5 - 4.0b3pre, I haven't tested it yet though, as I have 3.5.9.
thorax 16y ago
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.
- abp 16y ago
  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? ;)
jamesbritt 16y ago
"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 long to drive from your home at X to shopping at Y. So city planners go off and widen existing freeways, and maybe build new ones. For a while things are great; little traffic, and it's easy to get around. Before too long, though, you find that traffic is no better than it was before. But there's lots of new housing construction in your area. Seems the promise of easy access encouraged people to keep living far out from the city. You still have bad traffic, plus more people, and worse air quality. Had there been no attempt to reduce the friction of traffic there would likely be incentives to drive less often and fewer miles. There would be more opportunity for stores opening up closer to where you live; more locally businesses would thrive. 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. (Raise your hand if you've ever been silently relieved when a tab-heavy browser crashed and you couldn't recover them.)
- dekz 16y ago
  "Probably didn't need to read those 50 tabs of reddit anyway before my exam"
- abp 16y ago
  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. :)
TrevorBramble 16y ago
"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 that's how everyone did it. Especially now that you can easily drag tabs from one browser window to another, it's effortless. No new GUI to learn, to expensive extension to install.
- malnourish 16y ago
  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 hard facts compared to pretty videos and features, I suppose.
  - abp 16y ago
    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.
  - mbrubeck 16y ago
    > 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-fast-powerful-and-empowering/ http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/10/firefox-4-vision-fas...
- abp 16y ago
jberryman 16y ago
I AM DROWNING IN INFOGUILT! Now I know the name. This looks great.
- confuzatron 16y ago
  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?
phreanix 16y ago
I can't decide if this is a productivity tool or a distraction.
planckscnst 16y ago
I found that I hated working with lots of windows as have many others. However, I came to realize that this is because of the window manager. I switched to a window manager capable of actually managing windows, and will never go back. The particular window manager I use is called Awesome, but there are many like it. A particularly useful feature is Awesome's use of tags. Multiple tags can be assigned to windows, and multiple windows can be assigned to tags, and at any one time, you can view whichever combination of tags you want. I have a tag for work, a tag for personal, a tag for news. I also have a tag for web, a tag for communications, and a tag for production. Viewing combinations of these tags is extremely useful and an effective way of managing windows.
Corrado 16y ago
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!
- mitchellhislop 16y ago
  Man, did he have anything to do with Prezi? The zooming/boarderless idea just seems so fitting. It was a great day in UI when that started catching on.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  This zooming paradigm appears to be what has been superfluously part-implemented in KDE4 on the desktop in the form of activities?
- paul23 16y ago
  Jef's ZUI is also implemented as a file browser for Macintosh. Really awesome! http://raskinformac.com http://raskinformac.com
magma 16y ago
Pretty cool demo. I use Vimperator[1] to do most of my browsing. The experience is quite good. It would be interesting if Tab Candy will have apis to drive these features. Then vimperator commands could call them like, :group Work - current tab into the Work group :switch Todo - switch to the Todo group etc The features look great. But after using Vimperator, I prefer keyboard alternatives to the drag-and-drop stuff shown. [1] - http://vimperator.org http://vimperator.org
jim_h 16y ago
The tab grouping feature seems like it would be useful for me. It would be nice if the groups/pages were saved as folders/bookmarks so it could be retrieved later. They never mentioned what happens when FF was closed. And also if they could display the bookmarks/folders in the same fashion. I am NOT interested in them looking into what pages I go to or my searches so they can direct ads or price search results. Data sharing should only be to people I know AND approve in advance.
goodside 16y ago
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 a trash can. Tabs are just a modern incarnation of the same problem.
- jey 16y ago
  Sure, but the trashcan is the "proper organizational tool" only because a better solution doesn't exist yet, not because it solves the problem optimally. Isn't there some reason that copy of the Economist is sitting on your desk in the first place? Presumably you do want to read the interesting articles in it, and it'd be handy if the most interesting ones were somehow brought to you. Now, Tab Candy doesn't do that, but I think it's at least a step in the right direction of trying to address the cases that are somewhere between "garbage collect the tab" and "immediately use the tab".
  - goodside 16y ago
    The better solution is search, which is notably not an organizational tool at all as far as the user is concerned. Will there some day be a solution that's better still? Yes. But I guarantee it won't involve the user sorting into buckets or affixing labels.
- AndrewDucker 16y ago
  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.
  - yxhuvud 16y ago
    Tab Kit is a plugin worth looking at.
- 16y ago
nazgulnarsil 16y ago
how about software that can take your history and automatically make a mindmap? does this exist?
Jach 16y ago
Passing the word along: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890/ 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.
karlzt 16y ago
I'm happy with bartab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/ and list all tabs menu: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12380/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12380/
growt 16y ago
I wrote something similar for chrome a while ago: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/edooipcjkkbjmnogkdcahgmhbniipefp https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/edooipcjkkbjmnog... It's a little bit more lightweight (not in respect to memory usage maybe).
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  OTOH, there's another interesting approach to too many tabs: Don't allow them in the first place: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kjecajkoiikaohhagojedcphegkcfobm https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kjecajkoiikaohha... The No More Tabs extension limits the number of tabs you can have, and will close an old tab if you open a new one over that limit.
yellowstone 16y ago
tab candy is a bit too much work. sticking with tabgroups manager. it's a firefox addon which does the same thing but better. groups aren't hidden, they are tabs on a bar above the normal tab bar. you can auto name group tabs after selected tabs title by double clicking it. you can switch groups in 1 click by selecting the group tab. tab candy should go in that direction
yellowstone 16y ago
here's tabgroups manager https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/

