Firefox.next: Tabs on the side?

1. Eric Shepherd 4.10.09 / 4pm

   I personally prefer to keep my browser windows significantly taller than they are wide. I don’t want them filling up all my screen space. Tabs on top are easily preferable to eating up a big chunk of horizontal space, for me, despite the wide screen.

   This lets me put multiple things side by side on my screen, instead of having to switch from app to app using the Dock or other methods.
2. Mike Beltzner 4.10.09 / 4pm

   Couple of random thoughts:
   - a lot of tabs have the same prefix in the title (ie: Slashdot, in the mockup above) which aren’t necessary, and hide the actual differentiation of the title
   - controls to group-by-domain, find duplicates, find a tab, etc would be nice to have in that sidebar; instead of just thinking about how to display and organize them, let’s think about how we can provide users with better control to browse and pivot through their tabs
   - yes, absolutely we need autohide or some way of returning real estate; while many people have wider screens now, it’s by no means universal, and also not necessarily even the majority of computer users
   - every tab-to-the-side mockup and implementation I’ve seen loses the sense of “attachment” between the web content and the tab title; some effort should be made to preserve that in the design
3. MrOhad 4.10.09 / 4pm

   don’t you think it is wasting much more space comparing to the vertical tabs?
4. Dan 4.10.09 / 4pm

   An interesting idea. I think the best way to group tabs is by where they were opened from. Tabs opened from bookmarks, the location bar or an external application start a new group. Tabs opened from other tabs go into the same group as that tab.
5. Pelle 4.10.09 / 4pm

   Auto-hide as well as some kind of zoom feature as in the OS X dock would perhaps work.

   One advantage of having the tabs on the side is that it’s much more natural to scroll up and down through a vertical list than a horizontal so it would be a lot easier to have many tabs open at the same time.

   Also - in a vertical tab list you can group tabs in some kind of a hierarchy like a modern variant of a classic directory tree - which could perhaps make it easier to find the webpage you’re currently at?

   And lastly a crazy random thought - having the tabs in some kind of a large “tab wheel” - you’re always seeing the rightmost of the wheel (which is like a slightly curved list) and it’s always the tab on the absolute rightmost of it that’s active one. The scrolling would then become natural because there would be no end of the list - the scrolling is just be rotating around the wheel.
6. Endolith 4.10.09 / 4pm

   “How do you use the web?”

   I read through a page, middle-clicking links that interest me, so that they can load in tabs in the background and I can read them later. When I’ve finished reading the current page, I either close the tab, or left-click the last interesting link, which produces the same effect as “middle-click the interesting link and then close the current tab”. Is it logical to treat one “tangent” link differently from its peers? Nope, but it’s a kind of shortcut. Now the history for one of the “descendant” tabs contains the original “ancestor” tab’s history, but the other descendant tabs do not.

   Another bad habit is leaving tabs open as a “to do” reminder if there’s something else I wanted to do with them (the tabs I opened with middle click, for instance, are things I need to read, but it could also be something I’ve already read but still need to act on, for instance).

   This can build up quickly, though, and I find myself with dozens of tabs open, and my brain “holding onto” a lot of information about those tabs and their relationships to each other, like I feel all the other “to dos” weighing on my mind. I feel like I have to work through and close a bunch of branches, move back up the tangent tree, close all of those branches, etc. It also uses up a ton of memory and drastically slows down browser start-up to have all those tabs open, many of which I might not actually view at all during that session. Some kind of “to read” list would be better.

   I feel like there must be a more logical, fundamentally different way to handle these “browsing trees”, tangents, and viewing history, but I’m not sure what that is.

   When I’m reading certain “book-like” pages, like certain software documentation, I find myself clicking “Back” to go up to the table of contents page, and then scrolling back down and clicking the next link in the table to go to the next page. Wouldn’t clicking a “Forward” or “Next page” button make more intuitive sense in this context? Link rel= tags contain these kinds of relationships, but you need to install extensions to have any kind of interface for those.

   Why do we keep a history of which pages were viewed previously, in chronological order, independently for each tab? Where did this idea of “Back” and “Forward” buttons come from in the first place? Is this the best way to browse the web?
7. Spock 4.10.09 / 4pm

   It’s probably me, but when two navigation bars are right next to each other (as in the case of the screenshot with the browsers tab panel and gmail’s menu), it could get confusing trying to get to the right navigation bar. Considering several web-apps have their navigation bar on the left, having the browser’s tab bar on the right may help in this particular situation.

   I think it would be great if browsers supported a tearable flexible tabpanel (like the ones several OSes provide) that could be moved and aligned by users.

   But the idea of tab groups is excellent.
8. Lee 4.10.09 / 4pm

   *On the side. I like this, on my netbook I actually moved my windows task bar to the right hand side to give myself more height. On the other hand though, even though height is a scarce resource, most websites are reasonable about the height, and it is the width that websites are tough on. Also something to consider, I personally like having more controls on the right hand side of the screen (my back,forward,reload buttons are relocated there), this goes back to my tablet PC days, when I clicked the screen with my right hand, and having to move my hand to the left hand side of the screen wasn’t comfortable and blocked the screen when I had to do it. Also having it be adjustable in size even to the point of reducing it down to icons would help.

   *Applications. I love this idea, in a way it merges the bookmark toolbar. But I would also love to be able to at times freeze tabs so that it stops all scripts and all flash.

   *Grouped Tabs. This is a good idea, there are times I go off and do things, such as researching or shopping, and I will end up opening a bunch of tabs to compare things, in doing that sometimes I come up with questions in which I search for answers so then I end up with a huge number of mixed tabs (at this point I usually regret not having started doing this in a new window :P) and it would help if I could bunch them together in a group or session.

   *Work Spaces. Sounds like it would also work to throw tab groups into them.

   *Autohide. I never use them (even in windows) because redraw is always terrible, and if you accidentally mouse over it pops out and causes redraws.
9. Lee 4.10.09 / 4pm

   Oh yeah, what I mean about websites being reasonable about the height, I mean that scrolling on a website isn’t a problem most content can be handled with shorter height, but if you don’t have enough width some sites are difficult to navigate.
10. Diego 4.10.09 / 5pm

    I like the applications idea. It can be mixed with bookmarks, and have something like the Mac OSX Dock: an small indicator that the application is “running”.
    The workspace idea is also really useful, I usually make a lot of searches related to a theme (I’m wondering if someone likes to create a Firefox add-on with a mix of MindMaps and WebBrowsing… it will be nice for research on the net).
    About of vertical/horizontal space… I don’t know, I’ve a wide monitor but the Firefox Sidebar is always off, for some reason it bothers me when I’m reading (I prefer the sidebar on the right side, but there is not a friendly way to change that on Firefox)
11. Dylan Hafertepen 4.10.09 / 5pm

    Love it. I saw this and my first thought was “This is the future of browsing.”

    This almost feels like an un-intentional solution to the new-tab page. Where the tab-bar auto hides when browsing normally, opening a new tab shows the tab-bar.
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3556/3430235582_27830641bf_o_d.jpg
    Excuse the sketchyness…and the tabbed part could be the first column in this guy:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/azaraskin/3361919588/sizes/l/
12. Kian 4.10.09 / 5pm

    This is a really really good idea! Evolving the tab interface is long overdue.

    I feel the best place for the current tab system really is on top, due to its simplistic nature and little use. However, if we are going to expand on the tab system with grouping, workspaces, and so on, then moving it to the side seems like the only realistic option.

    The current tab system is a quick solution which allows you to swiftly switch from one page you are surfing to another. A lot of the proposed ideas (i love them all) are all themed around managing and organising your webpages better.

    This seams to lie closer within the field of bookmarking.

    I can very easily see myself making use of workspaces for everything i do, and infact, probably ending up using it as a way to organise my bookmarks.

    Currently I do have bookmarks, loads, but its more of a place to dump stuff Im interested in but will never pay attention to. My bookmarks sit in the background.

    Why not think about evolving the current bookmarking system, to accommodate organisation of currently open webpages, as well as those that you might not have sitting open but want to remember.

    This would be as easy as having all the awesome developments proposed above, but integrating the bookmarks system into, with all the open sites and applications bumped up to the top.

    With regards to autohiding bars, they tend to get really annoying, it’s another thing flicking about distracting me and contributing to the disintegration of my train of thought. I don’t really feel like I need to conserve screen real estate on my 24″, but on my 15.4″ laptop screen its gonna be worth the hassle. So why not just make it optional. A little button to click within the sidebar for autohide, which will disappear after an amount of time of not being changed. (a permanent option could remain in the firefox preferences)

    um. well, I just intended on saying, AWESOME IDEAS! DO IT! or something along those lines, but as soon as I started writing, I started thinking so it ended up being a bit of a spiel.
13. Colin Scroggins 4.10.09 / 5pm

    Aza: I work for a company with over 8000 desktops, 90% of which are 4:3 ratio @ 1024×768. Our internal websites are designed at ~950px wide. Changing to this sideview would throw a huge monkeywrench into the default display of our sites, forcing a side scroll. Allowing selection between top and side views would be great, but I personally prefer top view to side anyway. What implication would this have to existing sidebar widgets like the bookmarks sidebar and something like the Delicious plugin?
14. Ian Bicking 4.10.09 / 6pm

    The primary advantage I’d imagine (as a user) would be the feeling of stability in the face of scaling. That is, right now when I open a bunch of tabs the entire tab experience changes radically compared to the experience with a handful of tabs. I can’t find things, the titles are all truncated in a new way, it’s just a terrible mess. In a vertical orientation it should feel just a lot more stable.

    The workspace idea, which I will infer is Exactly What I Am Thinking Of, would be awesome. But since it’s only barely alluded to, maybe we are thinking of different ideas. In a lot of ways tabs and bookmarks are the same idea. Only they are both lame manifestations of some Better Idea Waiting To Be Found.
15. Dylan Hafertepen 4.10.09 / 6pm

    @everyone worried about the sidebar taking up precious webpage real estate on small resolution monitors:

    I image Aza will auto-hide/reveal the tab bar like in Fennec by pushing the content over:
    ttp://vimeo.com/3563474
16. Plume 4.10.09 / 6pm

    In my point of view, work spaces and applications are essential ! Tabs could have some problems with the title of the pages.

    This re-organization of browsing is something important and the experience could be improve thanks to your ideas.

    Nonetheless, when you observe the pointer moving on the screen (in my case, you can globally notice two areas : the top (above the website area), where I move my mouse right to left or left to right (tabs, browser option, windows, OS menu). And the rest where my pointer is moving up to down (scrolling, look over a blog or a website seeking an information quickly, etc). Most of people may don’t have the same global movements of the pointer on their screens as me. But I notice if I have this kind of right or left block with options, this could might disrupt my use.

    So in the case there is only the work spaces and applications, there will be for me a transparent block at the bottom with big icones (no text) in wich you can drag’n'drop. It’s how I see that.

    Sorry for my imperfect english, hope you understand easily. =)
17. Mardeg 4.10.09 / 7pm

    I do wonder if it’s a coincidence that this post comes the day after a Security Now podcast where Steve Gibson raves about how good Tree Style Tabs has been for him in the week since he installed it.
    Another extension that does it is Tab Kit - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5447
18. Boris 4.10.09 / 8pm

    Some things to keep in mind:

    1) On my 1900×1200 monitor, I tend to have my browser windows about half the monitor wide and full-monitor tall so I can view two of them side by side..

