Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Tabs, Sidebar, Windows: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:25, 19 January 2007

« Firefox/Feature Brainstorming

Tab dragging to Desktop

Exemple : if I want to save some page to my personal directory and I just drag some tab to this directory and Firefox make an "Save as..." function.

Setup previously the function "Save as..." : only HTML, web page complete,...

Alternatively, and possibly more useful, dragging a link or tab to the desktop opens a new window with that link/tab. This would especially be useful for users with multiple monitors. The "Save As" behaviour can easily be accomplished with Free Download Manager's "Drop Box"

Split Windows/pages

Possible to open many pages within a single frame.
- Useful for widescreens, since many pages use a fixed-width column layout.
Horizontal splitting and maybe vertical.
- Yes ! a frame for my communautee, another one for my activity
'Close' would remove active frame.
Toolbar/urlbar changes to reflect active frame.
Key bindings for all major functions.
Mimicking the behavior of HTML-Kit's tiling options for both horizontal, vertical, and multiple would be ideal. Multiple would take the available space, split it horizontally up to 2 times giving 3 columns - then splits each column once vertically for additional browsing windows, once the last column has been split once, it duplicates the operation below the existing 6 browsing windows. This is different from extensions like Tab Catalog in that it uses all available space, and the windows can still be navigated and resized within the browser.

Advanced tab behaviour

Most of those possibilities exist with an extension: simplifying this one could be right...

Using a single browser window at all times
Setting behaviour of links (open in background, open in new tab)
Ability to turn tabbed browsing off, or at least no functional way to open links into tabs unless specified (e.g. right clicking a link and selecting 'open in new tab'). It's a great feature, but some people prefer the previous method.
Ability to open a tab in any specific window from any other window instead of just 'open link in new tab' or 'open link in new window', useful for organizing information during research
- perhaps it can be a third 'open link' option 'Open link in new tab in window...' with a submenu listing all available open windows

When the user selects 'Open in tabs' from an RSS bookmark the RSS pages should open in NEW tabs and not in the tabs already open.

Tab appearance

UI for modifying tab width (f.e. splitter between tabs that can be dragged to change the width of all tabs)
Options to have no title and Icon only with 32x32 icon with a close button located bottom right of the icon
Right-click tab and remove from Bookmarks
Allow changing tab background color or shading independent of selected theme

Tab strip

Allow to move the tabbar to the right or left, with vertical orientation. this is the best useful when count of tabs exceeds 10 items. vertical tabbar allows to easy use up to 30-40 of tabs. for FF2 i was create the extention, that move tabbar to the right (http://forum.mozilla-russia.org/viewtopic.php?pid=138440) and some simplify tabbrowser.
- When left or right are selected (or perhaps all the time), provide the ability to specify a fixed width for tabs/tab-bar.
- When left or right are selected provide option which displays tabs in a tree based on ancestry relation ship of a tab like in Tabbrowser Extensions
Allow to move some tabs (and not the whole tabbar) to the right or left or bottom. That would be a great feature to have a minimum ability to organize tabs when using a single window.
Display a new tab button on the tab strip by default - It's so much more intuitive and most browsers (apart from Fx) now have a new tab button as default in one way or another. Then it needs to be decided how:
- Static button (Opera)
- Dynamic button (IE7)
- Some other easily discoverable (i.e. not double-clicking a blank bit of the tab strip) method of opening blank tabs easily with the mouse?
Displaying tabs over multiple rows
Holding right click then move left and right it's not used to do anything, this moving may has benefit to switch each windows tab. It's useful with users that take so much time for moving mouse to switch manually.
Options to allow the tab strip in a sidebar in addition to or instead of the tab strip.
- This could also be combined with the tab system for tabs to manage tabs with ease. Each set of pages becomes a folder in the sidebar as well.
Create tab system for tabs! Simply a small strip of numbers directly above the tabs. Each number would have the same behaviour as a tab; however, instead of flipping between windows it flips sets of 5 (or more) tabs within the tab strip.
- This could also be combined with the tabs in a sidebar idea to manage tabs with ease. Each set of pages becomes a folder in the sidebar as well.
Larger space available for link dragging to the tab strip in order to open a new tab. A block area vs a thin strip would be more user friendly.
- This could also be combined with the tab system for tabs in two ways. 1) When tabs for tabs are not needed space used by it is used for link dragging area instead. 2) When tabs for tabs are in use it uses the empty area currently used for link dragging, then simply dragging a link to a set opens it in a new tab.
Enhancements in the tab strip behavior (working prototype)
- Double clicking on the tab strip left arrow scrolls to the beginning, and double clicking in the right arrow scrolls to the end.
- Add tooltip in the arrows informing how many tabs are in the left and right sides.
- If the user invokes the contextual menu on the arrows, show the tabs in that side as in the "list all tabs" popup.
- Default action in "list all tabs" button invokes a "tab exposé" functionality, while invoking the contextual menu shows the current list of all tabs popup.