115 points by mbrubeck 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

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?

moe 16y ago
supposed Emphasis mine.
Qz 16y ago
Key words: supposed to. nix has a million different options and no clear winner. OSX and Win have static ones that can't really be customized and are only upgraded at a glacially slow pace compared to browser development.
thefool 16y ago
I wish you could do all this with regular windows. Its also much more specialized for the type of stuff people do on the internet.
mbrubeck 16y ago
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 suitable for different use cases than ordinary windows. Try it out and see. I've been using the internal Tab Candy alphas for a while now (I am a Mozilla employee) and it really adds some useful new possibilities. 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 http://twitter.com/jdub/status/19052579869)
- jberryman 16y ago
  I would love to see that too.
- abp 16y ago
  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 http://twitter.com/jdub/status/19052579869) Damn. Thats so awesome to read. Thank you.
docgnome 16y ago
That only works if your window manager actually manages your windows instead of just drawing them. StumpWM is a great example of what I'd call, doing it right. Plus it's hackable in CL so that's a plus. :-)
naner 16y ago
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 course, virtual desktops are used to some degree in a lot of places (mostly Linux desktops and OSX) and zooming isn't a new idea for the desktop but it hasn't been implemented in any of the big desktop systems like this before (AFAICT). The differences are that all applications (web pages) on this desktop are more or less the same size ("document" shaped) and we tend to have a ton more of them open at once then traditional desktop applications. And they are usually text-searchable. I've got mixed feelings about this. I've always thought tabs were cumbersome and didn't scale well but I don't really want to have to manually sort all of my tabs and push things around with the mouse, either.
- dekz 16y ago
  Thats why I think I would still continue to use multiple windows and spaces. It's easy to stay in the mindset of work, with work related tabs and an IDE in the space. Theres no temptation to look at "unproductive work" because it doesn't exist. Plus I'm using chrome but that's for other reasons.
- abp 16y ago
  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.
jrockway 16y ago
Most users don't have a usable window manager, though, so they decide to write one inside their pet application instead.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

proee 16y ago

This seems a little 'too much' for me. Though I wouldn't mind having a tab-candy type manager that automatically groups all tabs of the same domain into one group. This way I could close all pages of a particular site at once and clean up the Bazillion tabs I have open in my browser right now.

moe 16y ago
Browser tabs are quite a hard problem actually that many have tried to tackle - and many failed. In my firefox days I have tried just about every tab-addon there is, from coloring (with or without aging), over multi-row, to tree-sidebar. None of them did improve the situation enough. In summary the multi-row variant helped the most, but the tab-ordering would still get messed up constantly with unrelated tabs slipping into places where they don't belong (the dreaded "spontaneous google search"). And one thing is for sure, the firefox default of scroll-arrows on the tab bar is probably the worst from all worlds. The chrome-way of squeezing it all into whatever width available beats that hands down, but still leaves a lot to be desired. So, as someone who routinely has 30+ Tabs open in supposedly distinct groups ("Work", "Procrastination", "Research" etc.) - this looks very promising to me. Ideally I'd want this in a slideout side-panel. And in chrome, ofcourse. ;-)
- proee 16y ago
  Typically I open a new browser window for these sort of groups (work, fun, etc). If a tab needs to move between these ad-hoc groups then with chrome you can of course just drag it between the windows. Since I have a 3 monitor setup this is a no-brainer. The tab-candy setup would be less efficient in this regard because I have to open a third state to arrange tabs. However, if I was forced to work on a laptop this might be a better option than my current setup.

yason 16y ago

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.

