I don't know if I'm sold on it. I've installed FoxTab and haven't used it as much as I thought I was going to. I'd have to try it out to see if I like it or not, but it IS interesting.

Tempting but, browser.tabs.tabMinWidth.

The only time I have enough tabs open to bring up the scroll buttons is when I'm browsing porn or trapped in TV Tropes. In both cases that's one single task engulfing my browser, so it's hard to see how this would help.

I'd give it a try though.

Awesome idea!

Questionable name.

Cool tool. Not sure if creating "groups" of tabs is necessarily groundbreaking, but certainly useful.


Wow, did I just sound like an indignant internet nerd or what? Sigh. I've got to get off the internet.

Actually, I use Chrome.

It could be big if you think about the whole metadata thing and where that might lead.

Having something that works visually and allows grouping/notes takes it to another level. It's a more engaging way of working and a helluva lot more useful than clicking on bookmarks.

Currently I mark sites with Delicious and I know I might need to reference them if I'm working on a project or have an idea. It's useful and reassuring. But it's not really great to work with and I can't do anything of the things posited here. I wonder if adding Mind Maps and visual links to files on my system could work - you could capture all your online and offline stuff in one place.

So after a while, with all the coming extensions, Firefox is, perhaps, becoming an OS. if you add search and working with contacts you've got something that could be very, very powerful. Isn't that what Chrome and the Chrome OS is aiming for?

The other consideration is how to back this up and do it securely. I know about Firefox Synch but haven't tried it yet.


>> ^blankfist:

Cool tool. Not sure if creating "groups" of tabs is necessarily groundbreaking, but certainly useful.

Wow, did I just sound like an indignant internet nerd or what? Sigh. I've got to get off the internet.

Seems like a cool idea with a certain amount of utility, but nothing that is going to take over the world by storm.

Metadata and data sharing are over-hyped ideas in my mind. Right now, I have a set of a few videosift tabs open, some "to-do" tabs with Blue's News and Fark, and some tabs looking up information on new versions of some software I use (Winamp).

I could apply metadata tags to those groups or sets, but doing so would be a completely pointless waste of time. I am the only person that cares, and if I can't simply remember why I opened those tabs in the first place without tagging them, then they couldn't have been that important to begin with.

Still, the Tab Candy idea seems to have been properly designed with the user in mind, and will have enough organizational utility to be worth trying out. Possibly even the meta-tagging and set-sharing features, in a few very specialized situations.

***Edit: cut an overly negative paragraph out.

This would replace bookmarks/favorites.
Visual bookmarks!

I rarely have more than three tabs going at a time. Am I browsing wrong??

>> ^Enzoblue:

I rarely have more than three tabs going at a time. Am I browsing wrong??


No, you're just not an insanely messy sonofabitch.

Already doing this with Opera for over 6 years.

I see no use of this for me. Others, possibly. But not for the average user.

The only time I have a lot of tabs open in the same instance is when I read the news every morning: 7 news outlets, 19 blogs, one by one. All the other times (research, etc), I simply create a new instance of FF which fulfills the whole grouping thing just fine.

Save for later? Bookmarks work just peachy, thank you very much. If I can't remember why I created it, it wasn't important enough to remember in the first place.

Running hundreds of tabs simultaneously? Get your mess straightened out, you don't need that many tabs all at once. Again, folders of bookmarks work just peachy. I currently have some 300 bookmarks in 17 folders.

Meta data? For personal use, my brain can hold all the meta data I need.

"And if I zoomed out once again, maybe I could have the world's (state)."


Generation Facebook would love it. Me? I think for someone to even wish such a possibility existed marks a perfectly good reason to have his or her head examined.

What the guy above said. I normally never have more than 3 or 4 tabs open. I read a page, close it when I am done. If I need it again then thats what history/bookmarks are for.

Only time I'd have over 10 tabs is when I am researching/referencing, in which case having "groups" doesn't really help much. Being able to zoom out and see everything at once would be kinda useful, but thats about it.

Now, FIregestures is something I dunno how people browse without...

I always have over 100 tabs going at one time... but I like to scroll through them by hitting the ridiculously small arrow button one by one until I forget what I was suppose to be searching for.

Change scares me.

I just use Tab Mix Plus. I change the Tab bar to 2 lines and lower the minimum tab width.
No need to fiddle around with groups that way.

You're not browsing wrong

But we all have moments when doing research for something that visual organisation (if that's how your brain works) is very welcome.

When I was planning my trip (off on hols very soon this morning) I had dozens of tabs open for travel and accommodation searches/reviews mixed in with Videosift, Gmail, project sites, general browsing etc. All of which requires constant maintenance.