    2) If you allow the tab bar to autohide, keep in mind that a horizontal resize is a LOT more expensive than a vertical resize for a web page. For something like HTML5, we’re talking a difference between tens of milliseconds and several seconds.
19. Kurt (supernova_00) 4.10.09 / 8pm

    I think this is a bad idea!

    Yes, a lot of laptop screens are widescreen now a days but with the current design, the one tab or a hundred take up on about pixels. With your mockup, there is about 120 pixels being eaten up. That is a heck of a lot of screen restate when we have a perfectly working tab area now. I see you talk about auto-hiding, which will only create an accessibility nightmare with the sliding in and out.

    I like to see the tab bar at all times for quick switching between tabs all the time. I don’t want to have to keep having my tab bar hiding and then me having to make it reappear.

    And look, gmail doesn’t fit in the screen not to mention most other sites. And the tabs aren’t going to overlay the page and going to shift the page 100 pixels to the left! No one likes scrolling horizontally.
20. Hetdegon 4.10.09 / 8pm

    I personally would prefer the side orientation to be optional, while retaining the apps (in top, they can just be the favicons to save space), workspaces (I find this entirely valuable. If I can do it in my desktop, why not in the browser too, since it holds large amounts of different information?) and autohide…autohide requires resizing the content of a site, to adapt to the new canvas space, that can be slow at worst and bothersome at best, specially if you are reading a long chunk of text (when resizing your current reading position is effectively lost). Interface resizing is unfortunately a non-smooth procedure.
    Also, the top tab bar takes 30-something pixels out from the layout, and while vertical space is more precious, a side bar takes way, way more pixels in horizontal space.
    I use my firefox config in both my desktop computer and “netbook” (an EEE701). Some sites already fail to render right in the smaller one, requiring vertical and horizontal scroll or zooming out. Taking 200 pixels from the horizontal space is a much larger sacrifice than 30 in many circumstances.
    Also, those features can be placed into the regular tab bar with a bit of creative effort, or allowing the regular tab bar to grow if the user wishes so (I’ve tried extensions to get a multi-row tab bar, but all of them look terrible and behave strangely).
    Therefore, I suggest optionality.
    Also, as a cibercafé worker, clients would be totally alienated by a tab sidebar. They are already turned off by the tab concept and avoid using them entirely. Showing a (presumably empty on a first use) large box on a side is going to confuse them further, or even worse, if it just has “start page”, “google search”, “new tab” or similar “known” names, on top, users will believe they have to click there, and since the color is uniform, they will think the whole surface is a button.

    I am sure that between your ideas and user feedback you’ll find the most convenient solution at the end.

    Best regards.
21. pd 4.10.09 / 8pm

    if you make this the default, I will just have to install yet another extension to get Firefox to behave normally and I’ll stop recommending Firefox to anyone. IE8 will actually be more user-friendly because it will have tabs where they should be compared to a Firefox with tabs on the side.
22. Allen Pike 4.11.09 / 12am

    While such a big move would clearly be controversial, this would be a big win for me. I often have 10-20 tabs open at once, and the horizontal layout is really broken for that. Like you say, users often have one or two apps open (GMail, Twitter) and might have a dozen documents open, which are sort of different conceptually. Vertical tabs would be a lot better for scanning, closing, organizing, etc.
23. NGUYỄN-Mạnh Hùng 4.11.09 / 1am

    I wonder why you haven’t thought of integrating Tab Mix Plus functionalities into Firefox. Their way of managing tabs is so good that I still have to stick to Fx 3.0 (they haven’t updated their extension to work properly on Fx 3.5).
24. larffy 4.11.09 / 2am

    I think it will be a looong time before the masses use a 16:9 format.. I have a CRT.. and can’t afford to spend money on a flatscreen. Also I think lots of people already have have stuff stuck in a sidebar so even with a widescreen they view stuff in around a 4:3 format.

    I guess my thought is that if you want stuff on the side.. then remake the sidebar.. Seamonkey used to have several things in the sidebar.. firefox right now only has a simple stripped down sidebar that only has history and bookmarks.

    I guess you could remake the sidebar so it could change shape and size and pop over for things that it notices relevant to where your browsing… though anything on the side right now just seems like its taking up to much space for how often you need to click on it.

    I guess I would prefer to have tabs at the top be able to max out at like 10 a bar.. and then auto create a second bar.. and then make the bars collapse if you are not hovering over them.
25. Karel 4.11.09 / 3am

    Tabs on side might be a good thing for someone, but don’t forget that majority of people skims through horizontal text much quicker than vertical.
26. Mark 4.11.09 / 3am

    Let’s not debate too much. Let’s test it and see how well it goes over. Get some real feedback.
    Then, after we’re done testing it with the technically inclined, we test it with real people.
27. Merike 4.11.09 / 4am

    Concerning autohide, I believe it would be nice if it were layered on top of the page as bookmarks menu currently does when you open it. This way if a webpage has menu on the left side as well, it’ll probably cover it entirely while you choose your tab and redrawing webpage beneath wouldn’t be necessary.
28. Jeffrey 4.11.09 / 5am

    don’t do this please. “Our screens are wider than they are tall; vertical height is the scarce resource.” But tabs on top requires much less space than tops on the side. And remember, many users will have a screen resolution that - if implemented - will require a lot of vertical scrolling.
29. Jeffrey 4.11.09 / 5am

    sorry, horizontal scrolling, of course
30. Rory Marinich 4.11.09 / 8am

    I don’t think that a lot of people reading this really understand the intent of tabs-on-the-side. It’s easy to start complaining about space usage when you think about browsers today, where chrome eatage is the biggest problem. Certainly that’s why I like Safari 4: remove the URL bar and the bookmarks bar and I have literally no chrome in my browser at all.

    That said, the current model just isn’t working. Chrome and Safari 4 both helped things slightly with their new design philosophies, but they still only help for <5 tabs. More than that and there’s significant confusion. The problem is that when the tab bar is a part of the chrome, there’s a significant impulse to make that bar as invisible as possible. One of the reasons I dislike Firefox is that in an attempt to make those tabs stand out, it adds favicons, which makes the design look ugly - colored icons on muted gray? I don’t think so. Even that fails when I have, say, 20 tabs open.

    The other big problem comes from information overload. I don’t think that apps like Instapaper should be necessary to track what I’m reading, even when what I’m reading is more than I can bite off in a single instance. The Internet has become about reading lots and lots of things - in fact, that’s the second biggest priority for it, next to “seeing what pages I’ve got have updated.” The current model just doesn’t work for that.

    Ever since first reading that iA article, this system makes more and more sense to me. We need a change in browser thought. This isn’t a window to a site, where we should blank out everything but the site. (Full screen mode is a necessary, though.) Rather, this is a site manager: it manages URLs like iTunes handles Store downloads. That fixes a lot of problems at once.

    But Aza - I know you like custom interfaces, but on OS X this really needs to stop. I simply can’t use Fx3 on my computer. It has shitty support for multitouch controls, especially two-touch browsing, with no existing fix that I’m aware of. The theme is horrendous. Even grApple doesn’t help as much as it ought to. Your tab sketch above makes it look like you wouldn’t just make Firefox look like every other Mac interface following the HIG, which is insane.* This interface is consistent through iTunes, Mail, iChat, iCal, iPhoto, and most of the better third-party apps, like Coda and the Hit List and Delicious Library. If you flaunt that, you’re not being daring or innovative. You’re thinking like a Windows developer. The Mac standard is that apps look like one another except in the area of their specialty: the things that are web-browsing specific look unique, so that we can tell that window apart, but in terms of “What should the sidebar look like” there is already a standard set, and breaking that look is going to just make me hate the look and feel of Firefox more than I already do.

    You’re a very talented interface designer, but you’ve got flaws in your style, and refusal to conform in places where conformity doesn’t hurt the integrity of your idea is chief among them. I keep hoping you’ll work with the Mac team to develop a more humanistic interface, but so far that hasn’t happened.

    *Not actually insane, but really irritating.
31. Hordur 4.11.09 / 11am

    How about we create a hybrid between a SSB and the current Firefox?

    The location bar should be transformed into a stand-alone Enso/Quicksilver-like application (we are already half-way there with Ubiquity and the Awesomebar). When no internet connection is available, it should still be able to perform certain tasks, like launching other applications. This requires the location bar to be moved out of Firefox (to some extent at least).

    We should group windows in some sensible way in the taskbar/dock. This would be really important for the SSB experience.
32. B.J. Herbison 4.11.09 / 11am

    Many good thoughts in the comments so far, but the one I want to emphasize is “Let’s test it”.

    For my personal experience: Windows allows the task bar to be on any side of the screen. The arguments for the tab bar one the side also apply to the task bar, and this led me to trying the task bar on the side several times. Even though I use large number of windows, the task bar at the bottom works much better for me.

    (Same with the tab bar, that goes on the bottom as well. I have tab focus changing with hovering the mouse, and I don’t want to accidentally change tabs when I move the mouse up to the other browser controls.)
33. Hawken 4.11.09 / 12pm

    Just as long as you give us the option to put them back on the top of the window. I have several applications in my head that I need tabs on the top for, seeing as the left side is already used. I might be able to get used to tabs on the left, will you be making an extension for it? Like the New Tab page.
34. indigo99 4.11.09 / 3pm

    I love the idea. The screen width is rarely enough to hold all my tabs and vertical real estate is too precious to waste.
    I would like to see the list view integrate both the tabs and the bookmark bar. Commonly used pages would always appear as one item wether they are open or not, with some visual indication about the state. Other pages would appear in the list only while they are open. This design is similar to to the dock in mac osx.
35. Kazé 4.11.09 / 5pm

    I think this is the most interesting UI improvement I’ve ever seen for Firefox!

    I like to have horizontal tabs in all the applications I use (e.g. editors, IM/IRC client) because most of the time, I don’t need to see more than 10 tabs; but when working on Vim for instance, if I have to edit more than 10 files I prefer to have a buffer explorer in the sidebar. In other words, stacking tabs vertically makes sense when there are more than 10 tabs to see — like in a web browser.

    I already tried to have more visible tabs in Firefox 3.0.8 by shrinking all tabs (except the current one) to the size of the favicon: http://kazhack.org/?post/2008/12/02/Small-tabs-Firefox-3
    This is very handy on my netbook, and I use it on my 1920*1080 screen as well: most of the time, the favicon is enough. With “Tree Style Tabs” I can have twice as many visible open tabs than with my “small tabs” hack, and all titles are visible, too.

    The auto-hide feature is a must-have on small screens.
    The one implemented in “Tree Style Tabs” is pretty neat because it can shrink the vertical tabbar to show only the favicons — that’s what I’d suggest for this vertical tabbar, too. But it kinda glitches the main page when the tabbar expands/collapse, there’s room for improvement there.

    I can see other advantages to this vertical tabbar:

    * this would be very consistent with the MacOS dock: the “web app” section is the equivalent of the “launchers” section in the MacOS dock, the “tabs” section is comparable to the icon box. That’s the direction where all desktops are going:

     * it brings a very intuitive ways to group some tabs — either by domain or by origin (i.e. all tabs opened from the current page would become children of the current tab).

     * selecting tabs with the mouse wheel is perfectly intuitive: scroll up = previous tab, scroll down = next tab.