dekz 16y ago
I agree with yason. I rather enjoy having segregated spaces, for work, normal, university etc. That way I'm looking at articles related to work, I have the ability to switch to an IDE and do work. The only other option is to have everything in 1 space and that's not preferable.
mbrubeck 16y ago
> 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.)
- blasdel 16y ago
  If it really is independent, please keep it an extension and don't bake it into vanilla Firefox. It doesn't just impact bewildered users that never asked for it and devs/users of existing extensions that are now sidelined -- it completely fucks your upstream development cycle, since changes to the chrome are lumped in with and gated by rendering engine changes. It's a fundamental mistake that y'all and many others in the industry have been making for years. Microsoft stopped bundling some of their apps with Win7 for this reason, and Google has finally stopped bundling core user apps with their most recent Android release so that users have any hope of getting current versions.

Charuru 16y ago

Great video. FF learns yet another thing from Chrome. (In Chrome you can drag and drop tabs into distinct windows easily. It's actually easier to do this in Chrome than in Tab Candy.)

gxti 16y ago
You can do that in vanilla Firefox 3.6 and I'm pretty sure it's worked since at least 2.x
- Charuru 16y ago
  No you can't... I just tried dragging a tab into a window. Doesn't work. The whole point of tab candy is to fix this deficiency.
  - mbrubeck 16y ago
    Dragging tabs between windows works for me in both Firefox 3.6 and 4.0b3pre, with a clean profile (no extensions). You have to drop the tab into the tab bar area (just like Chrome 5 - I don't know if other versions of Chrome are different).
    - bruceboughton 16y ago
      Chrome allows you to drag a tab out of a window into a blank space to create a new window.
      - mbrubeck 16y ago
        Yup. So does Firefox. (And Opera, for that matter... Chrome did not invent these features.)
        blasdel 16y ago
        The shipping version of Firefox when Chrome was first released absolutely did not have this feature. It was a regular pain in my ass. The ability to poof a tab out into a new window without reloading the contents was added to Firefox in the interim.

mbreese 16y ago

What's wrong with the Chrome method of opening new tabs right next to the current tab? This way related things tend to stay together. This one "feature" was why I switched to Chrome. This seems like an overly complicated solution in search of a problem.

what 16y ago
You still have problems when you open LOTS of tabs. You can no longer tell what page is loaded in a given tab.
ccollins 16y ago
My biggest problem with this approach is I lose context. I prefer tabs to open on the end of my browser. That way I can open 5 tabs, type Command-9 to to get to the last tab, and quickly deal with my tabs in a LIFO manner. Tab Candy seems awesome to me for power browsing (20+ tabs), as long as there are intuitive keyboard shortcuts.
fliph 16y ago
> What's wrong with the Chrome method of opening new tabs right next to the current tab? Firefox already does this.
- omaranto 16y ago
  It does now? Back when I used Firefox, Firefox did not do that out of the box, so I used the Tabs Open Relative extension.
kaitnieks 16y ago
Check Tab Mix Plus extension.

onewland 16y ago

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.).

mbrubeck 16y ago
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.
- abp 16y ago
  Thats the point. It's alpha state. I see endless possibilities and extreme nice information organization at the horizon.

docgnome 16y ago

I like some of the ideas here, but I think my current browser, Conkeror (not to be confused with Konqueror), has already solved this problem. Similar to the way that Quicksilver for OS X works, I just type at it the buffer (tab) I want and it gets it for me. It would be pretty cool for it to be able figure out what the content was so I could say "camera" and it would find all the camera related stuff though...

lkozma 16y ago

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/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4845/ Disclaimer: I'm the author of f.e.t.

Frump 16y ago
It's not compatible with Firefox 3.6.7. Will you be updating it?
- lkozma 16y ago
  Should work now, I updated it 1.5 - 4.0b3pre, I haven't tested it yet though, as I have 3.5.9.

thorax 16y ago

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.

abp 16y ago
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? ;)

jamesbritt 16y ago

"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 long to drive from your home at X to shopping at Y. So city planners go off and widen existing freeways, and maybe build new ones. For a while things are great; little traffic, and it's easy to get around. Before too long, though, you find that traffic is no better than it was before. But there's lots of new housing construction in your area. Seems the promise of easy access encouraged people to keep living far out from the city. You still have bad traffic, plus more people, and worse air quality. Had there been no attempt to reduce the friction of traffic there would likely be incentives to drive less often and fewer miles. There would be more opportunity for stores opening up closer to where you live; more locally businesses would thrive. 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. (Raise your hand if you've ever been silently relieved when a tab-heavy browser crashed and you couldn't recover them.)

