Firefox future could be without tabs | Hacker News Reader

Firefox future could be without tabs

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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.

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.

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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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!

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.

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

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.

This is a job for...

duh duh duh

Userscripts!

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.

I agree that this implementation of tabs is somewhat ugly, and not necessarily as functional. Tree style tabs don't have to take up as much room, however. The tabs side bar from Tree Style Tabs (an extension) can be resized. Also, trees can be set to not indent if the user chooses. It's nice, because if you need to see the titles of your tabs (I usually prefer to), you can move it over. If not, you can give yourself move space. Furthermore, tabs to the side allows nearly 50 tabs to be visible at once, rather than 20. However, I agree that this shouldn't be the default.

What would be nice is an option to group/tag tabs like bookmarks, and collapse, expand, and explore tabs that way. I know at least one cranky person will say "Well I never have more than 3 tabs open!" Well, cranky strawman, when I read my daily rss feeds, I often wind up with 50. An option (not necessarily a default) to browse tabs by category could be useful.

I agree completely on the Ubiquity bar. If this is implemented, I really think it could bring a major shift in browsers, and I hope Firefox's competitors will also implement it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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