Markc:Firefox Tab Mockups

There's challenge over at Humanized.com to produce ideas and mockups for a better way to handle large numbers of tabs in Firefox. This is my take on it:

The basic problem

I won't go into detail about what the problem is - go and look at the challenge page for that - but suffice to say that if you have a large number of tabs open, Firefox 1.5 squishes them all down to become unreadable, and Firefox 2.x leaves them at a larger size, but adds buttons with which you can scroll to the hidden ones. Both approaches have problems, outlined on the challenge page.

One of the biggest issues is how to quickly and easily get to a particular tab. With Fx 1.5 it requires a degree of guesswork (or memorising favicons); with Fx 2.x it requires scrolling and either reading the tab names, or recognising the favicons. Personally I remember some favicons (for sites I regularly use), but mostly I think that's a poor way to locate a particular tab if you're not particularly familiar with the site (or if it has no favicon). Reading the titles is potentially more accurate, but takes longer.

So I think that any viable solution has to show the favicon and the page title. Even then, I often find it quicker and easier to identify a page by its general design rather than by a small icon or a bit of text. So that brings us to one of the solutions that has been most widely suggested - "Exposé".

An Exposé-alike solution

I'll assume that everyone reading this is familiar with Exposé - but if not, have a look at Apple's page about it.