Project Tofino – A browser interaction experiment by Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

Project Tofino – A browser interaction experiment by Mozilla

github.com

43 pointssnake_case12 comments

There is no concise summary on what Project Tofino actually is and the readme file is of no use, but here's my guess: modular browser UI. Firefox is probably long overdue for some fresh set of features, though I'm not sure how far the traditional UI can be pushed and still remain usable. I highly recommend Jacob Nielsen's website [0] for an analysis of pros and cons of customization and usability in general.

I see Project Tofino as a way for Mozilla to explore different customization paradigms, strongly implying that the one shipped with Australis didn't take on.

Now, is it possible to create an algorithmic, dynamically adjusting browser UI? I can only speculate but I'm sure Project Tofino will be a very valuable experience.

[0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customization

Though it doesn't sound like the team leader even has a clear idea of what they're trying to do [0], Tofino seems interesting.

One part of this "reinvent the browser" they're looking at is tab grouping, potentially with heuristics. However, it does give me pause, as usually when Firefox comes up, HN talks about how they always have 20+ tabs open at once. (Anecdotally, many of my friends and family are the same).

[0] https://medium.com/project-tofino/tofino-project-goals-updat...

I really like Firefox's current tab groups and wish that Chrome provided similar functionality. For me a better method would be to have the tab itself be the group "parent" and expand when clicked.

For example: I'm on reddit's front page. I'll open links in new tabs, then go to them later. It'd be great to have those auto-group under the parent front page tab and hide out of view until later.

Are there videos, or any screenshots of what this current implementation looks like? Like you said (and the GitHub readme explains) they don't really know what they're doing yet, but it'd be nice to see how it differs in its current state from traditional browsers, and might even convince me to give it a try.

Opera had tab group behavior like you describe when it introduced tab groups ahead of the other browsers. I'm not sure of the situation now since they based their browser off chromium.

You can get the right kind of behaviour using the Tree Style Tabs extension in Firefox, which is highly customizable. I've had a vertical tab bar for about a decade now and I couldn't imagine using a "traditional browser interface".

I used to use Opera but a lot of sites don't think that Opera is a real browser and show incompatibility messages. I used to use Firefox but it felt a little clunkier than Safari and Chrome and was not as performant. It's been a while since I used the tree tab extension but if I remember correctly it wasn't too attractive.

+1 for Tree Style Tabs; combined with "suspended" tabs, it provides exactly what I need: a lightweight, integrated system for short term bookmarks.

> It'd be great to have those auto-group under the parent front page tab and hide out of view until later.

Tabs Outliner for Chrome does this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

Foremost thank you for the link; that does look great.

It has quite possibly the most thoughtful(?) release notes I have ever seen for a Chrome extension, and the author also took efforts to address any privacy concerns, which I thought was nice.

I used it for some time, but it just keeps adding "crashed" sessions and it quickly goes out of control. I used it on my Chromebook and every shutdown or reboot meant me crashed session and other important sessions are left buried down.

Just thought I would throw out a simple firefox/chrome extension that I put together recently to help manage tabs. Basically, it's button in the toolbar that you can press to bring up a new tab with a list of all your tabs open, grouped by window. Clicking on one of the links will focus that tab and window. It's opensource and free.

Hope it helps someone out there!

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

Contribute feedback/feature requests/bugs: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

What I'd like would be a simple way to manipulate multiple tabs matching a pattern at once.

Press shortcut, then e.g. "githu", and it highlights all tabs matching the pattern (from github), and then you could close them with Ctrl+w, or drag and drop them to a new window. It would display the tabs either in a popup window (in a regular list view), or just highlight them in-situ at the top of the window.

Also nice would be to close all tabs older than x hours, except for example GMail. You'd press the hotkey, then have it somehow select the old tabs, and then with ctrl+click deselect the one you'd want to keep.

Admittedly, a power-user function, but something I could really use often.

Maybe something like close all tabs open in the past 10 minutes as well, although I'm not sure how this could be done as elegantly.

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