When I first heard about Tab Candy, I thought it was a stupid idea, because you would just be wasting your time faffing around with organising your tabs.

When I saw Tab Candy on a YouTube video of the Summit, I realised that I was wrong, and that TAB CANDY IS GOING TO SAVE MY LIFE!

There is so much potential for it. I’m guessing you won’t be able to squeeze all of your ideas into Firefox 4. Will we see improvements in Tab Candy in Fx 4.1?

You’re probably aware of this, but tryserver-builds are automatically cleaned up after 14 days.
If you aren’t aware of that, you might want to copy those files elsewhere and update the link.

I’ve been following the evolution of your thinking about tabs with great interest, and keep wondering about one thing:

If I understand it correctly, one of the differences between a tab and a bookmark from the user perspective is that a tab preserves the current state of the page while bookmark preserves just the page’s location. Because of the info-guilt you mentioned, we probably can’t rely on users to clean up their tabs regularly, so after a while they will will have accumulated a rather unmanageable number of tabs. Will these tabs be retired into bookmarks after some time to manage memory consumption or will the pages be saved into some kind of long-term storage?

Can you do anything with Tab Candy yet if you’re not a programmer and don’t know how to build programs?

I had done something similar while at Georgia Tech. in 2009 with shiftbrowse http://bit.ly/shiftbrowse. You should try the .air prototype. The ui is slightly complicated but the feature set is pretty similar. The context based tab trees layed out in an area where you could drag them around and easily remember tab groupings using spatial memory (dragging tabs around) . Users didnt have to manually make groups, they could open different tabs in different contexts from the beginning.

The basic idea of this is the same as using a different windows for each “group”. I use different Spaces (Mac) in order to organize it further and de-clutter a given window space.

But the advance stuff, such as sharing tabs with friends, I think that is pretty powerful.

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

Probably a dumb question, but what are the activation keys for the Linux builds? I’m assuming they have this feature enabled because the download site includes non-Mac/Windows versions.

The new interface and tab improvements mean little if they don’t fix the real or perceived bloat issues, those of slowness, stability and memory usage. I use FF daily and have since pre-1.0, but I’m seriously considering a switch to Chrome because f those issues. Running FF for a couple days, the memory shoots thru the roof and the responsiveness slows to a crawl and it starts to get crashy. Those are real problems. I only have a few windows open and a few of the most common extensions. If extensions are causing it, get them under control and sandbox them or something, but something has to be done or I’m gone and many more are, as well. I’ve tried Chrome and it doesn’t exhibit the same problems. I come back to FF out of allegiance to them breaking open the browser wars again and making a dent, but that only goes so far.

Great work! It’s really exciting to see what Mozilla has in the works for future releases of Firefox. Would it be possible for you to post the video in the entry in WebM or Theora?

Wow! This is awesome! Looking forward to trying it out.

Awesome work. I love it. I see great potential for many uses.
I haven’t looked at the current bugs and all of the documentation yet, but I see a few (very) minor issues like after resizing a group and clicking on a blank space, the 1st tab in the group is opened/focused automatically, and some tooltips (for tabs and the interface) would be nice and larger titles, but I’m guessing that I’ll be able to at least fix that last one for myself unless full page zoom could be implemented.

I’m looking forward to learning more.

Of course, suddenly, there is little practical difference between bookmarks and tabs. An unloaded tab is just a bookmark that exists in some form of workspace. In fact, this is much like how the Windows 7 taskbar doesn’t differentiate between shortcuts and tasks. They’re just programs that are either loaded or unloaded.

This thinking should be applied to Firefox a little more completely. Everything is a bookmark, or a “place”. Bookmarks can be placed into workspaces (tab groups), but aren’t active until you need them (such as when you switch to a group).

Anyway, it’s worth taking time to think about the interaction between bookmarks and tab groups.

Will give it a try, but people aren’t using browsers for organizing tabs. They use ‘em for browsing the web. The described activity takes too much effort IMHO. After testing my mind might change, but so far it’s way too complex and cumbersome.

come on, lets be serious, no one uses 100 tabs at the same time !

gonna=not*

Your Tab Candy Alpha link takes you to a Directory file page.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tryserver-builds/edward.lee@engineering.uiuc.edu-15284adb0a68/

So basically what you’re suggesting is to group tabs. While that is a clever way to view the structure. I think what you have done is good if you have a massive number of tabs and groups open, but I think there are more user-friendly ways to go about it for the average user.

