The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity

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45 pointsnreece33 comments

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...

Regarding the "awesome bar", I have to say I miss it on Safari (Mac). What I like is that it matches what you type with the whole title and URL of your bookmarks and history.

On Safari, it matches only the URL and only following the right order. E.g. on Firefox, I would type "cal" and Google Calendar would show up as the first result, while for Safari I would need to type "www.google.com/cal" before getting the result. Or if I wanted to jump back to this discussion, I could type "news firefox future" and it would probably find it.

Not that I'm in love with Firefox though. I keep on switching back and forth between the two. (right now on Safari)

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.

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

I haven't tried it, but it looks like this might address your issue with minimum tab width:

http://www.watchingthenet.com/firefox-tip-how-to-set-a-minim...

Thanks, I actually did fix it when I originally installed FF3, but I was referring to the behavior that everyone else sees by default. If it was a checkbox in the normal Firefox settings, that would be one thing, but its buried in a collection of keys and values with little documentation...

That brings me to another thing, the oh-so-cutesy "This might void your warranty" warning for about:config. I know they think they're being funny, but what would be a lot more useful is to actually explain whats going on, rather than scare users. I adjusted something for a less technical friend once, on their request, and they were slightly upset by the idea that Firefox could void the warranty on their computer. Seems rather immature, coming from the "Mozilla Corporation" with their flagship software...

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.

If Firefox does away with tabs, then I will do away with Firefox.

No reason to use it if it does this. Other browsers are already faster, more elegant, and better in many ways. What most of them don't have is extensions.

But even with the strength of Firefox's extension model, expect mass abandonment if they do away with tabs.

I doubt tabs are the be-all and end-all of browser UI, but what they want to replace it with is certainly much, much worse.

Wouldn't "gimme back my tabs" be one of the first extensions written if this did come to pass?

Maybe. Since the developers are getting overzealous, my guess is that they might try to block tab use altogether, a la how the Gnome developers operate.

All software projects that are successful seem to go through an open, inclusive, customizable period, then a user-hostile, closed non-customizable one. Gnome, Windows, etc., have all done this.

No reason to suspect Firefox won't, either.

I'm going to remain on the fence. I had tabs in Vim. Then I switched to Emacs, found out the tabs options sucked. Now I have ido-mode. It's a nice mode of operation. Though I'm not sure it's a good mode for the average Joe.

Though, I've found people will learn lots of things if it has the right pay off. People get by fairly well on their own when it comes to web mail and the various social networking sites. For some reason they need training on "work" tools but personal tools.

Yeah, but when you're editing text, you're working with a relatively limited number of files, ones that you probably work with often.

That doesn't map well to web browsing, a lot of which is exploratory. I know I use the tab bar as a sort of `to read' list, piling up things I will pay attention to later.

Once I've piled up some context, I tend to hover around 40 file buffers open. Tabs just won't do that well even on the sidebar.

You're a lightweight! I work with somebody who never closes buffers (with ido-mode and enough of RAM, there's just not much point). When I met him, his Emacs session had over 1100 buffers open.

Then he found midnight-mode. I think these days he tends to have only 300-some-odd buffers open at any one time.

I use 'conkeror' as my main web browser, which is a emacs-like browser running on xulrunner.

I can have 10+ pages open and switch rapidly to the one i want by typing C-x b <3 letters of a keyword> return For me this beats regular tabs.

I've been using Conkeror for about four months now, and while I like the Emacs-like interface and the ability to mess around with the presentation of pages, there are definitely a few warts

1. I had no idea how much I relied on the throbber icon until it was gone. For a fairly new piece of hacker-ware, there are surprisingly few usability glitches, but this one makes up for most.

2. Emacs lets you display any buffer (browser tab) in any desktop frame ("window"). This is the only intelligent way to manage this relationship, and the fact that browsers effectively restrict tabs to the frames where they were spawned is what made me try Conkeror out in the first place. For the moment, though, Conkeror is like Firefox, although the developers seem to be working on it.

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.

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:

+1 - I discovered the Tree Style Tab addon a few months back, and I absolutely cannot imagine living without it. If you don't already use it, give it a try now, you will never go back. This type of tab handling should be pulled in to every browser ASAP.

If you're the type of person that reads Hacker News, this plugin will improve your online experience by at least 5%. Get it.

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).

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?

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.

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))

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.

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.

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

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.

I use Linux too and this should work on both Linux and Windows.

When you start with Firefox it has File Edit View etc. followed by a separator on the top row, then the rest of the row is filled by a flexible space and a little "loading" image. Then on the row below that you have the buttons, the location bar and the search bar.

What I'm saying is it should be possible to drag the flexible space back into customize and drag the url up where it used to be. This will mean the UI is only taking up one row.

Like this: http://i41.tinypic.com/f7y9j.jpg

I don't know how to change the selection behaviour though. Personally I like having the whole URL selected but I can see it could be useful that way.

The actual posts (http://informationarchitects.jp/designing-firefox-32/ and 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.

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 ?

Looks like Opera to me.

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.

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...

Don't pay any attention to him please.

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