

Firefox future could be without tabs - TechCombo
http://techcombo.com/firefox-future-could-be-without-tabs
How did you come to know Firefox? For me it came after my best friend said, “have you used that web browser that is meant to be better that Internet Explorer?” I replied in saying, “there is no browser better than Internet Explorer, which I was soon proved wrong and to this day I use Mozilla Firefox as well as the other 100 million of the population that did the same.<p>Whilst we go on with our lives, head of user experience in Firefox Inc. who are, Oliver Reichenstein and Aza Raskin have been shuffling up some possible ideas that could come in use in the near future, which you can see in the image above showing a glimpse of what the revoultionary Firefox style could show up like.<p>Reichenstein also states that tabs could not be the web’s next biggest thing as tabbed browsing isn’t such a big deal in many people’s minds...
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kierank
Tabs are useful but I would like to create groupable tabs. Right now I have
lots of browser windows open to do this but I'd like to see something like:

topic1 --> Tab1, Tab2,

topic2 --> Tab1, Tab2,

I usually have a row of tabs on a given topic I need to find out about and
sometimes I leave tabs open for weeks on end, just hibernating the computer
each time. (That also gets rid of the problem to killing all those updaters
and other junk processes that decide to launch at boot)

EDIT: In fact there should be tabs that organise rows of tabs!

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windsurfer
This is exactly what you want:
<http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en>

I have been using this for a few weeks, and it's wonderful.

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thorax
I second this. As I did when this article came up before, I recommended
everyone here give it a shot (with an example of how it makes life more
efficient):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=563917>

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alexfarran
Great addon. With a widescreen monitor there's a lot of space that could be
doing something more useful.

One feature that I'd like to see, in tabs generally but it makes particular
sense here, is a way of intelligently abbreviating the title text. For example
on the Safari books site the titles all start with 'Safari Books Online'
before getting to the part I'm interested in: the book's title. I'd like to
see an addon that factored out repeated text in tab titles, or focused in on
the part that's different.

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windsurfer
This is a job for...

 _duh duh duh_

Userscripts!

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russell
I hope not. Tabs is a feature that I use a lot. Tree tabs seems to take a lot
of screen space and I have little to spare on my laptop. MS has conditioned me
to become very irritated when my personal feature set is improved or deep
sized. The first thing I do when I get a new machine is spend a few hours
getting the classic mode to work. I hope FF isnt going going down the same
road.

OTOH the Ubiquity bar looks to be useful.

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graemep
With so many laptops (and even a lot of desktops) having wide screen displays,
horizontal space is often more valuable than vertical.

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windsurfer
I would argue the other way around. Every toolbar that is 10px high takes up
more room than every sidebar that is 10px wide, on average.

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barrkel
iTunes? Ugh. iTunes has to be one of the applications whose UI I hate most,
and I am more or less forced to use it for Apple firmware.

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iigs
I don't see how the preview box is any faster than conventional tab usage:

result miss case: read the preview, decide you don't like it, go back (no
difference)

result hit case: read the preview, decide you like it, click "yes I want to
read this in the window" (less work by one step)

I'm also not sold on the point of ubiquity -- it seems to me that punching
most of this stuff into google already provides what ubiquity promises.
Directing this traffic at search engines gives users more opportunity to
select the implementation they like (say Yahoo search does something better
than Google). Pulling it away from the default search provider also means
they're directing less traffic at Google, meaning less (potential) income for
the project. This clearly shouldn't be a primary consideration but I don't see
a win in any direction.

 _Reichenstein also states that tabs could not be the web’s next biggest thing
as tabbed browsing isn’t such a big deal in many people’s minds._

Tabs are six+ years old (or so). There's probably no more easy growth. People
that are not proficient enough with computers don't want them or care about
them: my friend who lives on a farm and believes every pop-up that appears on
his screen will never benefit from them, and that's fine. However, it would be
entirely expected to find out that the take rate for tabs with the 12-20 set
is dramatically higher -- kids use computers differently than their parents do
and aren't encumbered by the same analogies that their parents use to
understand what is going on on the screen.

I contend that people will grow to the tools if you provide them. I'm not
convinced anything but the tree-tabs touched on here are actually forward
progress for the browser.

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cturner
Reminds me of the Bloomberg UI approach, which is an established GUI that is
an interesting blend of command line and GUI. I'm confident that this
interface approach could be used to create a better hitchhikers' guide to the
galaxy than the current mouse-oriented HTML+DOM+JS+flash horror. Part of the
trick with a keyboard-oriented platform like this is that under no
circumstance can something be allowed to hijack the keyboard to prevent you
from getting back to the command-line in the way that flash does at the
moment.

In Bloomberg, users type sequence of commands into a fixed console that is
similar in concept to a browser bar. Pressing return causes the application to
load. You get command-line power and more visuals than are possible in curses.
I think this is so far the best example in common use of a blend GUI.

For the purpose of discussion, it's a shame its distribution is on an
exclusive platform. If anyone has access to a Bloomberg terminal and necessary
skills to export the video signal to a system whereby a video can be taken of
it, it would be great to have some demos of this interface on youtube for
demonstration.

My memories of it are weak - I've only had opportunity to play with it myself
a couple of times. Every time I see it demonstrated I'm impressed by the model
but think of a dozen things I'd want to improve about it.

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mmphosis
The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=563338>

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csomar
Back to 2007 when I switched to FireFox, was because of the new "Tabs
feature".

Most people switched because of tabs, speed and add-ons. So disabling one of
them is not good.

But i'm for disabling tabs and implementing a new technology that makes it
easy to switch between pages

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jasonkester
My ideal future will see Firefox as this little niche browser that developers
use to debug their javascript (if they dislike IE enough to refuse to use its
script debugger) and CSS, but no real people use as their daily browser.
Chrome will take FF's 30% market share, and IE will keep the rest.

Firefox has done its job: It forced MS to release IE7 (and 8), and it inspired
Google to build Chrome. That's a good run, and the web will be better off
because of it. But now it needs to fade gracefully from the scene so that we
move on to a world where we only need to develop for two dominant browsers.

