

Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet - mbrubeck
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/tabcandy/

======
goodside
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
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
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.

------
jamesbritt
"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.)

~~~
peng
Too many tabs has never been an issue for me. Can anyone actually read more
than one tab at once? If you're thinking of buying a DSLR, then focus on
researching cameras. Close those tabs when you're done.

Exercise restraint, guys. Tab grouping is the classic engineer's solution to a
non-problem.

~~~
mbrubeck
"Not a problem for me" is not the same thing as "not a problem."

People's browsing habits differ. Some of us do use multiple windows and tabs
so we can switch our focus away from a task and return to it later. Mozilla's
user studies and large-scale data mining through Test Pilot bear this out,
e.g. <http://surfmind.com/muzings/?p=505> \- among other things, that analysis
of several thousand Firefox users found that tab opening/closing behavior
among the participants followed a bimodal distribution.

------
TrevorBramble
"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.

~~~
abp
Uh, I massively dislike working with a fat bunch of windows. How can the title
of one Firefox window as tab group can be as expressive as a group of tabs
you've persisted in Tab Candy with your own label?

 _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._

If you don't know any, i like Read it Later(<http://readitlaterlist.com/>).
Anything better out there?

~~~
albemuth
Springpad is pretty good, has mobile clients and all

~~~
mitchellhislop
Springpad makes a great dumptruck-I can throw a bunch of links in it, and than
actually organize them, unlike with something like Instapaper. I can also put
books, todos, etc in with the bookmarks. No, I dont work for them, just a
recent convert.

------
jluxenberg
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?

~~~
mbrubeck
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>)

~~~
abp
_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>) _

Damn. Thats so awesome to read.

Thank you.

------
Corrado
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!

~~~
paul23
Jef's ZUI is also implemented as a file browser for Macintosh. Really awesome!
<http://raskinformac.com>

------
thorax
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
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? ;)

------
yason
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.

~~~
mbrubeck
> _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
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.

------
onewland
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
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
Thats the point. It's alpha state. I see endless possibilities and extreme
nice information organization at the horizon.

------
planckscnst
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.

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

~~~
confuzatron
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?

------
proee
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
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
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.

------
magma
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>

------
jim_h
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.

------
docgnome
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
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/> Disclaimer: I'm the
author of f.e.t.

~~~
Frump
It's not compatible with Firefox 3.6.7. Will you be updating it?

~~~
lkozma
Should work now, I updated it 1.5 - 4.0b3pre, I haven't tested it yet though,
as I have 3.5.9.

------
Jach
Passing the word along: <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
I'm happy with bartab: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/>
and list all tabs menu: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/12380/>

------
growt
I wrote something similar for chrome a while ago:

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/edooipcjkkbjmnog...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/edooipcjkkbjmnogkdcahgmhbniipefp)

It's a little bit more lightweight (not in respect to memory usage maybe).

~~~
jamesbritt
OTOH, there's another interesting approach to too many tabs: Don't allow them
in the first place:
[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kjecajkoiikaohha...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kjecajkoiikaohhagojedcphegkcfobm)

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
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

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

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

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

------
Charuru
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
You can do that in vanilla Firefox 3.6 and I'm pretty sure it's worked since
at least 2.x

~~~
Charuru
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
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
Chrome allows you to drag a tab out of a window into a blank space to _create_
a new window.

~~~
mbrubeck
Yup. So does Firefox. (And Opera, for that matter... Chrome did not invent
these features.)

~~~
blasdel
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.

~~~
mbrubeck
That's correct. Tear-off tabs were added to Firefox in version 3.5, which was
released several months after Chrome 1.0.

------
mbreese
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.

~~~
fliph
> What's wrong with the Chrome method of opening new tabs right next to the
> current tab?

Firefox already does this.

~~~
omaranto
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.

