The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity
Thanks to its extensibility, Firefox quickly became the favorite browser for most power users. But while extensions are a great way to make Firefox more functional, Mozilla's designers are also currently thinking about a complete redesign of the way the browser looks and feels, in order to keep up with changing usage patterns. The most radical proposal we have seen so far would do away with the standard browser tabs, and replace them with an interface that looks more like iTunes than Firefox.
Look Daddy: No Tabs
Oliver Reichenstein and Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, have been thinking about the future of tabs in Firefox, and some of the resulting mockups are quite intriguing.
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.
The current generation of browsers does a decent job when it comes to keeping a current browser session organized, but Reichenstein wants to create a system that structures the browser more like a mutimedia file system. He proposes a new interface that looks more like iTunes than today's Firefox, with folders, libraries, and bookmarks in a sidebar.
Try Tree Tabs
If you would like to get a glimpse of what tabs on the side look like, have a look at Tree Tabs, a nifty addon that puts tabs on the side and that features a huge number of options for customizing the experience.
If you are on a netbook, for example, where vertical space is very limited, Tree Tabs (maybe in combination with Tiny Menu) will allow you to reclaim some of your screen estate.
Coming Soon: Built-In Ubiquity
Mozilla is also moving ahead with the integration of Ubiquity, a command-line style interface for common browser tasks, into Firefox's 'awesome bar.' Mozilla plans to add this project, dubbed Taskfox, into the main Firefox interface by the time version 3.6 of Firefox is released.
You can find an interactive demo here, or have a look at the mockups on this page.
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Tree Tabs, while on paper looks like a cool idea, is actually not that great. It takes up too much real estate space on my browser. It's only worthwhile if you got a wide screen monitor and the site you're on does not take advantage of your resolution.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7863
Automatic retitler for long tabs. Essential with Tree Style tabs.
Posted by: antony256.myvidoop.com
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April 14, 2009 12:55 PM
Wow. Did anyone else think of OS/2 when they saw Tree Tabs? Brings back memories...
Just to ensure you're clear on this, Aza (head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs, not all of Mozilla, but whatever) and the Labs team do a lot to encourage open discussions of what things might look like, and how interactions may behave, but you shouldn't take that as firm indicators of what the future of Firefox *will* look like.
We do encourage everyone to participate in the conversation, though: Firefox is your web browser!
So, they are making a better Flock right :)
Always,
Phil
Seems eerily like Google Chrome?...
As web developers we've been fighting for years to get people to set their monitor resolutions higher so we've got more horizontal space to play with.
I hate the idea of the browser chrome taking up any horizontal space at all. Users on smaller resolutions are going to start complaining about horizontal scrolling again and I though that was becoming a thing of the past.
Smells like someone's catching up to Google Chrome!
I'd like to just say I'm using the Delicious plugin for Firefox and based on the screen cap, it takes up just as much space. I've never had to scroll. Yes, we all want more horizontal space when doing a design, but there are limitations. There's also ways to make your site appear much wider than it really is. Build your site around the viewers, not yourself.
Tabs work fine for me, but I would love to see the Chrome "Recently Visited" page become my new way of keeping things in place. The fact that they have limited it to that thus far disappoints me. I'm not sure how I feel about a Tree view... it seems a bit antiquated but it could work.
Most new and future screens are going to be "widescreen". That means lots of extra horizontal space, and limited vertical space. Removing everything that takes scarce vertical space away from content is a good idea.
With low-end laptop screens at 1280x800, and a widescreen TVs causing a huge notch in the price curve at 1920x1080, we need to design for optimum presentation on future screens that are between 800 and 1080 pixels tall. Vertical space is scarce, while horizontal space is relatively plentiful - so design accordingly.
TaskFox sounds like a good idea. Pity Opera came up with the idea and has used it for over 5 years already.
The Tree browsing would be good if you can follow your own internet path. Eg if you were to click back and then go to a different page this would open up a seperate tree, saving all the history not just the direct path.