dekz 16y ago
"Probably didn't need to read those 50 tabs of reddit anyway before my exam"
abp 16y ago
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. :)

TrevorBramble 16y ago

"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 that's how everyone did it. Especially now that you can easily drag tabs from one browser window to another, it's effortless. No new GUI to learn, to expensive extension to install.

malnourish 16y ago
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 hard facts compared to pretty videos and features, I suppose.
- abp 16y ago
  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.
- mbrubeck 16y ago
  > 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-fast-powerful-and-empowering/ http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/10/firefox-4-vision-fas...
abp 16y ago

jberryman 16y ago

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

confuzatron 16y ago
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?

phreanix 16y ago

I can't decide if this is a productivity tool or a distraction.

planckscnst 16y ago

I found that I hated working with lots of windows as have many others. However, I came to realize that this is because of the window manager. I switched to a window manager capable of actually managing windows, and will never go back. The particular window manager I use is called Awesome, but there are many like it. A particularly useful feature is Awesome's use of tags. Multiple tags can be assigned to windows, and multiple windows can be assigned to tags, and at any one time, you can view whichever combination of tags you want. I have a tag for work, a tag for personal, a tag for news. I also have a tag for web, a tag for communications, and a tag for production. Viewing combinations of these tags is extremely useful and an effective way of managing windows.

Corrado 16y ago

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!

mitchellhislop 16y ago
Man, did he have anything to do with Prezi? The zooming/boarderless idea just seems so fitting. It was a great day in UI when that started catching on.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
This zooming paradigm appears to be what has been superfluously part-implemented in KDE4 on the desktop in the form of activities?
paul23 16y ago
Jef's ZUI is also implemented as a file browser for Macintosh. Really awesome! http://raskinformac.com http://raskinformac.com

magma 16y ago

Pretty cool demo. I use Vimperator[1] to do most of my browsing. The experience is quite good. It would be interesting if Tab Candy will have apis to drive these features. Then vimperator commands could call them like, :group Work - current tab into the Work group :switch Todo - switch to the Todo group etc The features look great. But after using Vimperator, I prefer keyboard alternatives to the drag-and-drop stuff shown. [1] - http://vimperator.org http://vimperator.org

jim_h 16y ago

The tab grouping feature seems like it would be useful for me. It would be nice if the groups/pages were saved as folders/bookmarks so it could be retrieved later. They never mentioned what happens when FF was closed. And also if they could display the bookmarks/folders in the same fashion. I am NOT interested in them looking into what pages I go to or my searches so they can direct ads or price search results. Data sharing should only be to people I know AND approve in advance.

goodside 16y ago

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 a trash can. Tabs are just a modern incarnation of the same problem.

jey 16y ago
Sure, but the trashcan is the "proper organizational tool" only because a better solution doesn't exist yet, not because it solves the problem optimally. Isn't there some reason that copy of the Economist is sitting on your desk in the first place? Presumably you do want to read the interesting articles in it, and it'd be handy if the most interesting ones were somehow brought to you. Now, Tab Candy doesn't do that, but I think it's at least a step in the right direction of trying to address the cases that are somewhere between "garbage collect the tab" and "immediately use the tab".
- goodside 16y ago
  The better solution is search, which is notably not an organizational tool at all as far as the user is concerned. Will there some day be a solution that's better still? Yes. But I guarantee it won't involve the user sorting into buckets or affixing labels.
AndrewDucker 16y ago
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.
- yxhuvud 16y ago
  Tab Kit is a plugin worth looking at.
16y ago

nazgulnarsil 16y ago

how about software that can take your history and automatically make a mindmap? does this exist?

Jach 16y ago

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

karlzt 16y ago

I'm happy with bartab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/ and list all tabs menu: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12380/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12380/

growt 16y ago

I wrote something similar for chrome a while ago: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/edooipcjkkbjmnogkdcahgmhbniipefp https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/edooipcjkkbjmnog... It's a little bit more lightweight (not in respect to memory usage maybe).

jamesbritt 16y ago
OTOH, there's another interesting approach to too many tabs: Don't allow them in the first place: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kjecajkoiikaohhagojedcphegkcfobm https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kjecajkoiikaohha... The No More Tabs extension limits the number of tabs you can have, and will close an old tab if you open a new one over that limit.

yellowstone 16y ago

tab candy is a bit too much work. sticking with tabgroups manager. it's a firefox addon which does the same thing but better. groups aren't hidden, they are tabs on a bar above the normal tab bar. you can auto name group tabs after selected tabs title by double clicking it. you can switch groups in 1 click by selecting the group tab. tab candy should go in that direction

yellowstone 16y ago

here's tabgroups manager https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/