    In my opinion, the main (only?) drawback of this vertical layout is that when Firefox starts, there’s a lot of empty space on the left panel. The gray area with Tree Style Tabs looks ugly.
    I’d say Personas would make a lot of sense in this case.
36. David Hammond 4.11.09 / 6pm

    I’m probably repeating some points mentioned above, but here are my thoughts:

    * One of the problems with auto-hide is that it will require a page reflow for every frame of the hide/reveal animation. This differs from the similar animation in the yellow notification bar because that never causes webpage elements to change size or arrangement; it just pushes them downward, so no reflow is needed (AFAIK). A sidebar auto-hide feature would have an expensive performance penalty, especially for large or complex pages.

    * If we’re talking about monitors with 4:3 aspect ratios, the *width* is arguably the scarce resource, even though it’s technically larger than the height. While people are used to scrolling vertically, there’s an expectation that the page content can always fit in the browser width as long as the window is at a reasonable size. Add the fact that many sites have sidebars of their own, and width is suddenly a very precious commodity. I don’t think tabs-on-the-side should even be considered as the default mode without an auto-hide mechanism.

    * If we do have an auto-hide mechanism, then we run into the classic annoyances with auto-hide UI mechanisms in general. The sidebar will often appear when the user doesn’t want it to, and it will often fail to appear quickly when the user wants it. It also means that the user now must perform 3 mouse actions instead of 2 to get to a desired tab: move the mouse to the far left side of the window to reveal the tab bar, move the mouse to the tab, and click. When people need to switch tabs quickly, this is a significant new burden.
37. rektide 4.11.09 / 8pm

    Ahhh the long awaited topic of tabs and information spaces. Opera pioneered the notion of the web browser being a browser of information spaces by introducing tabs, and they still maintain a sizable lead in how they let people manage large information spaces.

    The Opera side panel has a “Windows” view, which lists all tabs open in all windows and features a search as well. I frequently have over 300 tabs open at once, and because of the vertical layout of the Window panel, its easy for me to grok the extremely large information space. With horizontal tabs, my view is overly limited, particularly as I have no cross-window perspective. The Window panel also provides management capabilities, letting users drag and drop tab between different windows or reordering within the window. This is essential to creating the “tasklets” you talk about; focused interest groups of tabs; giving users a large horizon of all their work, and a single interface to manage that information space with.

    I was a long advocate of a window serving as container for an information space. I found myself wanting a way to keep this isolated unit across sessions, and frequently and ardently petitioned Opera to include a way of saving off one window. http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=161741

    Opera has finally relented, and now, whenever looking up reference information, Opera is my first and only choice of browsers: it allows me to create a well designed information space, and to save it off into a Session independently of any other tabs/windows I have open. Whenever I want that information space open again, I can just import that particular container.

    Lastly, you talked about adding additional “easy access” Application-routines into a side panel: it makes sense, but I personally find a UI unnecessary, overcomplex, and wasteful of space. In much the same vein as Ubiquity, Opera allows me to just type in what I want to do. At any point, I can open a new tab, control-l to the address bar, and start typing what I want to do: “d selenium” to search del.icio.us for selenium entries, or I can type “g ubiquity” to search google for ubiquity. Yes, many users may not adapt to these kind of routines, so for them having the Applications assistance in the side bar may be helpful, but for me it would be a waste of space. If there isnt direct keyboard access to helper applications, if the keyboard access isnt homogenized so that a user can add a new helper and use the same access patterns they’ve used in the past, its likely to slow down navigation more than to help it.
38. David McRitchie 4.11.09 / 9pm

    I would not tolerate wasting space and I can’t see how anybody would tolerate that without any gain, unless they don’t know about the tab drop-down. If that is the case teach people to use the features, not put in your face junk that destroys good usage. The space is too small on your modification to really see the complete names of the tabs anyway if that is the purpose.

    What is needed is to put vertical scrollbars on menus and on the tabs dropdown, that are visible when the drop-down won’t fit. I can see 31 tabs on the tabs drop-down without scrolling on my laptop 1280w x 800h, if I have more I’m perfectly will to scroll with real scrollbars. I generally keep the browser window at about 880 wide.

    Seems everybody thinks my screen real estate is their property and will usurp it any chance they get.

    Seems everytime something is done, we have to figure out how to undo it. So these are the things I fix immediately for tabs.
    1) fix tabs so they can squeeze down to less than the width of the favicon. With the width of window a bit below 800px, I can see the favicons of 60 tabs and 2 completely unwanted horizontal tab scrollbars. I could double the number of tabs and still recognize icons. And there is the
    drop down if I really need to know. Unfortunately something not Firefox itself destroyed the tab tooltip for single tab display.
    2) make the tabs bar and other toolbars much shorter in height, my tabs bar is 56% of the height as distributed, and I see a lot more on it (see web page).

    The tab drop-down without any modifications expands to 500px width if necessary, you won’t fit that on the side. It is only shown when I want to see it and it is scrollable.

    Here’s the nonsense that has been put out, into Betas and much of it into production as well. DO NOT WANT ANY OF THESE.
    1) rigid tab widths that only allow 5 tabs to be seen at a time.
    2) removal of the tab drop-down.
    3) screen images on blank pages (about:blank), nice to bring up when wanted but certainly not for an empty page, or new tab.
    4) screen images on tabs, instead of titles for tooltips.
    5) pictures on cursor when trying to drag a link to a bookmark or to a tab, annoying time wasting, and can’t see where to drop.
    6) space wasting and bad placement of new tab button on the tabs bar, as opposed to where we wanted to place it ourselves NOT on the tabs bar.
    7) horizontal tab scrollers on the tabs bar
    8) Firefox recent changes have broken the stylish extensions that did provide vertical scrollbars. Styles 52, 54, and 56 causing menu images to be become ghosted onto the window afterwards.
39. ChrisJF 4.11.09 / 10pm

    AZA YOU ARE WHAT’S WRONG WITH FIREFOX! ALL OF FIREFOX’S PROBLEMS, YOU HAVE CREATED! THE WORLD IS ENDING… AND ITS YOUR FAULT AZA! TABS ON THE SIDE IS A BAD, BAD IDEA BECAUSE YOU ARE A BAD, BAD MAN. FOLLOW THE APPLE HUMAN INTERFACE GUIDELINES OR PERISH IN THE FIRES OF WINDOWS!

    Lol. Ok sorry, had to get that out of my system. Honestly Aza, I feel bad for you because you are basically getting blamed for everything wrong with Firefox. Take heart. Changing minds takes time.

    As for all the commenters here, I would like to gently remind you that this is JUST an idea. That’s it. There’s no guarantee that this will ever be implemented. The purpose of this discussion is not to spew negative comments but to brainstorm together.

    Anyways…

    I too have to say I am a fan of tabs on the right. It is my opinion that the browser chrome should be second and the content should be the primary focus (that is because we english speakers read from left to right).

    “Are there other, better groupings?”
    Good q. I think someone already mentioned group by the originating tab. For example, I open a lot of tabs from Google Reader.
    Another grouping pattern would be based on frequency, that is, the websites you use the most would bubble up to the top. I think I’m partial to this design as it would employ my spacial memory by keeping (most) websites in a constant position/ordering (after a period of learning my most frequent sites).

    Workspaces.
    This feature needs to be elaborated on. I can definately make use of this but I can also see some inter-workspace tab mangement problems. Currently, I make workspaces using the Tree Style Tab extension. I put all websites relating to a certain task in one tree and then collapse the tree. This design means that all tabs are on the same plane and none are treated as second-class. This equality should be preserved.

    “Would it work to only show the left-most 50 pixels until mouse-over?”
    Hmm. Autohiding is something I’m very skeptical about. It makes me feel unsure of things and where they are. Right now, I’m going to say no, it would not work to only show 50px until mouse-over. Shifting the content back and forth when opening and closing the history sidebar makes me dizzy. Maybe overlaying is an option? Usability Testing is really needed here.

    “How do you use the web, and what kind of features would you like to see on the side?”
    I did a quick little comparison with your proposed tab sidebar and my Mac OS dock. One thing that hasn’t been addressed are my documents that are accessed frequently. Yes, applications are given some respect in your mockup but what about docs? I find that I access the same 5 documents almost everyday. For example, my class schedule on Google Docs. I wouldn’t say this is an application per say but maybe ‘a document’ is an outdated metaphore?

    @Mike Beltzner
    “a lot of tabs have the same prefix in the title (ie: Slashdot, in the mockup above) which aren’t necessary, and hide the actual differentiation of the title”
    Simple example of a fix: Slashdot | NASA…Canada
    Where the full page title is: Slashdot | NASA’s Zero-Gravity Robotic-Arm Partnership With Canada

    “let’s think about how we can provide users with better control to browse and pivot through their tabs”
    ZUIs!

    And I think I need to end this comment before it becomes an essay. Good night.
40. Gordon P. Hemsley 4.12.09 / 3am

    Yes, yes, yes, and more yes!

    I haven’t read the comments, but every section of the post seems to apply directly to me. I current have 113 tabs open in this window: the first 25 or so are always open, and the rest are related to one task or another—and I have no idea where each tab is related to a certain task.

    It could be great if I could group all of these things together, but separately. And it would certainly be much better if I didn’t have to scroll horizontally for years in order to reach what I wanted. And seeing as how I always turn off the Bookmarks toolbar to save space (because I don’t use it), it would be great if the tab bar could do that, too. Just don’t make it too wide. I like my horizontal screen space, too.
41. Simon 4.12.09 / 6am

    I can see the rationale, but I think it’s wrong, for reasons others have also given. True, the current setup doesn’t really handle large numbers of tabs, but I don’t think that’s a problem - it scales to a dozen or so, and that’s already more open documents than I can easily keep track of.

    I also dispute the assertion that vertical space is the scarce resource. Yes, some of us have big 24″ screens, myself included. But I have a screen like that because I want to fit things on it - to keep an eye on several things at once. I’d be quite unhappy if Firefox started getting greedy, expecting all that screen space for it’s own use.

    Also note that although screens are wider than they are high, vertical scrolling is much more acceptable than horizontal. On a small screen (e.g a netbook at 1024×600), your mockup looks like it would lose almost a third of the horizontal space, almost certainly forcing horizontal scrolling or otherwise breaking the layout of pages.
42. Dan Burzo 4.13.09 / 5am

    Hi Aza,

    Here are some thoughts on your idea:
    * It provides visual relief for when you have several open tabs, because it’s easier to scan thanks to the alignment: the favicons and the titles create a grid that’s more pleasing than a horizontal alignment of favicons + truncated titles.
    * Some argued that the tab dropdown is more efficient, but for some reason I haven’t gotten myself to use it. Is it the additional click to make it visible? I don’t know.
    * The vertical alignment provides little friction. When I switch between tabs, they are closer to each other than in the horizontal layout, where I have to cross the distance of the whole title to get to the next tab.
    * I’ve always found it redundant to have the title of the page in two places (the tab and the window title); that’s where I think Google Chrome found a lovely solution.
    * Should the page title be visually adjacent to the page content? In your sketch, what’s the implication of placing the page title _under_ the navigation controls and the URL bar?
    * One quick note: I keep my bookmark toolbar stripped down to the favicons only, because the icon is sufficient to identify websites that I use frequently.

