Fixing Tabs in Firefox: Design Challenge Winners Announced
Tabs, tabs and more tabs, crawling all over your browser; impossible to sort, eating up system memory - what part of using a browser is more maddening than tab overload? Mozilla is trying to solve that problem with a big design challenge. One hundred and twenty eight teams entered the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer '09, five winners were announced today, and I'm not sure anyone's really nailed it yet. But the attempts are quite interesting.
"Most Innovative" was won by a University of Michigan team that designed a pretty awesome radial display for tabs spawned by tabs. It doesn't work very well yet and it's not clear that it really solves the problem at hand, but some of the other winners are worth a look too. There's even a 3D/Augmented Reality entry! What do you think, do any of these look like they could fix your tab troubles?
TabViz is the name of the entry deemed most innovative. It displays "parent-child" relationships between tabs through a radial display of clickable screen shots. It's live on Google Code now, and it's cool, but it doesn't work very well yet.
How important is the parent-child relationship between tabs, though, once you've got a bunch of them opened up? It is one way to group related tabs, but how many of us think of our tabs as groups? I don't - I think "where's that darned tab I was trying to find?"
Collapsible Tabs is an entrant from Martin Polley of Israel. It too puts tabs in groups, but it does it in interesting ways. Most important - this proposal lets you search tabs by title name and hides all of them that don't match the letters you're typing! Hello! That's what I want. Unfortunately, this is just a visual mock-up so far and hasn't been developed.
A Firefox plug-in called Showcase is really close to the user experience I'm looking for in refining tab focus by typing search terms. I just found it and so far, I am pretty excited about it. It could be much easier to use, but you should probably go try it out right away.
Here's Polley's design.
CubeZilla was the Peoples' Choice winner and it's pretty far out. It's a 3D and Augmented Reality tab manager that would let users organize all their tabs into groups that are displayed on sides of a floating cube. It's cool - and it might be useful. It's a little reminiscent of Spaces on the Mac, but for web pages. It's mostly just cool, though.
Another option I'd like to see in some design is for tabs to decay over time. If I haven't accessed a tab in a couple of hours, partition it off someplace accessible but out of the way. Limit its memory usage and get it out of my way.
The best solution to tab management I've found so far? My MacBook Pro's multi-touch functionality altered using the MultiClutch program. I just swipe three fingers down my track pad and the tab I'm on is closed. Repeat, repeat, repeat; suddenly life feels far more care free.
Getting rid of tabs, that seems like the solution to me, more than managing them. How about you - what are your favorite methods of dealing with tab overload? What do you still dream of being able to do with all the tabs in your life? It's a major problem and people are listening.
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All of the suggested solutions seem incredibly inefficient from a UX standpoint. As far as I'm concerned, tabs are just fine as they are.
Usually firefox just crashes and I lose all my tabs ;)
Seriously tho, grouping and archiving tabs are both important. It often happens that I have several tabs on the same subject that would conveniently be archived together.
Polley's design is interesting. The others are not very good, I think.
Normally I use the keyboard shortcuts. It's simple and fast. Just ctrl+tab or shift+ctrl+tab through the tabs. It's really fast. You see the site as it is and you just cmd+w them away if you want.
But if you use Safari on a Mac you can look for your tabs via Spotlight. Very powerful! You can search for a word from the URL of the tab, this will also find the parent pages. If you select the exact page you will be redirected to the tab you were looking for, if you select a parent page Safari will open a new tab with that page. It's pretty fast and you get some options. Spotlight is cool.
You can also try the way Opera works with the tabs, using previews in the tab bar or in a pop-up window.
Whatever browser you use, you should definitely check the preferences (and learn the shortcuts). Try some options and see what works. A small change for the browser can make a big difference in the way you use tabs.
After seeing how many of the entries clog up the screen with the "new and improved" tabs, I'd say don't change them. What's the point of tabs if they take up a quarter (or more) of the browser window?
You can already group tabs by drag and drop. I could use the improvement of changing the title of the tab with our own text to make it meaningful.
I've found the best solution for "too many tabs" problem some time ago. It's called ReadItLater (http://readitlaterlist.com)
I'm serious.
Posted by: Marcin Kasperski
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July 16, 2009 6:48 AM
All the solutions make sense as long as the problem is “how to manage open tabs”. Maybe we should think how to help users so they don’t have to open too many tabs. One solution mentioned above by Marcin is ReadItLater. I took a stab at this using the Firefox sidebar. It’s called Omture – a firefox add-on that makes it easy to find information and reduces the need of opening multiple tabs, ideally used for small pieces of information. Please review at www.omture.com
"How important is the parent-child relationship between tabs, though, once you've got a bunch of them opened up?"
I'm using the tree">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890">tree style tab add-on and have found it to be very, very helpful to have tabs grouped in parent-child relationships, especially if you have 70+ tabs open like I do.
I found the most wonderful tab management plug-in EVER in researching this post on the topic http://bit.ly/umjaA linked to it too [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2661150497]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 16, 2009 12:10 PM
I don´t want to seem suspiciuos, but some things seem to be not clear. First, one of the winners that was mentioned before the challenge started as "example" worth to be seen (Tabviz).
Martin Polley is one of the collaborators/friends of Johnny Holland Magazine (panelists of the challenge) http://johnnyholland.org/the-johnnies/
And some concepts were made by a whole class = a LOT of votes :-)
Maybe their concepts are great...but I still can´t see some things to be clear.
Polley's design is easily the best. Cubezilla sounds good in principle but would, I think, actually be kind of annoying in the same way that Mac Spaces are also kind of annoying.
That said, I'm not hugely convinced that tabs are a problem that needs solving. I'd be interested to see a prototype of Polley's ideas done as an add-on though.
Thanks for the nice things people have said about my design :)
I just want to address Michael's concern about the fact that I am associated with Johnny Holland, one of the organizers/sponsors of the challenge.
Johnny Holland is "an open collective". That means anyone can contribute to the site. I am but one of many who has contributed material there. I encourage everyone who has an interest in interaction design to check out http://johnnyholland.org and consider contributing something -- the more the merrier!
If you like the direction Polley is going, have a look at an article I wrote about a very similar approach a month ago:
http://limi.net/articles/reinventing-tabs-for-the-browser
— Alexander Limi · Firefox User Experience
Polley's design is easily the best. Cubezilla sounds good in principle but would, I think, actually be kind of annoying in the same way that Mac Spaces are also kind of annoying.
That said, I'm not hugely convinced that tabs are a problem that needs solving. I'd be interested to see a prototype of Polley's ideas done as an add-on though.
We at clusterurl.com came up with a very elegant solution. It is a add-on that allows users to group tabs into a single page.
Tabs held within a cluster tab stop using memory which means your browser will perform better with less tabs open.
Tabs within a cluster tab retain history which means that you can carry on from where you left off. Close any tab and it will return to the cluster tab it came from.
each cluster tab you create or edit has a public & anonymous Cluster URL (clusterurl.com) automatically published on the web, which means it's simple to share your cluster tabs with friends and for others to find interesting clusters of sites you've made!