Yet still this is one of those things that strictly speaking you don't NEED. But in my scenario I'm subject to an increasingly unpleasant user experience. Here's a example - we didn't NEED tabs in the first place did we - just open another instance of IE. But other browsers came along and did offer them and now we can't do without them. In the same way this feature could become an ingrained part of the user experience.

And his point on "info-guilt" is very true. I often have that spare tab open for something I want to read or perhaps reference. That's where Delicious comes in - though as I'm using FF 4.0b I have to paste and copy into 3.68 to save them The downside with Delicious is that it's out of sight and out of mind. And when I go there it's all just tag-driven. We need more and golly I want this.

>> ^Enzoblue:

I rarely have more than three tabs going at a time. Am I browsing wrong??

am i the only one that simply opens a new instance of firefox or chrome in order to 'organize' multiple tabs?

Read a tab. Close it.

It's called Tab Closure. I gotta go make a video on this.

Listen to the smooth clicking of that Mac mouse... mmm can't wait to game on that.

The tab bar scrolls in firefox? EPIC FAIL. They should copy Chrome - they already have a better model for that...

So... I love the little animations and details in the interactions with creating groups of tabs - that's pretty solid.

What I think this is actually useful for is a replacement for bookmarks. It seems far easier to manage than the clunky bookmark models that every browser uses - especially since they could take advantage of meta data for auto group creation, and use the co-browsing for a natural bookmark sharing and synch system. In this sense, naming it tab candy is a horrible idea, imo... It automatically contextualizes it in a way that it appears to be just an easier way to manage tabs - but it COULD be much more than that. You have to be careful the context you provide when describing your software, or you may not be able to effectively tell users the story of your project, then they'll miss the point and just keep walking. (Learned me that the hard way.)

For example, that video really only got interesting about halfway through. Most users would give up by then - since it was boring. And a lot of people here say they only use 3-4 tabs at a time - but I bet they bookmark things.

Great idea - needs work on telling the story more effectively.

Just like Coolhund said: TabMixPlus solves most of these issues.
Change tab size, allow multirow (up to 5 rows), and select the 'open new tabs next to current one' option to have them grouped automatically, and you're pretty much set. I routinely research stuff covering multiple topics, with 30+ tabs open, and I never have to use that tab scrolling thing.

This is a neat idea, and very useful for researching across multiple sites.

I like how both Chrome and Firefox already allow you to drag a tab out of the window to create a new window, and both let you drag tabs between windows (Windows 7 enhances this as well).

Why doesn't IE do this? It seems to support more newer standards, but it's getting left behind in the usability functions.

Bookmarks, people. Close the tabs. You aren't going to update wikipedia and shop for DSLR cameras at the same time.

Theres this amazing feature on Firefox which already does this...its called "New Window"

Did anyone else notice that his group with TabCandy also had a few pages on bug troubleshooting? Also eeeeeeew, Mac. No wonder it has to be SOOO EESY

I always found myself coming across pages I wanted to read, but didn't have time or wasn't in the mood. So I would drag them to the desktop, this kept them out of my bookmarks, but also somewhere I could find them again. I realized this couldn't be the best way to do this, and I figured someone must of developed a solution. I went searching in the Addons and found Read It Later, it's perfect for this, exactly what I wanted, and it integrates beautifully. You can even make an account and save them to the cloud and read on a different computer, Android Dolphin Browser even has an Addon for it so you can read them on your phone too. This is just overkill if you ask me, I find FireFox gobbles up memory the longer it's open and the more tabs you have.

@google make chrome do this. Thank you.

Helping humans manage the widespread problem of information overload. Seems humanitarian to me.

"You can see that after browsing for a day I have roughly thirty tabs..."


Uh, just close the fucking ones you're done with, asshat.

Finally I can categorize my porn. The amount of variety it takes me to get off these days is ridiculous.

>> ^MarineGunrock:

"You can see that after browsing for a day I have roughly thirty tabs..."

Uh, just close the fucking ones you're done with, asshat.


Surprise! People don't all use computers the same way as you!

^Well, then there's their problem!

I have a wide range of interests but little time. usually I end up with 30 sometimes 40 open tabs, bookmarking them is a death sentence.
This might be a great tool for me.

>> ^robv:

Listen to the smooth clicking of that Mac mouse... mmm can't wait to game on that.


I can't wait to game on you.

