Firefox/Projects/Control Tab

Overview

Description

dao  developer
boriss    UI
johnath   technical advisor

Goals

• short term: disable feature to get out of 3.6's way
• instead of backing out, want to land the revised UI pref'd off

Use Cases

Name	Description	Recall Method	Limit
Quick-switcher	The user wants to switch to a tab they've used recently. Either they know exactly what order it's in, for instance switching back and forth between two items, or the know it was very recent but need to confirm the order.	Short term memory	7 +-2 items
Visual seeker	The user knows roughly what a window looks like, but they don't remember the name of it. They're searching for key visual elements they remember, such as a big logo or a green background.	Visual	Longer search time the smaller the thumbnails, can be stumped by similar looking tabs
Text seeker	The user knows the domain or title ("awesomebar info") of their tab. They could be looking for a site they use frequently ("slashdot"), or they might remember the content of a page that was opened awhile ago ("that article had 'bacon' in the title"). This user might know exactly that the tab looks like, but because of similar tabs they know a text search will be most efficient (ie finding that one Bugzilla page out of all the others).	Long-term memory, terms that "stick out"	Needs quick access to text field, thumbnails are useless until search query made
Text and visual seeker	This is the user that knows that tabs is somewhere, but doesn't remember it fully. It could be that they opened it so long ago that they forgotten what it looks like, or they remember part of the title but not enough to limit the search to one.	Short and Longterm	Needs to be able to scan through all tabs easily
Browser	This is a user who opens many tabs at once. It could be that they see tabs as "to-do" items for later, or open tabs to look at when they're bored, or simply never close their tabs and offload memory to keeping content open. This user may also want to delete certain tabs, or find that FIrefox is running slowly and want to delete many at once.	none	Needs to be able to delete items easily and quickly without opening them

Design

• Latest spec, November 2008
  • Mockups based on spec:
    
    

Other reference

• Dao's Control Tab extension page
• dev.apps discussion
• visual navigation wiki
• Possible feature wiki, June 2008
• Blog post: Tab View vs Application View, August 22 2008
• Blog post: Tabs Want to be Seen, August 20 2008
• Blog post: Control-Tab: A New Feature for Firefox, July 16 2008 (dear sweet jesus)

Status

The pre-3.5 code is on trunk, where it was landed as a basis for further work. That further work has happened in terms of implementing beltzner's proposal from November 2008. We need to wrap that up and take it as our new starting point.

Bugs

• bug 465076
  • implements beltzner's proposal
  • browser.allTabs.previews and browser.ctrlTab.previews hidden prefs default to false, allowing 3.6 to be shipped while the new UI is in limbo
  • patch ready for review
  • latest tryserver build