
The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity - nreece
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_firefox_no_tabs_built_in_ubiquity.php
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greyhat
Err... what?

* I hope they don't copy iTunes, with its extremely slow interface, lack of features, lack of extensibility, lack of options... etc...

* No tabs: They must use tabs in some confused and different way than me. Generally I have one window per browsing task, e.g. one for Gmail, another for HN with tabs of articles and comment pages I'm reading, etc... ironically it was much easier to work with 10+ tabs before the changes of Firefox 3 where they would scroll off the screen because of their fairly large minimum width... Maybe if people are using one window only, and trying to keep their mail, social networking, online radio, and everything else under the sun open all day, they might get confused, but this is sort of a solved problem. Just open another window.

* Taskfox/Ubiquity: umm, what? Most searches I do in Firefox go right to the built in search box with a simple Ctrl+K, couldn't be easier. I have over the years, starting in Firefox 2, added a few keyword searches to the location bar, because I don't like changing the search box. I have w for wikipedia, and so on. This seems similar, but I'm not sure of the utility of opening Wikipedia in a tiny dropdown... how is that faster, easier to read, or any other good quality? It seems like some kind of half hearted attempt at taking an autocompleting command line and adding some that useful on the web, but I don't see anything... _useful_.

* Possibly unrelated gripe: I took a while to "upgrade" to Firefox 3 from v2 because I didn't like the "AwesomeBar" and a couple of other interface changes. While I am mostly used to it now, I still can't reliably get the AwesomeBar to autocomplete some URLs. It seems to fixate on the first match, often not displaying the second match until I actually type the full URL, if at all. Not to mention the fact that even when it works, its not as fast as the Firefox 2 behavior of naively autocompleting visited URLs. I don't need to autocomplete my bookmarks, that's why they are bookmarks! I click on them!

I like Firefox, I have since Phoenix 0.4 or so, but I really don't know what
they're doing anymore...

~~~
gojomo
Highly recommend "Tab Mix Plus" for FF3; I set the minimum width to be about
the size of the favicon plus 1-2 title characters, and let tabs stack in rows
rather than scroll off the sides.

~~~
jamesbritt
I'm a fan of the "fisheye" tab add-on that does the expando Mac dock-like
thing when you have a mazillion tabs.

------
mikeyur
I'm just going to come right out and say it: No tabs = fucking insane. I
haven't tried it but I don't want my browser to navigate like iTunes.

Then again, it's just a mockup. Should be interesting to see where they go in
the future though.

~~~
dhughes
I've seen the Tree Tab AddOn and didn't think I would like it but it is much
better than having a whole bunch of tabs open, which tend to get squished up
when you have a lot open.

Also, with certain themes the active tab can be hard to see, they all look the
same, the active tab should be indented or darker but some themes make them
all look so similar it's hard to tell, that's not so with Tree Tab.

~~~
thorax
I have to second this. I've been using the Tree Tab addon for months now and
have a hard time going back. I definitely wouldn't want to be without it for
any widescreen monitors (e.g. every laptop I own).

I now, on average, have ~20 tabs open. When doing lots of fast research or
having a very multi-tasking day, it will hit 40 or so tabs. But it doesn't
feel like hell, it feels great, because they're all organized in
trees/collapsible, and are just a very visible/readable list on the left side.

In normal Firefox or Chrome, I never let myself get more than 15 tabs deep
because they're not organized in a meaningful way and feel like unsearchable
clutter. With the tree-style tabs on the left, it's really easy to
organize/reorganize them and feels more normal to have lots of them open at
once if you need.

I unofficially challenge everyone reading this to try that tree-style tab
addon for a month and see if you feel more productive/efficient using that
over the top-style tabs. It will feel slightly weird at first, but give it
that week/month and I bet you'll prefer it when you're done.