Does this guy just browse in one window? I start off with Blue's News in the morning, opening the different articles I want in separate tabs. Then when I click a link from one if the articles it opens a new window, I read it, then close it when I'm done. If it has a link to something else I want to check out, I open it in a new tab on that window. Sometimes I'm reading something and come across don't know about or want to know about, so I highlight it and chose search with... That opens the search results in a new tab which I tear off into a new window. I usually end up clicking the Wikipedia link, and I can never visit Wikipedia without clicking related things. Before I know it I've opened a dozen links in Wikipedia, then realize I've gotten off track, so I minimize that window to come back to later, finish reading the article and go back to Blue's.

So I'm already doing what that addon does, but instead of trying to keep it all in one browser window, I'm opening my tab groups in separate browser windows to keep them organized.

What about metadata, metagroups, co-browsing, the opportunities for extensibility to create new browsing models?

This is definitely going to bring something different to the table, assuming they meet their goals.

And the things you can already do? This makes tab and bookmark management far less clunky. For example, new browser instances are nice but ideally something to be avoided. They occupy space and if I close Firefox I'm not sure about which tabs have been saved - yes there are extensions that help but Tab Candy (yes I'm not crazy about the name either) is less about fixing and more about starting afresh and providing a seamless, useful experience.

BTW my title was obviously phrased to get the clicks I know everyone has their preferred way of working with tabs. I'm just saying we shouldn't be afraid of change, particularly when browsers could always do with improving.


>> ^jimnms:

Does this guy just browse in one window? I start off with Blue's News in the morning, opening the different articles I want in separate tabs. Then when I click a link from one if the articles it opens a new window, I read it, then close it when I'm done. If it has a link to something else I want to check out, I open it in a new tab on that window. Sometimes I'm reading something and come across don't know about or want to know about, so I highlight it and chose search with... That opens the search results in a new tab which I tear off into a new window. I usually end up clicking the Wikipedia link, and I can never visit Wikipedia without clicking related things. Before I know it I've opened a dozen links in Wikipedia, then realize I've gotten off track, so I minimize that window to come back to later, finish reading the article and go back to Blue's.
So I'm already doing what that addon does, but instead of trying to keep it all in one browser window, I'm opening my tab groups in separate browser windows to keep them organized.

I have 23 tabs open right now (I just pared it down from about 30) in three groups (using the tabgroups addon). This tab candy thing is brilliant and will really change the way that people view tabs.

But they're going to have to do something about resource usage because one of the biggest problems with firefox and lots of tabs is memory consumption. My firefox process is currently using 750MB resident ram and 1.7GB of virtual ram. I have to close firefox at least once per day to deal with this issue.

*shrug*

I rarely/never have issues using the single row of tabs in Chrome.

I need a friend called MARDAK.

>> ^gorillaman:

Tempting but, browser.tabs.tabMinWidth.
The only time I have enough tabs open to bring up the scroll buttons is when I'm browsing porn or trapped in TV Tropes. In both cases that's one single task engulfing my browser, so it's hard to see how this would help.
I'd give it a try though.


I'm late to this party, but This (tm). Firefox needs to become more like Chrome in handling multiple tabs/windows (multi processes) before they should be worrying about tab management. What good is this when the browser starts to eat shit once you have alot of stuff open at once?

He mentions the importance of performance in the video. It's an obvious problem if you're managing hundreds of tabs in this way.

>> ^Croccydile:

I'm late to this party, but This (tm). Firefox needs to become more like Chrome in handling multiple tabs/windows (multi processes) before they should be worrying about tab management. What good is this when the browser starts to eat shit once you have alot of stuff open at once?
<div><div style="margin: 10px; overflow: auto; width: 80%; float: left; position: relative;" class="convoPiece"> gorillaman said:<img style="margin: 4px 10px 10px; float: left; width: 40px;" src="http://static1.videosift.com/avatars/g/gorillaman-s.jpg" onerror="ph(this)"><div style="position: absolute; margin-left: 52px; padding-top: 1px; font-size: 10px;" class="commentarrow">◄</div><div style="padding: 8px; margin-left: 60px; margin-top: 2px; min-height: 30px;" class="nestedComment box">Tempting but, browser.tabs.tabMinWidth.
The only time I have enough tabs open to bring up the scroll buttons is when I'm browsing porn or trapped in TV Tropes. In both cases that's one single task engulfing my browser, so it's hard to see how this would help.
I'd give it a try though.
</div></div></div>

Yeah, Im not sold on it either. I just dont wanna spend that much time organizing my tabs. Throughout the day, I have about 2-3 tabs that are always open. Other than those, if I open a tab, its only for a few moments for me to look at what I want, then close it. Just seems like a waste of time to organize them.

Right now I have 8 tabs open, and I dont see what the big deal is about needing another addon to slow me down.

Attention deficit disorder makes its way to our browsers.