You had a button that took you to a separate page where you could manipulate the groups. I would continue to have that visualization, but that only takes place if you like control click or double-click that button. When you normally press the button, (in the browser and without opening anything separate) it moves the existing tabs down and creates a group tab above them that effectively includes all the tabs you currently have open. Then you can drag an existing tab to the group tab and it will create a new group and then everything else similar to what you have done except the only difference is the visualization.

Here’s how it would work: Imagine you have 10 tabs open, 4 about kittens and 6 about cameras. You click the button, it moves the tabs down by the size of one tab and creates a new tab called Group 1 that contains all these ten tabs. You move one of the tabs about cameras to the space next to Group 1 and it creates Group 2 containing this tab. You move back to Group 1 (which only changes the tabs displayed) and select all the camera tabs (using shift/ctrl to select multiple) and drag them to Group 2. If you want you can name the Groups just as you do.

I figure you’ve already done the coding necessary for all this, you just need to change how it works so it could be more streamlined into most users experience.

How about some images we can click on?

This is some awesome stuff. I’m going to try it out on my netbooks and see how well it performs. Those are some great ideas!

I never really saw the appeal of tab grouping. If I want to start a new set of tabs, I hit CTRL-N and open a new browser window, however I rarely need to do that unless I’m doing some heavy copy/paste between two browsers or working on a CMS and its output simultaneously.

I know you guys don’t want to hear this, but as a heavy multitasker myself, I say that if you think you need 30 or 40 tabs open, you need to reconsider how you use the browser. Do you really have 30 sessions open and in-progress ? Do you start filling out one form, jump to a new page and start typing on something completely different, ad infinitum ? Or do you focus on one task and let the others sit in line until you’re ready to deal with them ?

What I tend to do is I’ll middle-click a bunch of pages (i.e. on Slashdot or other aggregators), then go through then sequentially, closing each one as I finish reading or interacting with it. I never feel overwhelemed by the tabs, because I treat the tab bar like a queue. I might still go through 40 items, but since they only enter my headspace one-by-one it is trivial to manage. Since I don’t fuss with extraneous OCD gadgetry like this Tab Candy stuff, I am working faster and more efficiently.

As someone who spends most days juggling complex databases and OOP structures in my head, the last thing I need is an overcomplicated browser.

But does this add on work with multiple browsers on multiple windows?

I want tabs in tabs in windows on each monitor. Then I could truly unleash my 64-bit, OCd, water-cooled beast so it could keep up with my ADHD properly.

I think this add on will get me a raise at work. There is no refuting how much more productive I will become with so many tabs open and organized at one point in time.

Oh my god, I installed it… and it’s extremely easy to use with the ctrl+space shortcut. THanks a lot!!!!

That look really great! I have a some concerns though. First, does publishing this early give Microsoft too much of a head start? Firefox’s tab browsing probably in important feature that cause IE to lose market share.

I really like the groups. But, I want to be able to switch to the group with one click instead of multiple. That is why I bring up multiple Firefox windows that group different topics. Maybe you can have a task bar at the bottom where I can switch between the groups.

I also have a concern with stability. If one window has too many tabs then that hurts that window, but I can move things to another window. If all tabs are in one window that can cause more stability problems. If you need to restart the browser or it become unstable, you need an easy way to recover from that. Right now I use the session manager add on. When I bring up a lot of closed tabs it takes a long time bring up the tabs and they don’t all load. Your group concept might cause similar issues.

Lastly, I am using Firefox 3.6.3 on a 1280 X 1024 MS Windows screen. I can’t see the 5 right most characters in this form despite the window being maximized and there is no horizontal scroll bar. Please resolve that on this page. It is very confusing. Thanks.

Howdy.

I’m using TabGroups Manager at this point. Using that, I normally have hundreds or thousands of tabs open in many groups, one for each project or subproject. You might wish to take a glance at it.

What an awesome piece of software! I started using it right away, and now I’m addicted to it.

In my opinion, 100+ times better than Tab Mix and other extensions for us tab-junkies. Very useful, and very usable.

Thank you very much, gentleman.

Wow! Really looking forward to this! Great idea!

I hardly believe many of you… 70, 200… tabs at the same time… For what I see here at my environment, people looks at the same time at 2-3 web sites, not more.
70..200 web sites at the same time… I know it is not the same, but try reading 30 newspapers at the same time… doesn’t it make more sense to start with one and go on one by one until the end?

So, like Tim (#10291) my first thought was also that this duplicates capabilities offered by multiple browser windows. And this is, in fact, how I use browser windows — each tends to be task/subject specific, and I arrange them on the monitor in a consistent way each time.

