Firefox:3.0 Tabbed Browsing

Required Features

• Put the "Open the link in New tab" menu before the "Open the link in New Window" menu and Put "New Tab" menu before the "New Window" menu. Although this seems trivial, it makes it a lot easier for users to utilize tabbed browsing,
• A new pref that changes various tabbed browsing options and UI elements at once:
  • The user have two options: tabbed browsing mode (the new mode) and legacy browsing mode (used by firefox 1.0.* or below)
  • Tabbed browsing mode will switch prefs to open new windows for popups, bookmarks, history, searches, url, DDE call etc. in the background
  • Tabbed browsing mode will also hide the "New Window" menu and all related menus and toolbar buttons
  • Legacy browsing mode will behave in the same way as a new installation of firefox 1.0.x
  • Tabbed browsing mode should be the default
  • An infobar, similar to the popup infobar will notify the user the first time they have created a new tab.
• Drag and drop reordering
  • Tab moving from one window to another
• Close buttons on tabs
  • xxxmpc: This is a big pain for Fitts' Law adherence, the smaller target area is made even smaller by the "danger" aspect of the click area. This is allegedly "faster" but we're probably going to force all users to slow down, whether they realize it or not. Maybe enable an Accel-Click modifier to close tabs quickly (in addition to middle-click on non-contentLoadURL platforms). This would be faster/safer in both cases (closing and selecting).
    • bugmenot: Other than the mouse click modifier, a right-click per-tab close button could also work (Maxthon uses this approach). We can also hide and disable the per-tab close button unless the user has pointed their mouse on the tab for a specified amount of time.
• Overflow bucket
• The history system needs to be made more compatible with tabbed browsing. In particular, we should adopt a brached history system (that braches every time the user opens a new tab/window) where the user can always go back unless he/she has reached the homepage.
  • FunnyMan3595: Simplest way to do this is to just duplicate the old back history in the new tab. See my comments at "Why not use the back button?" section of the talk page.
• More visible highlight for the current tab. If more than 10-20 tabs are open, they start to look like a uniform mess...
  • Options in the context-menu for tabs like "color tab red/blue/green" would be nice,
  • or maybe "assign icon" to change the icon on the tab
  • Also: Options in the tab-context-menu "move this tab left/right" HaJo

Work Estimate

3 Weeks

Other Notes

In either the core or an extension, I'd like to see a concept of a sticky bookmarks tab, and a fixed number of non-sticky tabs. As you open new pages in tabs, the non-sticky tabs would get reused in oldest-first order, and would get moved to the end of the list. A tab could be made sticky by right-clicking on the tab and selecting stick or unstick (or some kind of alt-click on the tab or something). Sticky tabs would always show up before non-sticky ones.

This would let you freeze things like gmail, bugzilla, etc. in some N tabs at the beginning of your tab list, and then let you have 5 or something tabs after that that you'd reuse as you browse.

Undo for Tabs

Sometimes in haste I click Close all other Tabs because it is right next to Close Tab, and end up having the only tab I wanted closed, open. The tabbed browser extension has this, but I don't want to install that just for the one feature I use. I think we need to have a way to "Undo" the closing of tabs. I believe the current Opera 8 beta has something like this (a bucket).

• guspaz - Firefox crashes on occasion. It would be nice if it kept track of what tabs were open when it was closed. Then, when the user relaunched the browser, they could select an option somewhere (Edit menu? View menu?) to re-open previous tabs. Alternatively you could keep a bookmark folder up to date with all the current tabs. If a user re-launched the browser and wanted those tabs back, they could just open the bookmark folder and select "Open In Tabs".

Session Saving

Session saving is a feature that many users like, but that's often redundant, or even confusing to the user (the approach in rue's Session Saver or Opera) if incorporated by deafult into Firefox. Instead, it can be placed in the now IMHO useless Go menu. Go > Last session would fill most people's requirements, and it can be coupled with a "Save session now" feature. Go > Save session. This, too, could be tightly integrated with the new Places by placing saved sessions in the places folders.

• It would be really nice if the browser picked out the keywords from the page content and used these to form a sensible default title for the session. - BenS
• Firefox could have the option of automatically saving the session when Firefox closes and restoring it when Firefox oepns. Also, do not save blank tabs. -Harrison
  • I wouldn't get rid of blank tabs unless the user turns that on in their preferences. Once we've got drag-n-drop tabs, I can easily see a user using blank tabs to separate groups of tabs. -FunnyMan3595
• Part of what I think confuses a user is the terminology. Sure, "Save session" makes sense to a techie, but a new user isn't going to know what that means. Further, "Go" just doesn't seem like the right menu to put this under. A better menu would be bookmarks, since session saving is essentially a many-tailed bookmark. Maybe Bookmarks-Take snapshot, which creates a saved session, then you load it just like any other bookmark, by selecting it. When you open a snapshot, you get a Y/N/C dialog asking if you want to take a snapshot of the old state, with a "More information..." link. -FunnyMan3595