Tab focus behaviour

Ability to "minimize" a tab, which would be the fastest way to go to the previous active/focused tab. Otherwise you either have to close it or remember where in the tabbar the previous one was placed!
- This sounds like focus last selected tab (the extension, and the functionality in many other extensions), which usually also allows clicking the current tab to return focus to the last selecting tab, making it easy to toggle between two tabs.

Tab Opening/Closing

Opening a new tab occurs directly to the right of the focused tab, not the far right. Resolves issues of too many tabs open and it being difficult to get to the newly opened tab.
Duplicating tabs
Tab opening + closing animation
When warning about closing multiple tabs, currently there are only two buttons: Close Tabs (which closes all the tabs) and Cancel (which closes nothing). Add a button that says Close Current Tab Only, which will only close the tab that was currently open before clicking on Close.
Improved UI for finding and reopening any one or more closed tabs (including shortcut key) (like the "recycle bin" feature in Opera)
Having one close-button on the right, BUT IT SHOULD BE ABLE TO BE TURNED OFF IN OPTIONS. This feature is nice, but looks icky to those who use the middle button (wheel mouse) to close tabs. Accidentally closed tabs result in this feature to unwilling users.
Undo-close caching
Undo close-tab
The close [X] button should only be shown on the open tab to prevent people from accidentally closing tabs upon selecting them. Close buttons on out-of-focus tabs should only show after a 1 second mouse-over.
Keyboard shortcut to undo close tab (ctrl-z or whatever) intead of the existing control+F4
Give the option in the preferences menu to allocate a 'unique' close tab button in the right like 1 and 1.5 versions of firefox instead of 1 close button per tab like Firefox 2
Changing the focus when closing a tab
Creating a new tab when an addr is typed in the Location bar
If you have A, B, C tabs in order, and you open a new tab from B (this becomes D) and then close it (D), then the active tab will be C instead of B, the last viewed. It would be also useful if a newly opened tab would appear beside the one that opened it.
Alternatively, if you have tabs A, B, and C, and open B1, B2 from B, then select B2 and close it, sibling B1 should be focused; close B1, no more siblings, so back to parent B.
- Example: Google search result page 1 (T1) -> Open 2 external links (T2, T3) -> go to search result page 2 (T1) -> Open 1 more external link (T4) -> Select it (T4) -> Close to focus T3 -> Close to focus T2.
- In the B1, B2 example (right above), after you close B2, B1 is focused; if now you select C, and close it, then B (not B1) should be focused because of the sibling rule.
- Tabs closed in background is not affected.
Option to open default page when creating a new tab
Make middle-clicking/open link in new tab work for javascript links (e.g. by duplicating current page in a new tab then executing the javascript on the new tab and forcing any 'pop-up' links to stay in that new tab)
"Open this tab in a new window" added to context menu (when right clicking on existing tab). Preserve history so back button works in new window just as it would on existing tab.
Select on close behavior
Allow "open in new tab/new window/same window" settings to be set per tab. Allows use of a home page like Google or Yahoo to open links in a new tab, but other tabs links can open in the same tab.
Allow opening new tab when domain name is different from current page
Allow opening in new tab for form submits. Allows user to type several consecutive searches into a search box while opening the results in new tabs in the background.
Allow relative opening of Tabs, i.e. child tabs open next to parent tab in opening order (and not at the end of Tab bar)
Multiple tab selection via Ctrl + left click on desired tabs. Feature would allow users to use the right click options on only the selected tabs. EXAMPLE: Right click on one of the selected tabs and select "Close Other Tabs" leaving only the selected tabs behind.
To save a lot of space, make the favicon on each tab into the "X" on hover.
Make the current tab not shrink with the others, so is more visible.
Copy the (back button) history of the current tab when a link is opened in a new tab (so that the user can go back in the new tab).
Allow the user to "lock open" a tab or window to prevent accidental closure. Implement an easy way of "undoing" the last window or tab closure.
A button on the right click menu (on web pages) to open all links on this page in new tabs
A button on the right click menu for back/forward to open the back or forward in a new tab
Have a configurable option so that when a user does "Open All In Tabs", they do NOT replace all the current tabs, but open IN ADDITION to the current tabs already open.
When middle-clicking / control-clicking to open in a new tab. Both RSS Feeds and bookmarks should open in a tab "behind" the rest, and not take focus like it currently does.
avoid having twice the same tab by checking before opening a new bookmark or typing an adress in the bar that the website is not already open. Then click a second time when you really want to open it twice. The tab may also "blink" (or any kind of animation) to prevent the fact that the tab was already open
When opening the "new window" option, the new window should remain with the present page as in Explorer, instead of going back to the home page.
Open link in new window with middle mouse button. GUI-configurable option.
Open different windows each as a new browser instance so that a crash in one does not take down all other instances.
Allow 'drag & drop' of links anywhere on the browser window (not just the tab bar) to open the link in a new background tab (e.g. 'drag & drop' links from Google Search Results/Google News/Digg Front Page etc. to open several background tabs)
Allow 'drag & drop' of selected text on a web page anywhere on the browser window to conduct search on the selected text using the default search engine and opening the search results in a new background tab
Multiple link selection
- Click and drag to select multiple links on a page
- Right click to open multiple link context menu
  - Open multiple links in new tabs
  - Open multiple links in new windows
  - Open multiple links in tabs in a new window.
Allow open a window in modal mode. To force the user to not click in the parent window if the modal windows is open.
The ability to drag a tab to an empty piece of desktop real estate (secondary monitor, fr'ex) and have it spawn as a new Firefox window.
Allow user to "Undo Close Tab" via right-click even when no tabs are currently open (Currently, you can only access "Undo Close Tab" via right-click if at least 2 tabs are open).
Allow Closing all tabs on the left or on the right of the current one