Here's the link if you need it: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/5890>

___Edit_ : If you're not convinced, tell me which is easier to skim quickly.

This:

    
    
      * GMail, thorax
      * Active by Milest...
      * thread sync - Google Sea...
          * MSDN - WaitForSingleObj...
      * Twitter / Home... 
      * CNN.com - Breaking N...
          * Congressman came under fire in ... 
          * Jailbird ruffles features ...
      * hello - Google Sea...
      * hacker news - Google Sea...
    

or this:

> GMail, thorax | Active by Milest... | thread sync - Google Sea... | MSDN -
> WaitForSinglObj... | Twitter / Home... | CNN.com - Breaking N... | hello -
> Google Sea... | Congressman came under fire in ... | hacker news - Google
> Sea... | Jailbird ruffles features ...

------
halo
Personally, I'm not too fussed if Mozilla goes in a crazy direction and
Firefox loses popularity now. It's served its primary purpose by opening
competition in the browser space which was dominated by Internet Explorer and
turning it into a true open platform available on multiple operating systems
and encouraging the development of the web and open standards. The Webkit-
based browsers (Safari, Chrome) and Opera also exist and are at least at
parity with Firefox. Even Internet Explorer isn't that bad these days.

As a mockup, I strongly dislike it. It's trying to be "fashionable and
prominent" by imitating iTunes rather than thinking that people want a
lightweight minimalistic browser that stays out of the way and doesn't
interrupt your workflow. Hell, I'd argue that's what people actually want from
a music player, but no-one has yet to come up with a viable user-friendly
option that does that, music players are free, and too many people have had
their hand forced by Apple lock-in to make innovation easy.

I firmly think Firefox has been getting worse and I blame 'interaction
designers'. All of FF3.5's innovations are pretty terrible: I find the fact
you can't close the final tab frustrating, the moving "add tab" button is
annoying and poor for usability (since it's hard to discover as it keeps
moving), and Firefox's private browsing mode and tab tearing are both outright
half-baked and nowhere near as pleasant to use or as intuitive as Chrome's.
Their treatment of self-signed SSL certificates still leaves me with a bitter
taste in my mouth as it shows that those in charge of ease-of-use only care
about flashy features and not core functionality that prevents startling the
user with features with cryptic error messages. Even after using the combined
history button in FF3 for months, I still find jumping forward to pages
frustrating and unintuitive, I think it's terrible they still don't provide a
UI for removing custom words accidentally added to your Firefox dictionary,
their support when accessing RSS feeds in-browser is still hilariously poor
compared to every other browser, and still think the Manage Search Engines
dialog is unnecessary clunky. It's increasingly as though they're not trying
to solve the real problems I have in Firefox but rather focusing on needless
annoying flashy features directed by some self-proclaimed "usability guru".

If this is implemented, I'd probably either move back to Opera, a browser I
haven't used since the early versions of Firefox (then called Phoenix) was
released, stick with FF3, or await the inevitable fork.

That said, I don't understand their sudden obsession with innovation. Mozilla
have never been innovators, least of all when it comes to their UI. They've
grabbed low-hanging fruit (e.g. extensions which you basically get for free
via Mozilla's design, spell checking) or reimplemented the features of other
browsers, mainly Opera's, and got the credit for them (e.g. tabs, download
manager, search engine integration, AwesomeBar, Private Browsing).

------
jfarmer
I see Ubiquity as one big UI experiment, which is nice. Windows NT and OS X
aren't the last words on GUI.

That said, I'd like to see some data guiding these decisions. Does Firefox
report back to the mothership about tab usage?

Their central argument for this UI, in the article at least, appears to be
this: "Reichenstein argues that tabs were a good solution for an earlier age
of the Internet, when users hardly ever had more than ten tabs open at any
given time. Now, however, as browsers are slowly turning into operating
systems, a new paradigm for organizing this information has become necessary."

Is this true? Does this jive with data about how people actually use browsers
and tabs?

I have no idea, but I want my experiments to be backed by data, you know?

------
lucumo
FTA: "Reichenstein argues that tabs were a good solution for an earlier age of
the Internet, when users hardly ever had more than ten tabs open at any given
time. Now, however, as browsers are slowly turning into operating systems, a
new paradigm for organizing this information has become necessary."