    That being said, I believe that web-browsing should be immersive and browser chrome should be kept to the essentials. Let’s avoid information overload and not encourage unhealthy levels of multitasking. How can we enhance attention span while browsing?
43. Eugenia 4.13.09 / 6am

    Hi Aza! I’m a Mozilla Design Challenge participant and I have been in your session (great session, by the way) “Interaction Seduction”. I have also made a presentation about my prototype, and its design looks VERY similar than this idea :-) It doesn’t work with tabs, but It does with opened windows.
    It would be great to have some feedback from you (if it is possible, of course)
    This is my presentation: http://www.eugeniaortiz.com.ar/extra/presentation/presentation.html

    Best Regards!!!.-
44. Albert 4.13.09 / 6am

    Hi,

    have the Tabs on the left side is the prefered usage for me on wide-screen monitors.

    But the killer-feature of the Tree-Style-Tab Extension is to organize your Tabs as a Tree.

    Its not unusual for me to have 60+ Tabs opened. So its essentialy to open new tabs right after my current tab. But much nicer is to have the opened tab as child of the current tab. I love it.

    So for me, it would be really nice to take Tabs on the left with tree-style-blend to the mainstream. :)
45. Matthew McManus 4.13.09 / 10am

    Aza, I LOVE THIS IDEA. I’m a web developer and I have a browser open 100% of the time. I would love the workspaces and the groups.
46. Scott Newson 4.13.09 / 12pm

    I just started experimenting with the ‘Tree Style Tabs’ and the ‘Informational Tab’ extensions. I really like having the collapsible tree on the left hand side of my screen.

    I’m always very uncomfortable with autohiding anything. The movement on the periphery of my vision is always a distractor.

    I’d definitely use a way to bookmark or save an entire tree of tabs as a single item. With the ‘Tree Style Tabs’ extention it is currently possible to save a tree of tabs as a folder of bookmarks, but this loses the relational organisation of the tabs so when I ‘open all’ on the folder of tabs, it just opens them all up as distinct tabs, not as a tree of tabs.

    I’m currently working on a pair of 1280×1024 17inch monitors. A single firefox window is open and maximized to fill one of the monitors. I’ll also occasionally open multiple windows so that I can have useful tabs (like gmail) constantly open on a second screen.

    Thanks for all the work and thought you are putting into such questions! I really like to work on public (school, library…) computers, which means that I can’t mod out most of my working environments and so I really appreciate sane and helpful defaults.
47. MarkC 4.14.09 / 5am

    I like the idea, but would like to see an option to put the tabs sidebar on the right-hand side of the screen, for several reasons:

    1) I read from left-to-right, so text-heavy pages without a left sidebar would still begin at the left of the page, which I suspect makes them a little easier to read than if your eyes have to skip past the tabs first

    2) My scroll bar is on the right, and text content tends to be left-aligned leaving a gutter on the right. For both these reasons my mouse pointer tends to already hang around on the right of the screen.

    3) Tabs on the right wouldn’t interfere with any of the left-hand sidebars that people might also want to have visible.

    Of course tabs on the right interferes with the auto-hide functionality, as it’s liable to be triggered when going for the scroll bar. When I have plenty of horizontal space on a screen I would favour a fixed width tab sidebar on the right, but if horizontal space is an issue I would prefer either tabs on top, or a click-to-reveal mechanism for the sidebar.
48. Jonathan 4.14.09 / 10am

    I think this would be a fantastic feature, especially the grouping and workspace ideas. I switched to Tree Style Tabs a few months ago and I’m convinced I’d be unable to go back to a horizontal tab bar. I would love to see this idea pursued.
49. Alejandro Moreno 4.14.09 / 11am

    I think it’s a great idea. With a huge widescreen monitor it doesn’t really matter, since the browser window can be resized to fit your preference. But it would be fantastic for mini-laptops.

    I think most of them are 1024×600 widescreen, and there’s always a scramble to shave off a few more vertical pixels.

    I have an add-on that reduces the whole menu bar toi a single button, and placed that button on the bookmarks bar (I’ve thought of hiding the bookmarks toolbar as well, but it might be more trouble that it’s worth). I’ve also installed the autoHideStatusBar add-on. If the Tabs could be moved to the side that would be approximately 180 pixels gained!
50. sethb 4.14.09 / 12pm

    tabs on the side? why not tabs wherever you want them?

    “Tabs: top, bottom, left side or right? drag ‘em, drop ‘em, put them where you want ‘em.”
51. Tyler Downer 4.14.09 / 5pm

    Why side? I read best in an uninterrupted left-to-right, and like having everything that way. Vertically arranged text is not best for readers of horizontal languages. It makes it harder to rapidly read through all open tabs.
52. Gabriela 4.14.09 / 6pm

    I personally prefer to keep my browser windows significantly taller than wide. I don’t want them filling up all my screen space. Tabs on top are easily preferable to eating up a big chunk of horizontal space, as I work on a 15″ monitor.
    I use the TooManyTabs extension. It saves LOTS of RAM it’s very easy to use and you can add any number of rows and you can name each one as you like so as to keep a work row, an entertainment row, a Firefox news row, etc.
53. Tyler 4.14.09 / 10pm

    I agree that the positive aspects of a side tab bar could benefit the browser, so I gave the tab tree addon a try to see what it is like to manage tabs in a sidebar. I think the biggest problem with this method, however, is that it makes the program’s interface too prominent by consuming screen real estate. While our monitors do have more wide screen space, I believe it is because humans have a wider field of vision and feel comfortable with more horizontal content than vertical. If Firefox has a tab sidebar, it should definitely be easy to hide or scale back as you suggested. Perhaps it would also be possible to focus on integrating tabs better as they currently exist at the top of the window. I think it might be possible to group tabs together in the existing tab bar by making tab clusters, which would partially hide tabs behind the tab of the page that they stemmed from, and the cluster could expand to become fully visible upon a mouse over. The tabs could either expand into the tab bar using horizontal space, or expand downward from the origin tab to use vertical space, forming a sort of drop down view of the tabs in a cluster. The latter option would be similar to the expansion of tabs that occurs when you click on an icon in the taskbar in Windows 7, but it could partially show the tabs in the cluster at all times, rather than the hidden nature in Windows.
54. Mitchell 4.15.09 / 1am

    I think tabs on the side is a great idea - I typically have 40-60 tabs open at once, and this is much less painful with tabs on the side than on the top.

    Tree Style Tab is great, but it doesn’t always work perfectly. First-class support for tabs on the side would be great.
55. Mikeyott 4.15.09 / 2am

    How about instead of committing to one or the other, you give the user both options?
56. Ed 4.15.09 / 5am

    I argee with what most people said here. Side Tab Dont work for 4:3 screen, but i think autohide solve that.

    4 Years ago if you asked me i would have thought it is a crazy idea. However it seems website are really designed like newspaper. They show information vertically rather then horizontal. There are lots of website that shows more information horizontally if you scale up resolution.

    And to me moving mouse from side to side is easier then Top to bottom.

    Since the search bar and navigation bar will be merged together. You have a lot of space left on the navigation toolbar.
    I could imagine Mail, RSS and Newsgroup are properly integrated into the browser. With 4 buttons in the navigation toolbar; Browsers, Mail, RSS, Newsgroup
    Pressing each shows their respective Side Bar Information.
    For example Mail will have inbox, outbox, trash… etc…..
57. Carol 4.15.09 / 8am

    If we have the ability to move the side tabs to the right hand side. It seems cumbersome to move over to the left constantly.
    I like the grouping idea.
58. Tony 4.15.09 / 8am

    I think I might like vertical tabs, but this should be a preference setting. You already have horizontal tabs worked out. Why not add vertical tabs and let the user decide which arrangement they prefer?
59. Cara 4.15.09 / 10am

    I think you should be able to change your settings such that you can choose the configuration that you want, horizontal or vertical, if you’re going to implement this new change. Personally, I prefer the horizontal tabs, and would probably consider switching browsers if I was forced into vertical tabs.
60. Brian 4.15.09 / 10am

    What about Browse Path Trees or branched browsing? I often use tabs to take different browsing paths on a single site or to temporarily leave a site I plan to return to shortly. Maybe if these paths could be organized in a more convenient “tree” structure..?
61. Mook 4.15.09 / 11am

    (I’ve been using Tree Style Tab for a while already, and my usage tends to be maximized on screens that are 1280×768 / 1600×1200, on Windows, just so you know where I come from. Oh, and mouse with only vertical scroll wheel, no horizontal)

    Tabs on the side works great for me because 1) I have the window size to handle it, and 2) I already open more tabs than usable in the tab strip (routinely >20). I would not use it on the 1024×768 screen next to me. For the most part, 1280 is wide enough to have tabs on the side for the sites I visit to not need horizontal scrolling; the only exception I’ve seen recently was the mozilla.org redesign mockups.

    On workspaces: I have them; they’re called multiple browser windows. Of course, I only open a new one when the current one has too many tabs, and tend to forget about them after a while. I am also odd in not using many web apps (I have an extension to take care of gmail, and I don’t use songza/twitter/whatever). Things that I want to persist gets to be saved via session restore; I have about 10 tabs that have lasted almost a week so far.

    Autohide: Maybe, if it isn’t jarring the way Tree Style Tabs does it. Perhaps a xul:panel instead of actually resizing a box?

    Overall, though, your mockup looks way more complicated than the extension. This complexity seems to exist in some other mockups as well (e.g. taskfox); please, remember that Firefox succeeded where Seamonkey didn’t _because_ it was uncluttered. Using Ubiquity is great because you didn’t have to learn the whole Firefox interface at the same time; don’t bring the overwhelming experience into the app like that.
62. David 4.15.09 / 11am

    Do it as an extension, not for the default browser. It’s not very ergonomic on the side.
63. Tristan Young 4.15.09 / 11am

    I am absolutely not interested in side-tabs. They would get in my way.

    My typical configuration is:
    - bookmarks toolbar: no
    - bookmarks sidebar: yes
    - googlebar toolbar: yes
    - AIOS extension: yes
    - tabs: above page render space
    - single window mode: yes

    My current layout allows me to quickly traverse my hundreds of bookmarks, and perform rapid tab management functions.

    Occasionally I access the history via the sidebar, but other than that, nothing else opens up in the sidebar. My bookmarks are always within reach.

    If there were sidebar tabs, I’d never use them, because they’d get in the way of my bookmarks. There’s no way I’d sacrifice horizontal space to show both bookmarks and tabs, nor would I be willing to click “Yet-Another-Icon”(TM) in order to toggle between one or the other.

    Vertical and horizontal space is equally important. I am not a big fan of scrolling whatsoever. It’s distracting. The majority of websites I visit don’t have horizontal scroll problems. Way too many seem to scroll vertically forever.

    That being said, having the tabs at the top doesn’t really affect vertical scrolling, because most pages render longer than the vertical space taken up by the top tabs.
    Loosing the top tabs would have an extremely marginal change in how annoying the web has become.

    Keeping in mind how monitors have increased overall in size, and more-so horizontally, the way I utilize the screen will not change. I prefer efficiency and consistency across all my computers and the various screen sizes. My clients prefer this too, as they are more productive.

    Don’t force side-tabs on us, or bloat Firefox. It should be an extension.

    It would be more useful to “finish” the current tab system in Firefox - integrate *some* features from tabmixplus. If it wasn’t for TabmixPlus, I’d be just as unhappy with Firefox as I am with IE, page rendering accuracy and security aside.