Often, we are browsing and opening many links on the right of the current tab. Also at organizing them, we would like to switch of topic. For example, all tabs on the left of the current one are not relevant anymore. To be able to close all tabs on left would be convenient.

Allow Closing all tabs except the ones which are on the same domain as the current one

That was self-explanatory.

Capability to mark tabs with color (an extension is already doing that)
Capability to close tabs with a given color

That functionnality needs to one just above to be already implemented.

Capability to close all tabs without a given color

That functionnality is acting on the complementary set of the one above.

Capability to protect a tab from being closed

Because among all the rules to close tabs which are explained above, we can have some exceptions.

Allow to have booth options to close a tab, either by a button on the tab and the right hand button. And all this customizable through the options dialog, not from "about:config".
Give a configurable option to open new tab for each typed direction in the bar.
Ability to group tabs by domain name in the options menu, or through right clicking open tabs--and the ability to close tabs by domain name as well (for example, close all tabs from google.com).
Ability to close multiple tabs at once by selecting them with the Shift key, either through Shift-clicks or by selecting a specific tab and scrolling left or right with the d-pad. Once all tabs are selected, they can be closed either through the CTRL-W command or by right-clicking one of the tabs and choosing a "close all selected" option. This would be very handy for people who use many tabs and would like an option easier than repeatedly hitting the close button.

Put the "new tab" icon in the Navigation bar by default (e.g. left of the Home icon) because it is one of the most frequently actions and please don't consider implementing anything like IE 7 by having a mini tab at the end of the last tab to open a new one because it becomes a moving target.

Send tabs to dock/system tray

This feature would better facilitate web applications such as email and calendars by providing access outside of a typical browsing sessions and help blend the lines with traditional desktop applications.

Allow sending of tabs to system tray (or platform equivalent) by providing an option to save them as executable bookmarks in the "Save Page As..." window.
Allow users to download executable bookmarks as if they were true applications. The executable bookmark would thus have to check if FireFox is installed and prompt to download it if not.
Allow web applications to link to an application icon for use in docs/trays and application switchers. Should allow and recommend vector images to encourage proper icons. Something like this: <link rel="appicon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/path/icon.svg" />
If a "home" link is provided (<link rel="home" href="url" />), honor it when loading a new tab when the web application icon is executed.