You people are soo funny. First of all Chrome took a lot from Opera including quick dial which all of you are calling Chrome Recent sites for some awkard reason.
Like karl said this TaskFox thing is already build in Opera for some time now... Are they reinveting hot water now and marketing it as ALL BRAND NEW SOLUTION YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR?
I hate when smart people are not getting their credit. I am an Opera fan and I'd strongly suggest everyone to at least try using Opera for few days. After that period if you still like Firefox more it's easy to uninstall.
I used opera for a weekend and couldnt believe how slow it was compared 2 fox. its called about:config ftw
Beautiful!! BUT it may become a resource hog for "power" users who open a lot of browser windows perhaps...
Forward thinking for Mozilla, how would Apple Safari and Google Chrome step up? The ball probably again is in their court...
Beautiful!!
Firefox is going to change the whole browser feel.
Mozilla: More than 600 Bugs Are Blocking Firefox 3.0
Safari, Firefox charge towards a more colourful Web
A good read:
http://techunits.com/content/list_all/49/firefox
OMgosh no way dude that is way cool!
RT
www.anon-tools.at.tc
Vimperator users will hardly notice.
(I just have to put vimperator out there for those who can handle the power.)
Isn't Safari Version 4 Public Beta already having this feature?
That's true that the actual tab system is becoming deprecated because for persons like me, that have lots of tabs opened at the same time, this system is hard to use and needs a lot of memory (not only the computer memory but mine as well to know where are what when not seeing the title of the website) so the tree tab system is good but I think it can goes further complex and accessible, I'm waiting for the new Firefox design.
Opera has many neat features, but (IMO) hasn't historically been that great at designing a UI that makes them easy to discover and use.
Which makes it the difference between being the first person to use feedback on a record, and the first person to use feedback on a hit record. The majority of people will put credit in the wrong place.
And it also has to be said that at times the same thing is invented independently - it's unlikely, given the timescales, that this (or Safari 4 Beta) are a direct response to Chrome (although it's likely all 3 were inspired to create a more visual form of Opera's QuickDial).
I could also throw OmniWeb into the mix, which has some interesting ideas around 'Workspaces' (sets of related tabs) - and was one of the first with visual tabs.
I think someone could take this and run with it - one way I tend to work with a browser right now is tabs for related browsing, and a new window for a new 'set'. Even OmniWeb doesn't let me have a Workspace per window.
(As for memory use/hogging - that's a technical problem that can be addressed with effort - i.e. rendering preview images as per Safari's homepage, rather than actual real views. Equally, it might be possible to do the same with some of the pages - with rendering speeds improved, you could perhaps cache out 'inactive' tabs to disk, and re-render them when made active).
wowwwwww Great look i think rockssssssss
We heartily inviting to my blog http://funevil.blogspot.com/ Ready to Accept Pain of FUN
Hey... a better Flock?
@ Phil... well a better Flock would be welcome, it's my browser of choice at the moment.
Now I am using 5 browsers and Firefox is only one of them. Calculating shows that, its part play the most important role in my daily computing activity. The future of Firefox? My imagine is only that it will replace completely the remain in my desktop now!
Browsers are applications. They may becoming desktop interfaces, but they are _not_ operating systems. Browsers know nothing of hardware, interrupts, disk controllers, I/O or a whole host of other things that operating systems take care of.
Thanks for the idea generation, Frederic. Reading through the comments and clicking over to Aza's site and perusing some of those comments, my perspective is the best solution would be to keep top navbars (or at least allow us the option for users like me who prefer width over height), but also shift some navbars as left bars or even bottom bars (where both can auto-hide).
Again: Maintain the top bars, but also create left or bottom bars that can auto-hide when not in use, e.g. StumbleUpon's taskbar; irrelevant to keep that open all the time. Or SEOQuake's bar; ditto.
The more options that are allowed, the more pleasant the experience. Don't mandate everything be top or left, but allow the user to choose.
That said, I do like the concept of tab-free browsing.
