Firefox Tab Candy will change the way I use a browser for good

[zridling]

The power of the browser has grown substantially in the last ten years. We now use the Web to multi-task the activities we juggle every day, like vacation plans, purchases, sharing pictures, listening to music, reading email, and writing a blog post.

It’s hard to keep everything straight with dozens of tabs all crammed into a little strip along the top of your browser. Your tab with a search to find a pizza parlor gets mixed up with your tabs on your favorite band. Often, it’s easier to open a new tab than to try to find the open tab you already have. Worse, how many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later? We’re all suffering from infoguilt.

We need a way to organize browsing, to see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand. In short, we need a way to get back control of our online lives.

Enter: Tab Candy. Watch the video. This will be a hit, I promise.

[mouser]

Pretty cool.

On the other hand, maybe it's just me, but i'd rather stick knives into my ears than listen to Aza Raskin explain one of his ideas as if he has discovered the secrets of the universe.  I get that apple vibe from people like this.. i'll pass.

[Curt]

also, it should be noted that it still is in alpha stage, and bugged.

[mitzevo]

Nice idea/product.. but you are just wasting time learning this tool and using it. Learn to love the mess, don't waste your time organizing or "grouping." - Don't have so many tabs open! Things like this are meant to help with productivty and organization, speed, etc. but it's not really worth the overhead. It takes consistent use and repetition to learn a "tool" like this for it to be of any use. Get my drift. 

[mrainey]

While I don't see Tab Candy as likely to play a role in my future browsing activity, it does look pretty neat.  I thought the sales pitch was fun to listen to, one time.

[Josh]

I agree with others. It looks neat but it seems that any productivity or time savings gained is lost in taking all of this time to organize your tabs. I have had almost 30 tabs open at once and I would still never use a tool like this. I also agree that there is a spooky Apple vibe coming from this demo. I do not see it as useful for many people.

[tomos]

I like the sound of it, especially 'Save for later', well more the possibilities of it - it could be like a cross between 'tab-mix-plus' and 'Session Manager'.
The advertising might be a pain.
I really probably should take mitzevo's advice on board though!

[mitzevo]

Hehe yeah. Tabs changed the way I forever used a browser! Micromanagement is just not worth the overhead. (for me at least)  

[rgdot]

"I use my browser more than I use my operating system" one of the first lines, what in the world does this mean?   

Interesting concept, not sure there is much overhead or that much of a learning curve. Has potential in my opinion.

[nudone]

i read throught the above and thought, hmm, yep - i don't need yet another tab manager...

BUT i watched the video and i think i get it. and here's why:

i use the desktop for throwing loads of icons on - work files and shortcuts. and (as discussed before), i do it because of the "spatial" kind of way you can work with things.

this seems to be exactly what Tab Candy is doing. it's just the desktop for your browser. if you keep a clean desktop (like mouser) then i can see why Tab Candy doesn't really appeal.

i've not tried it yet so i may be getting excited over nothing. but it looks like something i can work with - i think...

[Perry Mowbray]

Haven't used it... but I like it.

I don't display my desktop icons: but I know the people I manage at work all use their desktops to arrange their icons in groups -- this'd work a treat like that.

Also my browser does get to be a mess after a while with all the tabs. And I know mitzevo I should close them... I eventually do when I can't stand it any more, but then I often have to go grab it out of the History 

[tomos]

It seems you currently have to get it via "a Tab Candy-enabled build" of firefox, i.e. you cant get it as a simple extension, only with full Firefox.
I'm not that interested - yet.

[nudone]

It seems you currently have to get it via "a Tab Candy-enabled build" of firefox, i.e. you cant get it as a simple extension, only with full Firefox.
I'm not that interested - yet.

-tomos (July 25, 2010, 09:14 AM)

oh. i'm not that interested either. i'll wait until the hype hits the net in a few months from now - and if it becomes a standard plugin/extension.

[f0dder]

OK, so the guy gets a bit over-enthusiastic, and things go a bit overboard in the last quarter of the video... but I believe it could be a really useful thing, especially if it's not just for open tabs (oh, the memory footprint horrors!) but as a way to replace/aid bookmarks.

It really depends on how you use your browser. It's not uncommon that I end up with 20+ open tabs, for assorted tasks. Grouping tabs by task could be very useful for me, reducing clutter when I go from development-related work to some leisure surfing, or whatever. Or "look at this later" when reading blogs, forums, whatever, without cluttering up the already overloaded taskbar.

And hey, it looks visually appealing - which is important

[daddydave]

My kneejerk reaction is that this is kind of crap people resort to in Google Chrome since there's no Tab Mix Plus add-on. But I will wait a little bit for it to be a finished and polished product and give it a try -- the download I saw was a whole separate build of Firefox, and not part of Minefield either.

Reminds me of the Speed Dial addon, too, which I use, but I wonder if it is comparable.

[f0dder]

TMP was a bit clunky for me - can't remember what exactly it was, but I ended up uninstalling it. And (if I recall it's feature set correctly ), it doesn't do the features of TabCandy that I'm really interested in - named grouping, only showing tabs associated with the currently active group, and the nice visual zoomable overview.