However, Tab Candy shows the potential for greatly improving on using windows. For example, naming groups. Or (very useful) searching across groups (3:28 in video). And the Tab Candy workspace is much more scalable than when using windows. (More than 4 windows start becoming unwieldy.) You can move tabs between groups more easily, and arrange them more easily. And the interface offers a lot more promise, as you demonstrate.

I was also initially skeptical because it reminded me of Exposé, which seems like a great idea in principle, but after 3 years on OS X, just doesn’t work for me in practice. Mainly due to how it defeats muscle memory. By making the Tab Candy workspace user-defined, it avoids this problem.

However, some things still bother me. One is how it still doesn’t solve the subliminal task-switching conundrum I blogged about here:
http://blog.isotoma.com/2010/05/solving-the-real-alt-tab-problem/
(In response to one of your posts.) Again, to switch between tabs using Tab Candy, you’re forced to look away from what you’re doing, and focus on first a button, then a workspace, before getting to the tab you want. There’s no hotkey that can flip between your current tab and the last one you used. Or with two keypresses, the current one and the one-before-last.

One advantage Windows has over Mac is that you can actually Alt-Tab between browser windows, so that way, for example, I can easily hop between a bug ticket tab and the window containing the related web page. This gives an added advantage to using additional browser windows, in Windows anyway.

I’d still like to see you address these issues — whether through Tab Candy or another Firefox enhancement.

Aza, I hope you read the comments. As it stands now TabCandy lacks any integration with the structure of the browsing experience. Right now we have windows containing tabs. It’s a primitive structure, but a clear one.
TabCandy tries to add one more layer: Windows containing tabgroups, containing tabs. The problem is that it mixes up the order; it’s not at all clear that the window contains multiple tab groups. In fact, since the button opens something resembling a page, it looks as if the tab contained the tabgroup which is well, messed up.

I know it’s not easy, but if this is supposed to make any sense it has to be clear that the set of tabs currently visible are children of the tabgroup. And that means that the tabgroup can’t be a separate interface (how much sense does it make if the top [window] and lowest [tabs] points of the hierarchy are visible, but the middle ones [tabgroups] are not?

If the tabgroups were visible above the tabbar and scroll out on click it wouldn’t be nearly as flashy, but a lot clearer.

Yet another Emacs feature added to Firefox ;)

hey Aza what happened to the New Tab page project for Firefox… you were working on that but there hasn’t been an update in ages..

Firefox needs to have a New Tab page! and you are the man to make it!!!

Cool! Especially the future.

Excellent job Aza !

That is the Firefox 4 I want to see, the true revolution.

It would also be nice to merge bookmarks and tabs.

I am looking forward to your project !

Nice idea.

I’ll cross my fingers hoping we’ll ultimately be able to rearrange tabs within a group (for the time being it seems a bit erratic), and also have something like BarTab to go easy on memory.
I, for one, don’t like the idea of having switched-off groups’ tabs removed from memory (not sure it’s on the planning though).
It probably has to do with the potential issues when switching between different groups.

The main interest (and main flaw as well) of Tree Style Tabs is having all the tabs in sight (providing you managed your nesting efficiently).
I’d love to see something that easy from Tab Candy in the future (since it doesn’t seem that way right now).

Tab candy is excellent for doing research online. I can separate pages by topic and easily tuck away a new-found page for when I get to that topic. I think you might have found the cure for my research ADD!

anyone got a download link?

when I download this (below)

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tryserver-builds/edward.lee@engineering.uiuc.edu-4d7c7a3c5ac2/tryserver-win32/firefox-4.0b3pre.en-US.win32.installer.exe

it downloads an 8.6mb file called minefield, which I install but then it opens up my regular installed firefox version (v 3.5.1) not 4.0
Also, the tabs are the same old ones.

thanks

Great! pursue your ideas. :)

It’s amazing! Very good idea, grouping tabs… I think. :)

I like Tab Candy in some ways but not in others. I believe the added task of organizing the tabs is not a feature I would use often. I think the ability to intuitively link the tabs together based on some logic of “if I click on a link from this page and it opens a new tab, that tab will automatically be grouped with this tab”. Also note that not everyone configures Firefox to open a new tab with every click. I hope this is helpful feedback.

v/r
Jeromy

THAT is the direction I want Firefox to go.
Firefox 4 looks really promising, keep working!