    Go Firefox Go!
64. Juan Ángel 4.15.09 / 12pm

    I felt really disappointed when I saw that it wasn’t real (yet) xD. This is a very good idea: browsers are the new desktops, and webapps has to be more easy-access. Maybe you can adapt this to an add-on with an auto-refresh option, for example.

    And for people who don’t like a vertical bar, maybe you can adapt it to horizontal orientation, isn’t true?

    Definetly, this project is very good-looking! Cheers!
65. Fred bloggs 4.15.09 / 2pm

    Why not have iPhone style apps in the sidebar to access your favourite websites?
66. Bram 4.15.09 / 2pm

    Why not enable the user to choose between having tabs on top or on the side?
67. chuck 4.15.09 / 4pm

    aza, tabs on the side is total rubbish and i’m telling you why:

    1) moving the mouse (read: hand) from left to right (and vice-versa) is much easier and convenient than moving a mouse forward and backward. that’s why the mouse wheel was invented, after all!

    2) it’s much easier to adapt top-tabs to left-hand users and right-to-left readers than if the tabs were on the side.

    period. it’s really a matter of logic thinking.
68. chuck 4.15.09 / 4pm

    besides, your sketch suggests that google is having way too much influence on your thinking, aza. note that not everything google does, makes sense. in fact, a lot of stuff they do is plain rubbish. however, the more people expect that everything out of google labs is the work of super brains, the more it will be praised, even if it actually is and stays rubbish. read “predictably irrational” for more information on the topic.

    ego-centered design: smells sweet but tastes horrible. the web is way too ego-centered and algorithmic already. i’m really not interested in even more ego on the web. i don’t need a butler, i need more diversity. i don’t want any googletastic super-algorithmic ubermensch to preselect the news i see or the friends i might want to add to my hyper-intelligent facebook profile.

    autohide: one of the worst ui design “ideas” that ever came across humanity. it’s a very unintuitive thing. if things aren’t here, why are they popping up out of nowhere all of a sudden? and why the frigg are they disappearing again after a second? makes no sense and worsens the overall user experience as clicking on things that aren’t fully visible is difficult, time-consuming and dangerous.
69. Chris 4.15.09 / 4pm

    I thought I would hate having the tabs on the side, but I’ve been using the tree tabs all day and I’ve got to say that I love them. Especially the grouping.
70. Vladimir 4.16.09 / 12am

    My opinion on this concept - it’s great. Precisely, it would be great if… if the concept of applications will make one step forward:

    Now I have a gmail tab and a “gmail notifier” icon in statusbar. A don’t want to keep them both. An item in a sidebar with the application “GMail” should also show me an information about unread messages. THAT would be great. The same for google reader and many others, I guess.

    And do you agree, that workspaces should be saved like sessions to prevent loosing the context on notebook shutdown or smth else? I hope yes. But I wish to add something. May be it would be useful to save them in a “shared manner”, like we save our bookmarks over delicious or xmarks? So, on coming home it would be possible to open my “social” session, opened all over the day at work.
71. Francisco 4.16.09 / 6am

    Hi Aza,

    two quick ideas for improve the tabs:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/ftosete/3447474476/
72. Will 4.16.09 / 1pm

    I can see how many people will find this advantageous, but suffice it to say I think it would be a mistake to not make it optional.
73. Tyler 4.16.09 / 2pm

    I mentioned in an earlier post that I think the horizontal-bar style could be improved further by grouping tabs based on what site they stemmed from. I made a mock-up (actually using a screen shot of Chrome because I thought it was easier to make it work with their tab style for now) that shows how tabs could be grouped together and also made more compact to manage the groups and conserve space on the bar.

    Here it is:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/29079374@N07/3447479333/sizes/o/

    I haven’t thought out exactly how it would work right now, but I think maybe some of the ideas could improve the tab situation.
74. Gerv 4.16.09 / 2pm

    Would this be a great way to integrate application-style sites? If you dragged them into the “Applications” section, you’d get special semantics. E.g. the browser would make sure you only had one copy of the site running, and they’d always be present there - like a combo of bookmarks and tabs - and they might even get special privileges and so on.
75. tech dodo 4.17.09 / 12am

    i love the ‘grouped tabs’ idea. it would be a great to have something to click on, and automatically group tabs that come from similar site sthing.
76. PETITJEAN 4.18.09 / 4am

    Je suis contre, car certaines personnes ayant des problèmes de vue fond ” control/ molette ” pour agrandir la police.
    Ce qui compte c’est la largeur vu que la molette et si simple à descendre la page.
77. daphna 4.18.09 / 5am

    Cool Idea - but please - if your going that way, make sure one can move the tab menu to the right and also a top or bottom and a popup option (like the web devloper extension of firefox).

    not everybody “eats” info from left to right - only latin language countries do….and for eastern users this left navigation system isn’t necessarily natural.

    good luck :)
78. jim 4.19.09 / 5am

    I use tabmixplus but would like to see Firefox have the native ability (even just to keep up with opera lol) to allow tabs to wrap to multiple lines. It’s nice to have at least such basic choices over your UI. Just a simple choice over whether multiple tabs can wrap to multiple bars or stay within one OR display in the side window instead (say with options between a treeview or just a button list). It would just be nice not to have to rely on extensions for basic viewing needs that change depending on screen size/shape and whether you are often a million tabs a session browser or never have more than a few tabs or windows open at once. Lot more million tabs and windows at once people these days with all the million different kinds of things people can view and play online now. Also why google’s idea over cleaner tab memory managment and crash resistance is so needed. Their browser isn’t quite finished but it’s they did a great job of puting out a ‘clean’ ‘useable’ product (them and k-meleon miss the multi line or side tab options, I guess in favor of just “detaching” a tab and going with a new window maybe full of other tabs. but only chrome has the nice feature to kill something individual that is misbehaving without killing all your other windows).
79. cantubury norton 4.19.09 / 1pm

    Everything in the multiverse, even branes, are egg,mobius-stip shaped. I would prefer a spiral for tabs. human eye seeks horizon, but metaphysically, and computers emulate higher levels (Plato: “as above so below” we need to think on more of an ancient traditional singularity. a conceptual artist. all of the suggestions I read are brilliant and creative. This is just a stab at “making the familiar strange; and the strange familiar” hopefully it will span some expansive spiritual visions.
80. AlexT 4.20.09 / 6am

    - Tabs on the side, especially in the manner in which you have done (much better implementation than Tree Style Tabs, which I use and enjoy, as I open hundreds of tabs at times).
    - Also, I noticed that all the ‘everyday’ applications I run on my computer, aside from system tools, I could find a counterpart in my browser– even for audio and video, provided it’s already on a server. Perhaps clever use of HTML5 and Gears or similar could fill that need. Of course, your Songza is one example of a good way to replace that.
    - As such, I believe that desktop computing as we know it is soon bound to be relinquished to the browser. All that keeps this from happening is the interface, and a few technicalities such as JavaScript and Flash speed on lower spec systems.
    - Once this all comes together, existing applications can be used on an Eee without anything else substantial being installed on the computer.
    - Keep up the good work, bud! Hope to see some of these things realized soon, these are the sort of things that drive things forward.
81. AjiK 4.20.09 / 7am

    This is one the must have add-on for me. It is especially useul if you a widescreen display and have lots of tabs open at any given point of time. Would be a great addition to core FF.
82. Andras Szalai 4.21.09 / 2pm

    Good idea.
    Some older thoughts of mine about disposable tabs can be read here:
    http://szalaiandras.com/b/make-every-tab-disposable/
83. Lythande BlueStar 4.21.09 / 11pm

    I dislike things on the side, and would prefer to keep tabs on top. Currently I’m using Tab Kit, and use rows of tabs at the top. It also provides grouping, What I _would_ like to see is a way of moving/joining groups of tabs between windows (as per Tab to Window).
84. Stephen Preston 4.22.09 / 11am

    I was thinking about ways to group tabs in space-efficient manner and came up with this.

    http://i204.photobucket.com/albums/bb274/steppres/Untitled.png

    The rightmost button on the tab bar opens a new tab group. When switching groups, the active tab group is minimized, but maintains its position relative to each other group on the tabbar. When minimized, the tab group displays the favicon of the last active tab in the group, as well as a visual indicator for other tabs in the group. Tab groups can be arranged by dragging and dropping them, or saved/closed by right clicking to bring up the context menu. The linked picture shows the same set of tabs, but with 2 different groups activated.
85. Mandy 4.22.09 / 2pm

    Before, 1 year ago, I would have said:
    “NO. DON’T DO IT. I WILL HATE FIREFOX FOREVER, IF YOU STUFF UP MY TABS”.

    But, since, I used “Tab Kit” I was converted. Had Tab Kit for a few months before I dared to try side tabs. I was only switching to side tabs temporarily, because I was trying to set up a way to navigate between tabs as fast as possible (for this one thing I was doing… ).

    Anyway, if it weren’t for need to switch between pages in a split second, and trying to set up Firefox to allow me to do that, I would still have been completely ignorant about Side Tabs.

    Let’s take a few examples -
    a grocery list,
    a to do list,
    a movie list,
    a tab list

    or
    a grocery list, a to do list, a movie list, a tab list

    Most lists are made vertically. Especially a list you want to give equal emphasis to each item. What I mean by that is, they all start at the same point. All you have to do is scan up/down. Horizontal, you need to work harder to distinguish wording of the next new item from the previous.

    Reading a book is not the same, because you want the words to flow. As they are all relevant/ connected to each other. But tabs need to be treated differently, they need to be made easier to scan as individuals.

    Vertically to pinpoint a tab, it becomes much quicker.
    Tabs are closer as someone pointed out.

    You are only scanning 1px or w/e, and you see the next title.

    I’m pretty sure this is why I have found working with vertical tabs so bloody amazing. It’s feels so much more natural, easier to scan a vertical list then it is a horizontal one.

    Whatever the reason… I have to say now,

    DO IT! JUST DO IT!

    Trust me, I would have kicked and screamed. Like you’ll find most everyone, who have only ever known horizontal tabs, will. But once they give it a go (proper one), they will get it.

    BUT until then, I am more then HAPPY with TAB KIT.

    Why don’t you work with the person/s who made that, because it really is quite polished as it is.

    Also, I opened IE the other day, and realized they now have TAB GROUPING! I WAS SHOCKED!!! I couldn’t believe it. What IE have grouping, firefox doesn’t???!
    They even have colors to identify different groups.

    As I understand it now, firefox were the inventors of the fabulous “TABS”… but what about, keeping that track record and making the big changes that matter before other browsers beat you to it!
    - TAB GROUPING. - long overdue - IE beat you to it.
    - SIDE TREE TABS - really believe (for those who use more then 5 tabs lol) this is how they should have always been

    LIKE THE IDEA OF GROUPING TABS. Check out “TABGROUP MANAGER” This should give you some inspiration.

    Or maybe a way similar to Windows7 taskbar, where you see the icons, of running tab groups, click on one to get all the tabs in that group. Maybe they could be bookmark folders… BECAUSE like someone said, bookmarks could be revamped. you click one group icon it opens all tabs in that group from when you last looked at it, and when you close the group they only close with what tabs you have left… If there aren’t any left, it still keeps the icon ready for the next time you want to use that group. unless you completely remove it.
    BUT you still have your permanent bookmarks as well. These are just for the flowing bookmarks. lol I am too tired to explain as you can tell I am rambling.
86. Mandy 4.22.09 / 3pm

    Stephen Preston (post above) that looks awesome. It looks really snazzy.