Regarding using horizontal space in preference of vertical:
Why do people seem to have this belief that everyone runs their web browser maximized? One of the original advantages of a widescreen monitor was supposed to be the ability to view multiple items side-by-side. For us multitaskers the most important design concern is total absolute area consumed by an element since as the window gets smaller this becomes a larger percentage of the total.
Usually this gives preference to any toolbar where text is drawn in the same direction that the bar runs, and for some reason people don't like reading text vertically so...
What I wish apps with sidebars did was wrap items when the text started overflowing the width of the bar, essentially treating the item like a button that's gotten wider. If I want to make a viewport smaller I expect having to do some vertical scrolling to see everything, but what really bugs me about apps like iTunes or Outlook is reducing the sidebar size means I can't read everything anymore.
Hell no... If firefox looks like iTunes i'm going to scream. iTunes is the worst piece of shit ever...
Cf. commnent #1:
Tree Tabs option of tabs side-bar "auto hide" works very well.
Boo. When they implement any of these changes it will be time for me to find a new browser.. Maybe Google is paying them to sabotage themselves for the good of Chrome...
Simple Solution: Tab Groups.
- when a new tab is opened via a clicked link, the original tab turns into a tab group, it and all 'child' tabs are shown in a scroll-down menu when you click the group tab.
- configurable so that middle-click or another easy button+click opens a new non-group tab.
- Another configuration option would be that CTRL-TAB scrolls through either the tab group alone, only top-level tabs (including 'parent' group tabs), or simply scrolls to the next page in sequence.
Seems like this would be very easy to impliment, and would allow for tab usage without having to relearn a whole new system.
Taskfox is FANTASTIC!
I am definitely liking Taskfox.
BUT I would still prefer if Firefox focused more on performance, stability, and standards compliance, and let the user-built extensions take care of the extra functionality.
My 2 cents.
I don't like it. If you use more than 10 tabs and have a problem with Firefox not showing them all on the top, switch to Opera. I don't think that there is any way that a tabless browser will make using the internet more efficient.
Just Awesome. I agree that sooner browser will be a OS. Most of the time we use browser rather then using any other feature of OS. Great!
http://www.ekhichdi.com/googleyahoo/three-companies-that-will-rule-the-world
Tina
Ugh, I hate the idea personally. I really don't think you meant 'do away with window tabs' but if they were actually yanked entirely out of firefox, I would stop using it.
I don't think tabless browsing will make it more efficient.
That would be great if browsers were becoming more and more like operating systems.
Hey open source developers:
*Please* start coming up with new UI ideas of your own. Stop "borrowing" from Apple. I want to see more innovation in the open source world, and less copying.
I'd like to see Ubiquity on the new build. I've tried it before but there were quite a lot of bugs that slowed down the browser but if perfected might be a powerful tool.
Firefox is changing faster than even Facebook is. Well, maybe not. Does anyone still use Outlook? It's my favorite because of Outlook Track-It which is an amazing toolbar plugin that reminds you to follow up to important emails. Firefox needs something like this. But Outlook will do just fine :)
I will be forced to abandon Firefox if it moves away from tabs.
I can't think of a worse decision the UI designers could make. I depend on them far too much.
Wow. Did anyone else think of OS/2 whenwhat and why about moet chandon champagne they saw Tree Tabs? Brings back memories.
What we have seen today aren't available for tomorrow. Technology is updating day by day. We know how firefox looks in the earlier days and how it was now, We can't assume how it would be tomorrow.
All these updates are making life so easier and comfort.
Thanks
Sankar Datti
Love tabs. This new shit looks ridiculous.
Opera already does this and more in a better way. You don't need to have a view of the tabs at all, just use a shortcut key, Ctrl+Tab Voila!
Why don't they put the history/tree tabs into the new Ctrl+T tab so you can access it that way, like new tab king/speed dial/other firefox addons? Then it's invisible until you need it, when it's big and graphic:)
Have fun - https://addons.mozilla.org/es-ES/firefox/addon/8879
Oh...no
no, I do not enjoy tree tabs, tiny menu maybe
the iTunes interface style has possibilities, worth playing with.
interesting ideas
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