Additional browser events

Allow "triggers" to be set 1) before FF attempts to start downloading a page, 2) when the page has been downloaded but not yet rendered, 3) after a page has finished loading. Ideally, the triggers would either be external applications, or maybe even a funky python plugin framework - if this feature is added, _please_ don't make me have o write nasty javascript for my triggers! Thx :-)

Location bar and unavailable URLs

Allow navigation toolbar to show URL's that are as-yet, not loaded: if you open a link in a new tab, and that web site is down, you end up with an empty tab with no URL shown. If you've got lots of tabs open, it is very useful to know what should be displayed on the empty tab. I suggest that when a URL is attempted to be opened in a new tab, FF displays the URL in the tab, but shows it "grayed out" (but still selectable!)

Isolated tabs

Add Isolated Tabbed Windows: This is to ensure each tabbed windows does not leak over to another window eg: HTTPS sites. Simplest way to test, Goto your bank's website (make sure you got 2 different accounts usually your wife's account would be good to test if she is with the same bank) log into your account with one tab, log into your second account in another tab, navigate to your second account's summary view, then go back to 1 first tab and do the same. You will notice that both summaries are from the secondary account.

Attach/Detach Tabs

A right-click option to pop an existing tab (or a selection of tabs) out into a new window.
The ability to drag a tab from one window to another.
- And by holding ctrl this would result in duplicating the tab, by holding shift you would move it (this is also default behaviour, but the default should be reconfigurable). Those keys are what Windows uses when dragging files to choose between copy and move. You could then also drag the tab the same window, hold ctrl, and hence duplicate the tab in the same window.
- This should copy over the full DOM state, AJAX and forms would otherwise cause dataloss.
The ability to close one browser while keeping selected tabs open in new window.
The ability to drag a tab from one browser to another (maybe a web site does not open correctly in firefox, but works great in Safari, you could drag the tab to the known good browser, or if you are a web site developer, you could test your site in different browsers by dragging the tab over).

Thunderbird/Sunbird Tabs

Thunderbird Tab -- Opens Thunderbird within a tab rather than a separate Thunderbird window
Sunbird Tab -- Opens Sunbird within a tab rather than a separate Sunbird window

Tab Groups/Stacks

Tab Grouping by Domain and Tab Grouping by Originating Page (eg. if I open a Page from Tab A then it will be in the same group as Tab A). A group maybe as simple as having a coloured border around the tabs in the same group.
Alternatively, an option to have tabs open next to the current tab. This solves the problem of having all your links from different tabs open in the same place, and helps with sorting tabs, because all the links from one website are next to each other.
Tab collections used to organize tabs, think Linux virtual desktops
Saving tabs
Customizing tab groups
Nested tabs (eg. drag tabs into a tab) and multiple rows of tabs (see this mockup: media:Nested-tabs.png).
Tab stacks
Tabs can be grouped into dynamic folders. When one folder is double clicked on it breaks open, sliding out the tabs contained in it. The surrounding tabs shrink as those tabs coming out of the folder pushes them away. Over time (like a spring) all the tabs eventually become evenly distributed along the tab bar.

References

On Tabs

Custom tab grouping with popup menu enabled by a mouseover action. It's not something unknown, almost every serious site has a mouseover popup menu. It functionality is great because there's no need of adding more buttons and every nested Tab is even less than one click away.

You can see an example here:http://www.powweb.com/powweb/index.bml Place you mouse over products or company.

Session saving/management

Support session savings. Enables the user to save a session where he/she has, say, 18 tabs open, to another time.
Implement some method to deal with session sets
Make session restore fast and precise (save and restore DOM, or use FastBack data)
Add "email all tabs" option in list of right click tab options
- Emailing tabs doesn't sound like something many people use, but perhaps we need a context menu editor that allows users to add things like this.

References

SessionSaver - MZKB
SessionSaver - UMO
SessionSaver (rewrite) - MZForum
Session Manager Ext
Tab Mix Plus with Session Managment
Add optional prompt to choose between a new session or the last session restored on loading the program.
Support multiple session saving, with the ability for uers to open previously saved sessions from the HD.
Saving sessions to the HD should be done in a format that is easily editable, so that extensions and external programs can easily manipulate sessions (splitting them comes to mind, along with creating new ones from scratch). An XML based format seems perfect.