Actually, I prefer the task bar paradigm in my OS as well.

------
mmphosis
No tabs.

((begin-rant) No tabs. As part of installing Firefox, I turn off tabs.

because...

\- most people that I've asked don't want tabs

\- most people open one browser window at a time, may be five, but that's
pushing it.

\- the tab bar (and all those other bars) use up screen space, valuable screen
space, really really valuable screen space on hardware you don't know about.

\- there are already a number of various alternatives to the tab bar:

    
    
       windows: the Windows task bar, the Mac OS X Dock/Expose, and whatever your Linux does which is usually similar to the Windows task bar
    
       screens: Linux workspaces, Mac OS X Spaces
    

But, none of these reasons will stop you.

because...

You like tabs. And, you installed Firefox yourself. And, you are a power user,
uber-geek, hacker extraordinaire. You gravitate towards the most popular user
interface of the year which may at the moment be tabs although they were kind
of popular a long time ago in Lotus Notes but Lotus Notes is definitely not
popular, anyways you may even decide to use this one type of user interface
for everything because you are an egoless hacker god. So go ahead use tabs,
just remember the rest of us, and remember that tab stands for Take A Break.
(end-rant))

------
dhughes
One thing I miss using Firefox over IE is the ability to move everything in
the menu, bookmark, address bar onto one line to maximize screen space. With
Firefox you can choose Customize but only drag items to and from its toolbar.
Unless I'm misinformed there doesn't seem to be anyway to have everything on
one line.

I also miss the ability to double-click on for example "ycombinator" in
new.ycombinator.com to highlight just it and then type in whatever I want and
still have "new." and ".com/..." still there untouched. I believe the Windows
version of FF does that as well as IE.

~~~
anc2020
I've got everything on one line, like this:

File Edit View History Bookmarks Tools Help [Y|<http://news.ycombinator.com/>
*|v] [G|v| Google ]

Just drag the address bar and search to the top.

~~~
dhughes
Sorry, I failed to mention that I use Linux, hence the "I miss" part of my
rant.

~~~
windsurfer
Oh, that's just the change that Firefox made for its linux build, due to the
different interfaces for different operating systems (such as pasting with
middle click, and autoscroll being off). If you go into about:config, you'll
find a key called "browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll", and it should be
true in linux but false in windows.

Also, you can still move stuff around on the toolbars, just like in windows.

------
halo
The actual posts (<http://informationarchitects.jp/designing-firefox-32/> and
[http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefoxnext-tabs-on-the-
side...](http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefoxnext-tabs-on-the-side/)) are
much more insightful than this blogspam. The prjor suggests that the iTunes-
style design could be more of a "default landing page" than an actual tab
replacement and a way of uniting the sidebars together. I could live with
that.

------
boundlessdreamz
It is a sensational headline. They are just mockups and things could change
drastically.

That said, it may be a good idea. I'm sold on tabs now and has never been a
fan of sidebars, so I'm not very enthusiastic about it. Also what will happen
to all those firefox extensions with sidebar functionality ?

------
hhm
Looks like Opera to me.

------
wenbert
English text reads from Left-to-Right. So it would make sense to put tabs and
not use the iTunes navigation bar -- it would be a waste of real estate.

------
sho
Oh god, not Oliver Reichenstein. That guy is an absolute know-nothing clown -
the typical useless twittering "expert" with a pretentious self-chosen job
title (he is an "Information Architect" but a non-programmer) and no clue
about how the world actually works but willing to spout nonsense to anyone
that listens - which they unfortunately sometimes do. He's like the Joel
Spolsky of information architecture, _sans_ the actual technical skill.

I don't even want to type one more thing about this nong. I refer you to a
(badly written, ranty) thing I wrote last year about one of his more
ridiculous articles: [http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/06/09/the-revolution-is-
not-ove...](http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/06/09/the-revolution-is-not-over-it-
hasnt-even-begun/)

Don't pay any attention to him please.