    I just think that the Group Icons need to be on their own bar.

    And we should have permanent groups (pinned say, like win7). So even when empty, the group is there, ready to be used when the user clicks on it. (In a way this could work well for merging bookmarks with groups ie. no longer need to “bookmark all tabs”, as you will have it behind an icon, and they will always be relevant, edited in real time, no need to re-save, delete old ones)

    Also the groups could have ‘pinned’ tabs. So you could pin a tab/s you always want in that group. And it won’t be closed accidentally.

    Rather then having the icon for the groups drawn from the last tab, I think it should be a specific icon pre-selected by the user. Something that will be relevant to the group.
    Because you could have any tabs open, with any random icon, that really don’t identify to the user what that group is about.

    eg. A “reference” group, would be better off with a permanent book icon, then a ‘dog’ icon some random site brought up. But this could be a user specific type thing. Maybe once a user selects a current icon to become permanent, they stop changing.

    Also, a folder with a list of group titles, icons, that can be used to open a new group automatically named. Eg “work”, “shopping” with a relevant icon.
87. Grehg 4.22.09 / 4pm

    No matter what size my resolution is I don’t like static columns in my browser. I want the full width real estate to be available for the site I am browsing. This becomes more of an issue for people with lower resolutions. Currently the standard optimized width for websites is 1024 wide, with the introduction of the sidebar.. this will cause people at that rez to have to scroll right to see the whole page, which is not good at all! Also a sidebar will introduce “eye path” issues for users browsing sites. The typical left column navigation for a website will now have to compete with this column. Overall a very cluttered solution with side effects. I think the Mozilla team needs to go back to the drawing board. I personally like what Safari and Chrome have done by moving the tabs to the window title bar. This buys even more vertical real estate.
88. Ivanonymous 4.28.09 / 4pm

    A slightly off-topic suggestion: A tab-sidebar could also offer space for a drag and drop clipboard. Combined with support for dropping things within pages, this is another approach (like taskfox) to integrating discrete sites.

    So to email a photo I’ve found, I drag it to the sidebar, switch to my mail, and drag it over. Less elegant and efficient than ubiquity/taskfox, but maybe more intuitive and tactile? Certainly better than downloading from one page and reuploading from the other.
89. Thom 5.1.09 / 2am

    To those complaining about the “waste” of horizontal real-estate: I say good. Screens are going wider, and that’s great for multimedia, but not so much for reading/scanning/what people tend to do on the web.

    People have trouble seeking to new lines after about 80 characters–regardless of font size. Many web designers seem to forget this in their desire to have fluid-width layouts (oooooh!) and make their main body content 1800 pixels wide. It might seem like a waste of space, but I’m willing to bet you would actually find many sites easier to read–and the remainder of sites are probably running fixed-width pages anyhow. (I design too, and many people seem surprised that I use max-width right alongside min-width.)

    Another concept this design would take advantage of is the F-pattern–the way people tend to scan content at a glance. (”F” as in, they read the header and first one or two lines of body text, and just scan the leftmost inch of content afterwards.) People are used to scanning content down the left-hand side, so if they manage their tabs this way, I would imagine it comes more naturally. (Isn’t it easier to jump from place to place in Finder than it is to skip through lots of tabs?)

    And negative space = good stuff. having some padding and indentation to work with on our browser organization would probably be a big plus, and would certainly keep things cluttered.

    I have some thoughts about how this iteration could be improved upon, but I think I’ll draft up some mockups to better explain things. I’m definitely interested in this approach, though.
90. Thom 5.2.09 / 2pm

    Cool… I put my own take on this on my blog. I hope you take a look:

    http://digg.com/u12GWx
91. jujika 5.4.09 / 5pm

    … need a plug in the dynamically switche between top-tabs and side tabs depending on which of my monitors the majority of the firefox window currently resides in (the old one or the widescreen)
92. Tahir Akram 5.6.09 / 1pm

    Firefox adons will not let it die against Chrome, Safari and the kid IE.
93. Günter (neandr) 5.6.09 / 5pm

    I like Thom’s idea (see link) and the mookup he posted.
    From my POV combining the Tabs with the ‘Sidebar’ is good idea. One of my favorite security app ‘Spybot & Destroy” follows that concept .. a clean and good structured layout (OK somewhat old fashioned, but a good one!!).
    Maybe the ‘Sidebar’ extension is a starting point. The only one point I would change: make it configurable: the use can decide which function should be included with Sidebar (I hate to have the Error Console on it, and there is no way to delete it from it).

    http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html
94. Morten 5.7.09 / 5pm

    I really love this idea, I prefer to have my webbrowser in a seperate workspace (osx / ubuntu), and fullscreened.

    For normal day-to-day home/personal use I think this is a great sketch of the future.
95. Federico Viticci 5.10.09 / 6pm

    I’ve already said that is a great concept, but I’ve also done some mockups:

    Flickr
96. Steve Erickson 5.15.09 / 9am

    This is absolutely outstanding! I want this now. I hope that at a minimum someone creates an extension to do this. This is exactly how I use a browser and browse the web. Being able to group tabs together would be wonderful. Excellent idea.
97. hue tang 5.16.09 / 2am

    new idea! hidden tabs. all tab listings will be on a hidden page activated by a key combination (e.g. ctrl + t). once activated, you can use the mouse to select the window you want to view, or you can use the arrow keys and press enter to display the tab. with this system when you open a link to a new tab, that page will take over and the last page will reside in the hidden page of tabs. it’s kind of like how google chrome does as it’s home page, only it would be hidden. i also got this idea from widgets that are loaded but hidden on a macos system…maybe also true with widgets on windows, but i’m not sure.
98. John Somebody 5.16.09 / 10am

    I think that Mozilla should talk with HJ (the original creator of Mozilla tabs) because he knows what to do, not to mention that he blogged about seven (7) patents and they all are about this very same change - seems like you got to pay eventually anyhow.
99. Jim G. Miller 5.16.09 / 11am

    I typically have between 50 and 100 tabs open, sort of a “mission creep” effect as I encounter more interesting links but don’t want to “lose” the immediacy of previous information by closing certain earlier tabs. I save pages extensively with Scrapbook and organize my saves into folders, but those saved pages are hard to get back, given that I have thousands saved and searching takes time. Traditional bookmarks, to me, are the worst of both worlds, and I don’t use them - a bookmark only saves page title information with optional comments, and the sense of immediate access to information isn’t nearly as high as with an open tab.

    Additionally, every week or two, as my number of open tabs builds up, I have to save the session and restart the browser, because the resource usage of all the tabs has bogged my system down. Saved sessions (I use Session Manager) are a further form of organization, in addition to bookmarks, scrapbooked pages, and open tabs. But they all organize differently, and using them all forces the recreation of the organizational hierarchy and metadata in several places.

    What’s needed is a universal information store to serve all these needs - easy, quick access; archiving; preserving session state - using a uniform organizational model. IE-like tab groups might be part of this universal solution. Users need to be able to quickly call up and close clusters of web pages (to use system resources wisely), and the pages within those clusters should be easy to identify and searchable. Clusters should be definable by users’ criteria. Each page in a cluster should have an archive history (some pages change frequently like news sites) and that history should likewise be easily searchable by keyword, time, etc. Pages or clusters should be markable for session restore. Color-coding and other visual organizational cues should be used.
100. Johannes 5.18.09 / 3am

     Do it like Omniweb:
     http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/
     They do that for years, which is the reason I use their browser (even paid for it!)
101. mamue110 5.18.09 / 3am

     My idea is to only open a “classic” tab if a user types in a address or opens a bootmark. All tabs that are opened in that context do not produce a new “classic” tab. Instead they are stored under that tab. The tab will only show how many tabs are stored under it. When you put the mouse over the tab a new tabbar will be displayed showing all tabs that are stored under that tab.
     You could also combine this with a hover bar. Putting the mouse at the left or right side of the screen will show all tabs in the current context, putting the mouse at the tob or bottom of the screen will show all tabs of all contexts.
102. sebo 5.18.09 / 4am

     I never never use tabs in the browser because the title of the tab doesn’t have enough information to identify the content. I have on my Mac OS X in the bottom right corner the Exposé command ’see all the open windows in your current application’. So I open many sites in own windows and switch by Exposé where I can see the content of all windows.
     I think I would like to have a ‘Cover Flow’ to flip through the tabs in a panel on the top/bottom that comes down/up when you go with the mouse over the tabs and disapears again when you choose one. In Safari 4 they have something like this for history searching. Seems nice.
103. Enrico Bernardi 5.18.09 / 4am

     Hi,
     it could be a good idea
     if you work with a monitor with high resolution, but if have I a monitor 1024 x 768 what’s matter?
     Thanks
104. pencripup 5.18.09 / 5am

     Many many interesting ideas.

     I think dropdown floating palettes would work best for me - I could click to zip them to just a line of text, or click to expand to a resizeable palette that I could set to icon/snapshot or text view easily. Think of the colour palettes in image software that can be resized to wide or tall with as many or few lines/columns as wished.

     And being a floating palette means I could put it anywhere I wanted, drag and drop between other palettes or straight from the page, with some set to display text others snapshots or favicons.

     That way everybody can have whatever works best for them and the whole tabbe or not tabbe problem would disappear.

     peace out…
105. Jakob 5.18.09 / 5am

     When i saw the sketch first, it hurts in my eyes. On most websites you will have a vertical menu on the left site. if you have your tabs there too, it would bother you while reading and navigating through the websites. Thats why most people dont use the favorites-view or bookmarks-view.
     between the horizontal tabs and horizontal menu of websites theirs always enough space.
     Maybe vertical tabs can work for me on right site of the window or if i can fast-switch them.
106. Paolo 5.18.09 / 7am

     I agree that vertical space is the scarce resource. Very few pages require to scroll horizontally, but almost every page (this one included) requires to scroll vertically.
     However, I like to be able to fit two windows side by side so on a 16:10 monitor my standard browser is about 8:10, taller than wider. I think I’ll hate to use a browser that forces me to overlap windows and given the dominant form factor of web pages, there is no point in having a wide browser window.
107. AndyB 5.18.09 / 8am

     Its an interesting idea… how can we better manage the tabs…

     Firstly, we need a combination of auto-hide and always-displayed. There’s nothing worse than having to move the mouse to the top or side of the page, waiting for it all the scroll a panel out just to see the tabs you have, then waiting for it all to scroll back to hidden. yuk.

     So I’d suggest a dockable strip that’s quite narrow to hold your tabs, in normal operation this would be either a strip on the side that has just a little part of the tab text to it (and coloured!) so you can see how many tabs you have, roughly what they are, and you can swap between them without having to un-hide them - most people, given a little clue will remember which tab is which anyway. Its the clue that matters more here. Of course, if you hover over the strip then the tabs will appear - and I really think that scrolling a panel in is a poor choice, instead have semi-transparent tabs appear floating “on top” of the browser window for you to select from.

     At no point does this impact the surface area given over to the page you’re viewing (a common complaint for many people where screen real-estate is given up)

     Colours are very important for this too - you should be able to categorise your tabs/bookmarks by colour to assist in finding them, possibly giving a bookmark/tab a short name to show up in the mini-strip.