Tab overflow

Tab queueing. The option set a max. number of loaded and visible tabs, and when one closes, another one opens in sequence. To enqueue a tab, there would be an option in the context menu, and there would be an option for direct replacemnt of tabs/tab switching so that when you close tab #4 in a max ten tab set, tab # 17 can open, as opposed to tab #11.
Add arrows to the right and left ends of the tab bar when it gets full to unhide/allow to see all tabs
Allow an option to have more then one tab bar, especially for commonly used tabs.
Tab Mix Plus extension allowed multiple rows of tabs and that worked great (for me at least), except of course it doesn't look like a tab anymore. Give users the ability in the options dialog to configure the minimum tab width and the style of tab overflow (multirow with vertical arrows or horizontal scrolling arrows). Depending on this choice tabs are either shown "blending" into the window below , for single row tabs, or as seperate "buttons". Another possibility is to make it look as if tabs are "behind" eachother, and the appropriate row jumps to the front. Microsoft Windows behaves like this, but it can make it difficult see the real order of the tabs.
Another possible method to handle tab overflow : Automatically spawn a new window.
Make the tab overflow left and right arrows in Firefox 2.0 to be draggable; that is, instead of moving 1 tab at a time on click, you can also drag it to act like the scrollbar middle box.
Expend tab when the arrow above it like in the Mac dock.
I would like to suggest when there are open several tabs, the arrows that control the visualization of tabs are driven automatically when mouse is placed on them.
- Personally, I find it annoying if things start scrolling without me doing something explicit... something for the options dialog?
The following two suggestions can already be done in Firefox 2.0, but have not via the options dialog :
- I prefered Firefox 1.5 tabs. Just shrink those tabs until they fit. An arrow doesn't tell me much about the tabs it represents. A large amount of tiny tabs tells me there are a lot of tabs on that page. This would be especially cool in combination with the "Expand tab like in the Mac dock" suggestion also mentioned here. (Or add an option to choose behavior.)
- I also liked the close-tab-button on the tab-bar and not per-tab like in FF 2. I prefer to be able to quickly close a bunch of tabs by clicking a fixed position. (Or add an option to choose behavior.)

Window-like tab behaviour within Fx window

Allow multiple tabs to open to vertically or horizontally on the same screen.
Tab docking like window docking in Visual Studio .NET to be able to drag a tab and dock it with its content to one side of the window. This would allow displaying tabs side by side.
Display multiple tabs in tiled panes (both vertical and horizontal panes, preferably mixed.
Cascade tabs
Allow for windowblind treatment of tabs
Allow tabs to not be full window. If a js opened window is redirected to a tab, and the size is smaller then the window, make the tab like a little window inside the window.
Option to make a window / popup sticky and always-on-top (Would be nice for watching a video in a popup while surfing). this option MUST ONLY be available for the user not for scripts!
Allow to do a "spreadsheet like behaviour on a web page" : you can click on th tag to say "freeze up" , and when you move the cursor down the lower part of the page is scrolling down, the upper part stay unmoved,

Tab switching/expose

Tab exposé
Option to view tabs in sidebar (with thumbnails)
Show all open tags in a browser window organized by miniatures like the F12 function of Xgl or the same function of MacOsX Expose.
Switching tabs with mouse whell (like Konqeror or Epiphany on Linux)
Option to send tabs to the bottom right of the browser, much like sending a program to the taskbar in windows. The tab would be represented by its icon with a mouseover description; clicking on that icon would restore the tab to either its original place or the end of the tab bar depending on a selectable option.
When pressing control-tab on the keyboard to switch tabs, switch them in most recently used order, instead of numeric order. This would match the alt-tab program switching behavior of windows. Opera by default also switches tabs in this order.
When pressing control-tab on the keyboard to switch tabs, show a window with a menu of all tabs as long as the ctrl key is held. This will allow you to see the full title of each tab, and a larger icon. Again, this matches the alt-tab program switching behavior of windows (and Opera). An enhancement to this would be to allow a tab to be clicked on from here, too.

References

Tab search

Tab search

Sidebar

Option to open "Options" menu in sidebar, for convenience when changing/reverting settings temporarily
Sidebar animation
Allow the windows from downloads,extensions,bookmarks and history to dock as sidebars. A bit like the extension All-In-One-Sidebar (Or Opera).

Split the sidebar vertically; and show the buttons in the left strip and the details in the right strip.