Well, I tried tab candy and I am a huge fan.. unfortunately the install on my mac just stopped working altogether, and no error or anything to explain why. I open the program and nothing loads up. I have it installed at work on my XP computer and it works fine(it is just much slower on the windows machine). I have been looking for a troubleshooting section, or a place to report errors, and I haven’t really been able to find any

Feel free to contact me at my e-mail if I just missed the place to report the issue or need specific software/hardware specs. As I said it worked great, but only lasted about 4 days and no matter how I remove it(I have even used appzapper to delete any related files) when I reinstall it the same issue is there.

I am not sure if it an issue with tab candy or the beta build of firefox, but I can’t find anything from them that would say it is specifically the browser.

Also, another annoying point of having it integrated into the browser is that the entire time I had it installed it wanted to install an update that does NOT have tab candy, so having autoupdate disabled by default, or only being notified about beta updates that include tab candy would make sense as that is the only reason I would use it..

None of this is really a complaint, if anything I want it back asap, it made it possible to navigate everything I have open so much easier(I usually have 100+ tabs open at all times, and not over info guild, but as you showed in the video it is because of research, future tasks, some things I use daily, social networks, etc.)

Regards.

Simply Awesome idea ! Like they way you present.

BTW after downloading MineFiled for Windows I updated it HELP–>Check For Updates. It removed the Tab Canday from the browser. Could be BUG.

Genial!

awesome, gonna love it

I’m not a developer or coder or any variety of geek, just a reasonably non-technophobic end user who likes stuff that makes my work easier. Here’s how I see using this:

I’m working on a project: A presentation that can be customized on the fly by letting different audiences vote on “chapters” to be included in that day’s workshop. So I’m researching maybe 10, 15 or so topic groupings for each chapter. The presentation is delivered in person with a live browser running in the background, so that when I get to (for example) the chapter on “Financial Reporting” I can quickly go from the presentation slide to the browser with various pages ready to look at (“Here’s a site that covers regulations for X category of reports really well.”)

To accomplish this now, I’m setting up and running multiple browser windows, one for each chapter that MIGHT be voted on by the audience at the beginning of the workshop session. In each one, I’m opening all the bookmarks currently saved and grouped for that chapter.

This is klutzy because I can’t readily see from all the thumbnails of browser windows which chapter is which, and have to take valuable presentation time to organize them.

I can see having tab groupings with chapters all set up, and titled, and just zinging right onto that. Love it!

I would ESPECIALLY love it, if I could save tab groups like I save bookmark folders. It would be so much more convenient to simple open a browser window and go to my Tools>Tab Groups menu and click on a titled tab group and have ALL of those sites open at once, in tabs, ready for me to use.

I am not at the level of understanding builds, and I am on a 64-bit Windows OS, so I’m reluctant to try an alpha download. However, when you have a beta version ready to go I would be thrilled to have a chance to test it out!

I just viewed your Tab Candy presentation and I just had to say 2 things; Tab Candy is an amazing, innovative enhansment to web browsing that’s been long overdue and that your presentation was very well done.

Nice job overall.

I couldn’t get it to work for me when I downloaded it a couple of different times, but I’m very excited about Tab Candy and WANT IT and NEED IT NOW!!! So hurry!

Fenomenal Idea. I will install and I will give you my considerations and suggestions.

Thank you for your development.

TabCandy is awesome ………. is it available for Chrome ?

Is there any binary of Tab Candy available for the Solaris/SPARC platform ?

Kind regards.
Daniel

PLEASE add captions to the video about the new tab candy in Firefox!!
Thank you.

I installed minefield and found it was incompatible with plugins I used so I uninstalled it. That uninstalled all of firefox and wiped out all my bookmarks, plugins, and toolbars. I am NOT happy.

This function is really bad design…. I spent a lot of time to get my tab back… I hate this….

Could you release the ctrl+space key sequence to the user?
or at lease let us define the shortcut….

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This is mind blowing ! Incredible.

Tab Candy: Making Firefox Tabs Sweet

I just recent across from your blog I suddenly stop to read firebox Tabs. This person is really very creative person, I,like your Idea.I wish your Idea will become great tips for every internet users.

The “Tweak Network Settings” plugin sets the max connections to 16, which seems to work well. 30 does seem a bit high, and while it’s true that httpd daemons terminate at 100 connections generally, there’s generally multiple httpd daemons running.
Burn Xtreme

Screen capture courtesy of Al Fasoldt INTERNET EXPLORER 9, shown filling most of the screen on a Windows 7 desktop, has no menu bar to clutter up the top of its window. A tab bar is the only feature at the top. Menus pop out when.
Stimelex

This is a great tab management feature. It does a great job on organizing group tabs and it also looks wonderful.
Burn Xtreme