     Now, you just need to improve the history and bookmarking and we’re a lot of the way to a better browser UI.

     cheers.
108. Ron 5.18.09 / 8am

     1. A *large* fraction of users still have 4:3 monitors.

     2. Newer is not always better.

     IOW, don’t be insular in your thinking, assuming that everyone has the latest and greatest.

     Still, though: what’s needed is better tab reorganization and the ability to move them in bulk from window to window.
109. Jaysyn 5.18.09 / 8am

     Looks bad, takes up too much screen real estate. If you’ve got to “fix” this, please make it optional.
110. Sprite 5.18.09 / 8am

     I dislike the concept; I like my width realestate for my screen; having the tabs along the top works well for me.

     Why bother adding this to the program when you have good addons that do the job? Bloat is never needed. If anything, give the users the option of various ’styles’ when they download so those of us who know what they want can get what we want.
111. Jim Massey 5.18.09 / 9am

     Tabs suck, I love tabs. I wish there were a way to reduce the need for tabs.
     I think a close examination of why tabs are popular would reveal that many people end up with lots of tabs open because they started browsing a page and wanted to keep the original page accessible while opening/following links. In this situation the back button is pretty useless after just a few links are opened and there is no easy way to get back to the root uri where the research(link following) started so people end up with a tab holding the root page and a bunch of tabs representing where the researching has led.

     I propose a ‘Flip’ button (per tab?) that would hold the root uri and the current uri. When this button is pressed it would flip back to the root uri, a second press return to the current uri, so the root uri is always one click away, the history back and forward is more useful and the need to open many tabs is greatly reduced. I actually started an implementation of this several years ago before tabBrowser was born for the KioskBrowser(still in there) but ran out of resources to fully flesh this out at the time and have never returned to it but this discussion has made me start thinking about it again.
112. Chris 5.18.09 / 10am

     This is a good idea, altho I think the collapsed “auto-hide” could be reduced to a lot less than 50px. Take Konqueror as an example.

     http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Konqueror-fm.png

     Now, ignoring the other horrid wastes of real estate there, the sidebar uses icons. Favicons may acceptable for when it is collapsed, then it slides out, like Fennec had in it’s design, sliding either over the open page or pushing it to the side temporarily (not shrinking it).

     As for Thom’s idea, my chief dislike of this is that scrawny URL bar. a long URL bar is important, imo, letting me read some of the longer URLs in the world (>_<)* The rest of his idea is spot on awesome :) I might tinker with a mockup myself in a bit.
113. M.G. 5.18.09 / 10am

     Takes up WAY too much space compared to top-tabs. Plus it looks like crap. Make tab positioning OPTIONAL.
114. mb 5.18.09 / 12pm

     I’m reading text, not watching a movie. This is a crap design. Don’t re-invent things that don’t need re-inventing just so you can have fun making a new UI.
115. Ugly American 5.18.09 / 1pm

     I’ve used Opera with the tabs on the far right and my OS bar on the far left ever since I got a widescreen monitor.

     Studies have shown that shorter text lines allow text to be read both faster and more accurately.
116. sede 5.18.09 / 4pm

     The tabs should be opened just right (not the most right, and not 3 tabs right with strange methods), and when closed, the focus should go to the just left tab (not the opener, not the most right or right).

     This works like a tree, this group of tabs does not affect other previously opened tabs. And while reading the first opened, the others are loading, when closed, the next loaded tab opens. I am using this way the tabs since 2002. Why we should use tab-mix-plus to achieve this?
117. Phez 5.18.09 / 5pm

     It’s a little bit Mac like… too Mac like
118. vlad 5.18.09 / 5pm

     I think we need to move away from the concept of browsing by sites, move into something like browsing by concepts and tasks, then we can group what we are doing in a more efficient way.
119. Debajit Adhikary 5.18.09 / 7pm

     Well, the best alternative to tabs already exists — and is fully functional. It’s called Expose for application windows.

     On Mac OS X, set a hot corner for this.

     Now, open a new browser window for every page that you want. Open as many pages as you want.

     Move the mouse to the hot corner, all the windows will tile up in a smooth animation. You can see thumbnails of all you Firefox windows (only. Note that this is different from all-windows-Expose).

     Click on any window thumbnail to jump to that window.

     I’m not sure I understand why this is not sufficient.
120. John 5.18.09 / 7pm

     Some new way to display or group tabs is less important than ways to keep their machine usage under control. Some tabs do useful work while some other tab is active — for example, they may be performing some AJAXy task or playing audio while someone is interacting with a different tab. Other tabs suck up resources to no good effect — rotating ads, playing Flash ads, auto-reloading the page to display more ads. (See a pattern developing here?) Leave too many tabs open and these useless background tabs will eventually throttle the machine or crash the browser. Forget about vertical vs. horizontal, give us a way to group tabs (via manipulation, site URL, etc.) into “keep running in background” and “starve or hibernate when not the active tab”.
121. Alec 5.18.09 / 7pm

     I personally really like the idea of a putting the tabs on the left, but only if an autohide is also implemented. I use AIOS (all-in-one-sidebar, an extension, for those of you who don’t know), and it seems to me that implementing a relatively small tab setup on the side would free up more screen space. However, web content is increasingly made in 1024 or even 1280 resolution that a really big side area is impractical.

     The increased focus in the modern web on online productivity a’la Google Docs means that some form of grouping of apps would be nice, as would persistence. If users could specify certain tabs that they always want active and loaded in the background so we don’t have to wait for them to load when we want them, it would speed up browsing.

     And, as others have said, any major change like this should be optional, or you’ll have a lot of users refusing to move to the new version or working on ways to revert it like the extensions to bring back the old url bar behavior.
122. Dutra de Lacerda 5.18.09 / 8pm

     My preference would go to an existing format ( a lateral one) since wide screens are too wide for work.
     I’m refering to the tree view that unites the colapsed view (if desired) with the lateral position and the hability to store a lot of open pages (if you have enough memory.
     Aditionally these could be implemented with a page limit of a pre-defined number of active pages (others would become dorment)… or keep the ones in cache indicated with a bold font while the lost ones would be in a normal font.
     Anyway, the lateral position makes a lot of sense now with the wide format that is so unfit for work.
123. Damian Keeghan 5.18.09 / 10pm

     I love the side bar format, possibly with something like Aero Peak and the new Windows 7 Task bar.

     Tabs could be grouped by domain, allowing you to mouse over the domain toplevel category and visually see a subset of each page so you can quickly navigate to the correct one.

     Also, like in your screenshot, allowing people to add specific sites to an applications tab

     In the end, the user should be free to choose what way they prefer.
124. Dist 5.19.09 / 12am

     Aieee! Do NOT do group-by-domain, this just leads to something that is not task oriented. (As seen with OS X Spaces).

     Tabs need to be grouped by tasks and linked to other related tabs, as a group, a tree or links/relations (how to make this intuitive is left as an exercise =).
125. Jons 5.19.09 / 4am

     The option of having tabs on the side would is a good idea but let’s not complicate the interface too much.
     I think Google’s Chrome essentially solves this by allowing you to move tabs between browser container windows. You can use that to group tabs in separate windows and use the OS’s task bar (or whatever) to move between windows.
126. Mrtn 5.19.09 / 4am

     I think that the best option is to keep the same tab toolbar at the top but organise it better.
     What I would like is to have two default tab settings.
     Setting (1) has the left-most tab to be the “mother” tab and the tabs to its right to be “daughter” tabs.
     Setting (2) shows all the mother tabs.

     If you right click on the tab toolbar it alternates between the setting (1) and (2).

     How setting (1) works:
     In setting (1) if you place the mouse into the tab toolbar and use the wheel, then you rotate the “Mother” tabs with all the daughters shown to the right of the tab. If you place your mouse over one of the daughter tabs, and that daughter tab is also a mother, then a vertical list of grand-daughter tabs appears. If there are great-grand-daughter tabs then these appear as you place your mouse over the grand-daughter tab.

     In setting (2) if you place the mouse over one of the “mother” tabs then the daughter tabs appear vertically below. If there are grand-daughter tabs then these appear as you place your mouse over the daughter tab.

     So in effect the tabs are being grouped but do not take up additional screen space.

     There should also be a reveal command which reveals all the tabs so that they can be arranged or navigated while all being open.

     An example of this at work is if I am looking at google scholar while also looking at my university library.
     The mother tab google scholar should have its result daughter tab, some of which might have grandaughter tabs. Meanwhile the library mother tab will have its own daughter tabs. So if I open up a document from IEEEexplore for example I know that the result under the mother tab google scholar will only allow me to view the abstract, wherease the IEEEexplore opened under my library mother tab will allow me to read or download the full document.
127. bj 5.19.09 / 5am

     What I don’t understand is why you’re trying to fix something that WORKS the way it is. I don’t want stuff on the side. Ever since Netscape 3.0 I got rid of that bookmark column that the default install always wanted to give me. Now you’re trying to give me a side column? BLECCH!!!!

     I personally LIKE tabs just the way they are. I don’t want them categorized, I don’t want them moved, I want them to work. Which they do. Just the way they are.

     So unless you make all this stuff OPTIONAL, you will lose this user. Opera is a fine browser. We do have other options.
128. HotPepperMan 5.19.09 / 6pm

     Hmm Menus are horizontal. Bookmark Menu is horizontal.

     If it aint broke, don’t fix it..
129. Cranky 5.19.09 / 7pm

     Get lives, you people!
     Could you BE any more trivial?
     Sheesh!
130. manuel mijares 5.20.09 / 12am

     coffe and donnas… ok mister pancho?
131. Terry 5.20.09 / 6am

     The problem with the idea is that you need a text description of each tab to keep track of which tab contains what content. Since we read left to right, the tab’s descriptions will always take up much more horizontal space than they do vertical. Here’s what that amounts to:

     A sidebar of tabs would have room to list a large number of tabs before being forced to scroll. Unfortunately the reason that’s true is that a sidebar is forced to be a certain width in order to leave a reasonable amount of space for each tab description. In the end, it takes up a significantly larger percentage of your screen than the current horizontal tab would. The only way tabs on the side would be advantageous would be if you regularly had something like 20+ tabs open simultaneously. Me, if I have more than four going I feel cluttered.

     Another alternative would be to figure out what else to put on that sidebar, so that it’s not sitting there being largely unused space most of the time. The search bar? maybe. The navigation buttons? Probably not - I can’t see people readily adjusting to that change. What else would you put there? There’s no need to permanently leave open your favorites or navigation history.

     I can see why this exists in add-on form - I’m sure there will be people that find the concept interesting for a change of pace. By and large, though, people would hate it.
132. Eduardas Tamošauskas 5.20.09 / 8am

     Good idea. Let’s call it groups of tabs, as it is. Seems to be pretty intuitive, if
     – one can create groups to be persistent across sessions (approx like expandable, known in, say, MS Outlook),
     – could drag and drop address into group
     – could drag and drop page between groups
     – could bookmark into groups (narrow leftmost side of group’s tab reserved for bookmark action, if dragged into)
     – autohide selected by preference/appearance setting

     Overall - yes, way to go! I never liked left side panels, and turned them off, but they never were that functional nor intuitive!

     Regards,
     et
133. Shriharsha 5.20.09 / 12pm

     I don’t like the idea of the tabs going away. Tab is such a nice feature that made me to switch to firefox many years back.

     I am not much worried about height of view area as long as there is a scroll bar. Of course I disliked some pages that did not show images completely in the view without needing to scroll slightly down. In such cases doing away with bookmark bar solved the problem. But I don’t want bookmarks bar to go away.
     So why not use idea of using ribbon? Ribbon is the concept used by Microsoft in their Office 2007 suite.
     I would love to see same feature implemented in Firefox.

     One more idea that I would like to see is to have tabs for web sessions and a sidebar for the pages that belong to the session. In this way we can have lesser tabs. Each tab is uniquely identified with the website.
     When clicked on a tab all the pages that were opened as “view in a new page” will be shown in a sidebar just like how that tabs are shown in the image posted in this article.
     This makes browsing much easier because it brings the way to view web sites and their pages in a single tab.

     I hope, one day I will see the browser this way.

     Regards,
     Shriharsha
134. Shriharsha 5.20.09 / 2pm

     It would be great if you chm file format is supported too. Some websites contain just simple pages. Making them look like chm will be very good. The pages should load only when clicked on the link in the sidebar (contents table).

     The current blog sites can be transformed to look like a chm book for every blog user.

     Add some thoughts on this front too.

     Some websites really need to be represented as a book and displayed as if it is opened with a chm reader.
135. johnkzin 5.20.09 / 8pm

     Personally, I like the current mechanism for tabbed browsing, and if you do something new, I expect that you’ll still let us re-enable the current method … since user choice trumps designer’s visions.

     I agree with some of what was said in previous comments: horizontal tabs on a side bar takes up WAY too much space, esp. on a netbook or MID. And that’s an important consideration: whatever you come up with had better be usable on a 1024×600 screen (or even an 800×480 screen). That’s a growing market segment.

     The idea that we’re no longer in an era of “slow machines on a thin internet” is actually quite wrong. The move to smaller hardware, with fewer resources that today’s desktops and laptops, counters that idea. This isn’t just about what mozilla on the desktop can be, it’s also about what mozilla in the pocket needs to be … and I’m not talking about feneck (or however it’s spelled), I’m talking about devices that run full Firefox on a mobile computer.

     I run Firefox on a Samsung Q1 Ultra, and a Dell Mini 9. The idea that it would stop being the same experience that I have on my desktop macs is … rather annoying. And it strikes me as a rather poor design choice. Consistency and stability are far more important than designers jumping through hoops.
136. Dave Everitt 5.21.09 / 2am

     “Are there other, better groupings?” - my ‘want’ scores:

     * from a search = 90%
     * by domain = 80%
     * from origin (i.e. from a site’s links) = 60%
     * by frequent use = 10%

     I hate clutter in the browser window apart from the page I’m looking at, so side tabs are fine, but allow them and their groupings to be:

     * reorganised (add/remove/move);
     * minimised as groups, rollover shows a group’s tabs.
     * hidden
137. Jordan 5.21.09 / 4am

     At first I was a bit sceptical because of vertical resolution restrictions and not being able to see the full list at once - but as long as I can opt not to group them and have only tabs in the left pane then when I get my widescreen monitor I’ll be all ion favour of this!
138. Jordan 5.21.09 / 4am

     Forgot to add: I’d definitely like to see more than one option provided so that we as the user can choose the best for our needs. However, obviously the default one has to be the best general purpose option as many people won’t customise their browser.
139. Adalberto Hernandez Vega 5.21.09 / 12pm

     It optimizes screen real estate and better in wide-screens. Definitely a good addition/change.
140. Adalberto Hernandez Vega 5.21.09 / 12pm

     Flockr browser has been very interestingly taking advantage of spreading add-ins to the sides lately.
141. Don Hopkins 5.23.09 / 4pm

     The tabbed Emacs windows I implemented for the NeWS window system, UniPress Emacs and the HyperTIES hypermedia browser around 1988 were attached to the right side of the window. Later versions let you drag the tabs around to any position along any edge of the window.

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_document_interface
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg

     Obviously, because text is wider than it is tall, you can put a lot more tabs along the left or right edge than you can along the top or bottom edge. But it’s also nice for the user to be able to decide which edge, and where along that edge, each tab is positioned.

     Here’s a video of the NeWS Toolkit 2.0 version of tabbed window frames, which are built into the window manager, and frame all NeWS windows (and X windows, too — it ran on X11/NeWS).

     http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov

     The Sun running that software had a three button mouse. The left button would bring the window to the top, and drag the window around by the tab. The middle button would leave the widow in place, but drag the tab around the edge of the window. The right button would pop up a pie menus, with window management commands in appropriate directions.

     -Don
142. dzh 5.26.09 / 2am

     And what are you think about Google Picasa Timeline Veiw for photos? try to fix Firefox tabs in this way
143. jermans 5.27.09 / 3am

     I propose to make a replacement of tabs with scrollable list as window manager in windows vista. I suggest to switch to the choice of tab when pressing the key Ctrl + T and scrool tabs list in tabs manager with mouse wheel event. Need add opportunity for groupping tabs and expanding collapsed tab groups by mouse over event handling.
144. jermans 5.27.09 / 4am

     I propose to make a replacement of tabs with scrollable list as window manager in windows vista. I suggest to switch to the choice of tab when pressing the key Ctrl + T and scroll tabs list in tabs manager with mouse wheel event. Need add opportunity for groupping tabs and expanding collapsed tab groups by mouse over event handling.
145. Taek 6.14.09 / 2am

     I’m sorry, but anything using the side of the screen is stupid in my opinion. Just take a look at how mIRC is handling it.

     I think it should be an option to be able to choose if that is there or not, or even be able to move it to the right side of the screen. I love tabs. far much better than this taking up the side of the screen. but at least keep it as an option for people. To either keep the tabs, use the side bar type deal or nether.. Also it would be nice to be able to move the tabs to the lower portion of the screen considering that a default Windows OS desktop has the task bar at the bottom.
146. Vishal 6.14.09 / 5pm

     Please do this!
147. Torley 7.11.09 / 5pm

     I continue to champion vertical tabs for multiple awesome reasons and am thrilled to see this (upon searching). I’ll concur it may not be that useful for someone who only uses a few tabs, but for those who wade through dozens of pages at once (not atypical if you’re into Firefox’s Open All Tabs and the like), having the info presented vertically — as it is in Gmail, any sidebar, phone books, and soforth — is cause for timesaving championship.
148. graig smith 7.21.09 / 6am

     yeah, screens are wider than they are tall, thats so i can fit 2 programs side by side.. i dont like tabs on the side. because then i have to make my windows wider to use it. then i gotta make the netflix video on the other side of the browser smaller.
149. Ben 7.24.09 / 7am

     Like almost anything, a vertical tab bar is not for everyone. Target audience is obviously a wide screen user with more than 10 tabs, so of course it’d have to be optional.

     As a user of vertical tabs since opera introduced them, it’s so obvious that many critics here have never really tried it. Get over the “it will probably be bad because X” phantasy already and test it for real, experience it for a day or two. Get the Tab Kit extension, you’re in for a treat.

     I’d really love a closer integration with the UI, for example a better connecting-tab-to-window feeling and some other minor uglynesses. Other than that, discuss and theorize all you want, just don’t break my beloved tab kit plugin… ;-)
150. patrickjdempsey 7.26.09 / 7pm

     I tried Tree Style Tabs after a friend suggested it many months ago. I thought I would like it, but as I strictly use CRT monitors both at work and at home I found it to be less than Ideal. I typically work with my Firefox *almost* maximized but with a strip at the left open for finding desktop icons and common task folders easier. This makes my typical Firefox experience into a square, not even the 4:3 ratio many are complaining about. I’ve tried and used many of the sidebar enhancing extensions and in every case I’ve gotten rid of them because they simply took up more space than they were useful.

     The second problem I had with Tree Style Tabs was that it had lots of wasted space. I rarely have open more than 7 or 8 tabs, as I get easily confused after that, and only a handful of tabs in Tree Style Tabs was just a huge waste of screen space. You seem to have solved this by adding more stuff to the side, but then you run right back into the old problem of running out of space when you have more than 10 tabs.

     Grouping and collapsing tabs seems to fix this but adds to the confusion issues, and slows down browsing significantly. This feature of Vista grouping applications I find to be miserably difficult to use. It looks slick, but it slows down actual use. Also, if you are considering grouping vertical tabs to save space, couldn’t you do the same with horizontal tabs, maybe with a quickly opening automatic tooltip style menu for choosing the specific tab you want? Maybe grouped tabs could have “sub-tabs”?

     So what about auto-hiding it? With that implimentation I can no longer just glance up and see what I’m working on and where it is. I would have to use my mouse cursor as my eyes, just to see the tabs. Talk about slow. Move the mouse to unhide tabs before you can even think about which tab you want, click on grouped tabs to see all tabs in the group, and then select the specific tab you want. I’ve also used All-In-One-Sidebar with it’s autohide feature and found it to be difficult to use and erratic in behavior. When in fullscreen it works great to move the mouse all the way to the left, but when Firefox is not in fullscreen, it is clumsy to find that thin strip and open it. And having it disappear the second my cursor moves off of it is just annoying!

     And what about users who love to have the bookmarks sidebar or other optional sidebars open all the time? In that case you are talking about a huge chunk of screen being taken up with something that doesn’t really seem that useful, or may interfere with those features.
151. KinkyNice 9.7.09 / 4am

     While our monitors do have more wide screen space, I believe it is because humans have a wider field of vision and feel comfortable with more horizontal content than vertical. If Firefox has a tab sidebar, it should definitely be easy to hide or scale back as you suggested. Perhaps it would also be possible to focus on integrating tabs better as they currently exist at the top of the window.
152. Kir 9.23.09 / 2pm

     Why not have both? A minimized version on top that shows the current workspace, and the sidebar for when you wanna pull it out
153. شات 10.4.09 / 5pm

     what about users who love to have the bookmarks sidebar or other optional sidebars open all the time? In that case you are talking about a huge chunk of screen being taken up with something that doesn’t really seem that useful, or may interfere with those features.
154. Chris 11.4.09 / 10am

     Tabs on the side is an excellent idea. I have absolutely no idea why businesses give their staff widescreen laptops which are only useful for watching films on, but aren’t very good for creating documents etc on - especially as the new version of office now has even chunkier menu bars. As you say right at the start… vertical space is the scarce resource. Why not allow the user to choose whether they want side or top tabs?
155. شات 11.10.09 / 5pm

     I’m sorry, but anything using the side of the screen is stupid in my opinion. Just take a look at how mIRC is handling it.

     I think
156. دردشة اغار 11.25.09 / 12am

     دردشة اغار
157. شات 12.2.09 / 6pm

     especially as the new version of office now has even chunkier menu bars. As you say right at the start… vertical
158. بنت الخليج 12.14.09 / 1pm

     Vere Vere nice
159. SPA2TACU5 1.22.10 / 7am

     Off topic: I love the lack of “HOME” button on this site.
160. طرب 3.14.10 / 2pm

     طرب
161. فويس 3.16.10 / 12pm

     فويس
162. الخليج 3.16.10 / 12pm

     الخليج
163. خليجي كام 3.16.10 / 12pm

     خليجي كام
164. شات الخليج الصوتي 3.16.10 / 12pm

     شات الخليج الصوتي

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