Aza Raskin, Mozilla’s head of user experience for its Labs unit, on Friday unveiled a new project called “Tab Candy” that promises to dramatically change the way users manage open browser tabs.
Tab Candy is a new tab management feature for Firefox that organizes tabs into groups to help you keep your tabs grouped by task. Not only does it offer incredibly handy features, but it looks beautiful.
Tab Candy is not an extension, but a new feature that Raskin and team plan to build into a future version of the Firefox browser.
This is what Raskin had to say about Tab Candy:
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.
Tab Candy effectively consolidates different windows inside of one, so when you’re looking at one group, your others are waiting inside the switching interface. The concept is still in development, and only available in an experimental version of Firefox, which Raskin has made available for brave alpha testers.
Right now it’s only feature is this tab organization, though many more features are coming, including search, clusters that can be set as a private browsing session, and public and private sharing of tab groups.
This demo video details some concepts:
This looks like a big step forward for tabbed browsing in Firefox. What do you think of Tab Candy so far?
Read Aza Raskin’s blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment