Firefox/Projects/TabCandy

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Overview

Description

Why is it that you can remember where the knives are in your kitchen, which has hundreds of things, but have difficulty remember where a particular tab is? TabCandy is a project that helps users deal with the complex ways the modern web is used by providing spatial, touchable groups of tabs and tab groups.

Current Status

• Have removed jQuery dependency, working now on integration with trunk. See Bug 572889.

What Is This All About

See the presentation

Problems

• Tabs don’t scale.
• It’s time consuming to switch between tabs.
• We work in semantic groups; our browser don’t.
• Our tabs have no understanding of search. Only basic understanding of “apps”.
• Bookmarks are to heavy, tabs are too light. No metaphors for saving/sharing/viewing what we are seeing.
• No incentive to clean up.
• We spend 76% of time on first & last tab.

Goals / Use Cases

• Make switching between tabs easier
• Make grouping, saving, and managing tabs easier
• Productivity when you increase monitor size goes up by ~30% (recognition+spatial memory), bring this efficiency gain and ease of mind to tabs.

Non-goals

• Whole-sale replacement of tabs (by default)
• Slowing down tab switching (with gratuitous animations, etc)
• Being an alt-tab replacement
• Trying to encompass all of Ubiquity's use cases. Only interested in navigation and information retrieval.

Design

• More detailed designs coming soon
• See the presentation.

Prototype

• Get the source code for the Firefox extension.

Testing

• TBD