[Cloq]

Hmm.. wonder how Tab Candy is going to handle pages with Flash activity. In my experience, Flash with Firefox, tend to have high cpu usage for whatever reason.

These days just about every other page has flash something or other embedded with it (think adverts for instance).

[MrCrispy]

This is a nice concept. I like the idea of visual memory helping me locate stuff. But  -

1. I don't want to have to remember to file away every tab where it belongs
2. The folder metaphor is dead. I want a tab to belong in multiple buckets. I want tagging for tabs
3. I want the tags to be applied automatically, using my browser history, my surfing habits (kept only locally!!), and rules based on automatic metadata extraction.

Knowing Firefox, this will take a few builds (we're talking 6m-1yr here) to stabilize, then half the people will turn it off because it uses too much ram/cpu, then there will he 2 dozen copycat extensions. I really wish they make something like this a core browser feature with minimal resources.

[daddydave]

It solves problems I personally have my own workarounds for:

If a tab is "distracting," I close it unless I'm going to read it this session (conveniently these have red italics - I think I have Tab Mix Plus doing this but I don't think it's required for this function)
If I want to read a tab sometime after this session, I use Read it Later.
If I want to open multiple tabs at one time, put multple bookmarks in a folder and middle click the folder.
If I want to  open tabs by clicking on a thumbnail, I use Speed Dial.

Furthermore, it re-creates the problem I had before discovering "Single Window Mode" in Tab Mix Plus, that of having to look at multiple windows to figure out which window contained a specific tab.

EDIT: Also in the shopping example they give in the video, a good solution for that is the way IE8 gives the tabs opened from the same source their own color automatically. This can be emulated in Firefox using the Vista-Aero theme, but I wish they would extract that functionality into a separate add-on so I could use it without making Firefox look like IE.

I may change my mind when I get around to testing it, I'm just not that motivated to install yet another build of Firefox to give this a try. The "tab dashboard" idea might get some use if I don't have to recreate it from session to session.

[nudone]

just a bit of fun: you can get similar results using plugins already available, as daddydave said above.

if you like having lots of tabs open (or hidden) try TooManyTabs: https://addons.mozil.../firefox/addon/9429/ which will give you a double decker style tab bar. then you can move tabs up and down to arange/categorise them in a "visual" way.

or, try Speed Dial (as daddydave mentioned). here's a screengrab i've just done after messing about. you can't zoom with Speed Dial; i tried setting a dial to open another Speed Dial "group" but it didn't work. anyway, if you up the number of rows/columns and hide unused dials you'll get a similar look to Tab Candy.



p.s.
i'm pretty sure i saw something that nearly did the IE "colour tabs by relation to original tab" thing. it didn't have the other options you get from Tab Mix Plus so i removed it. nor did it work well alongside TMP - which i have colouring my tabs by current, read, unread (which i now think is actually better than the IE colouring method).
edit:
think i might have just been thinking of this instead, so not exactly like IE colours to be honest: https://addons.mozil.../firefox/addon/8004/


edit:
thought i'd also say, you can drag those dials around to change your grid layout. i'm now going to start using it instead of Tab Candy - why wait around.

[daddydave]

edit:
think i might have just been thinking of this instead, so not exactly like IE colours to be honest: https://addons.mozil.../firefox/addon/8004/

-nudone (July 30, 2010, 10:39 AM)

Yeah, I think I tried all the well-known tab coloring extensions, and none of them had automatic groups the way IE8 does it that I could tell, the closest thing I found (before finding Vista-Aero) was something that groups tabs by domain, which isn't what I wanted. And Vista-Aero does exactly what I want, but since it is a theme instead of an add-on, it is a bit limiting if you don't really want Firefox to look like IE.

[daddydave]

nor did it work well alongside TMP - which i have colouring my tabs by current, read, unread (which i now think is actually better than the IE colouring method).

-nudone (July 30, 2010, 10:39 AM)

If this is (ever) done right, the current tab and unread tabs are still obvious (I think IE8 uses a lighter shade of the group color). And unread tabs have red italics going for them (in TMP by default, maybe even in Firefox default or at least an about:config setting).

[nudone]

i didn't realise IE used different shades for read and unread. hmm, i did want my FF tabs to behave like IE tabs - now you've said that they using shading i want them again.

i don't really understand why there isn't an extension to do it in FF, there must be a lot of demand for it.

i'm going to check out this Vista-Aero thing anyway...

[f0dder]

nudone: those extensions combined might give some of the benefits of TabCandy, but it looks clunky in comparison... I generally perform function over form, but in some cases (and I believe TC to be one) form is part of the functionality. Your example screenshot doesn't make it easy to locate your tabs of interest visually, and it lacks the tab grouping, which is one of the primary points of interest for me

[nudone]

umm, i've just realised what you mean. what i did doesn't have any use for currently opened tabs. oh well, i thought i'd found something - seems not.

just looking at this Vista-Aero thing. looks interesting - will install it now.