When showing the favorites, split the right-side of this composite sidebar. The upper part should show the folders, and the lower part should shows the URLs belonging to the selected folder in the upper part.
Better handling of multiple searches in different windows (see Bug 45082)
Ability to be able to change how the sidebar appears on the screen (i.e. Where you want the sidebar to be docked on the right-hand side of the screen, top of the horizontally or even bottom of the screen horizontally) without the need for scripts. Also have a preferences option to set the default appearance would be nice as well.
- I like All-In-One-Sidebar even though it seems to greatly slows downloads. As a side note, what would be interesting( although perhaps annoying to many Firefox users, including myself) would be if such a sidebar behaved similarly to that of the Mac OSX dock (RK Launcher or QuickDock applications in Windows). --Armaetin 18:21, 18 January 2007 (PST)

Multiple sidebars

Possibility to add another sidebar on the right (useful especially with wide-screen monitors)

Options

Setting tabs to refresh every X seconds.
Turning off the close button on every tab.
pienso que debe existir un aviso cuando se instale un sidebar desde internet o cualquier programa desde internet y que firefox avise que si quiere ser instalado o no para asi evitar barras de busqueda molestas o dialers de paginas inseguras, ademas pienso que debe existir un menu en el que des click con el boton derecho del mouse y te apoarezcan todas las pesta�as abiertas por que andar navegando entre varias pesta�as cuando son muchas pesta�as hasta encontrar la que buscas es algo molesto, bueno por lo pronto es lo que se se ocurre y espero que sea tomado en cuenta, gracias.

Various

select tab from command line mozilla -remote "selecttab(http://www.mozilla.org)"
Shading of Tabs denoting time since it started (On the scale of white to black, white is more recent than black); corresponding extension: Aging Tabs
Faster tab mouseover feedback, i.e. show in status bar or set tooltip delay to 0
More detailed tab mouseover feedback, i.e. thumbnail image of page with some options on what you want to do with this page like bookmark it, reload tab, protect tab without right clicking it
A right click option for when highlighting plain text urls to open in new tab as opposed to having to copy then paste in a new tab address bar; available as an add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1864/
Ability to change tab titles and save tab titles so that when you enter the site again you will see your own tab titles (Different from page title)
Sort tab according to time opened, title, time idle
Tabbed source viewer
dual screened tabs. two tabs showing in the same window pane, almost like frames. with ability to drag and resize viewing area between the two tabs.
Create a way to rotate a window in four directions to allow viewing long web pages on a laptop by rotating the laptop sideways. This is one of my favorite commands in Preview in Mac OS X. Please make sure the command to do and undo this can be made a shortcut.
Widescreen browsing : split long web pages into two windows side by side. Sync scroll bar in order that scrolling the first one (top of web page) will scroll the second one (rest of the same web page).
Scroll Bar Re-position-- allow the right side scroll bar to be moved to the left side screen. Or even placed in the middle... having to move the cursor all around from menus to scroll bars etc... to the right side and then to top and botton is a PITA. (It could be placed on a column separator by user for convenience )... I keep panels at the top with menus, so the same could apply to the bottom scroll bar: allow it to be placed at the top just under the menu's or tabs.
Scroll Bar Status: For very long pages, more info is needed rather than just the shaded scroll: place 1) an equivalent line number 2) an equivalent page number 3) a percentage number of the page: in order to help fine adjustment positioning or a reference point.
View screenshot of all available tabs. (Similar to Ctrl-Q or respective keys in IE7). Be able to close tabs from here or switch to any of these tabs.
Text readability improvements: 1)button/keybind to automatically narrow text to a pre-configured width - text extending accross the whole width of the window is cumbersome to read - possibly configurable to multi-column mode; 2)"Visibility imprint" - on quick scroll operations (PgUP, PgDn, mousewheel...) the previously visible area should be delimited by a frame/line for a certain period of time, after which the frame disappears or fades out, so it's easier to find the last read line; and 3)Improved automatic scrolling: finer control for very slow scrolling and freeing up the mouse. Like current autoscrolling, only finer controls (the current slowest is still too fast) and the possibility to detach the mouse, for instance by re-clicking the middle button, upon which the mouse is free to move but the page continues autoscrolling.
Scroll document with middle mouse button click-drag-release. The reverse to the familiar glove that moves the document. This behaviour maps to how scrollwheels/scrollballs work, which often also occupy middle mouse button.
"Application Mode" - allow web applications to act more like native applications. Give them the ability to have their own launcher from the Start Menu or Dock, and their own icon and process so that the OS can treat apps like gmail just like any other app. Currently such apps are labelled "Firefox" by the OS. Hide unnecessary GUI elements such as Bookmarks bar and Address bar in this mode, for more screen real estate. (Very nice idead - i think you can make something like this with 5 lines of VB but launching firefox.exe -appmode -url http... would be cool! When the Browser runs in appmode there JS should allowed to modify the window's behavior)
Auto-fix tabs whose pages containing user-changed data in input or textarea fields (asking confirmation when attempting to close)
In addition to the current "block all pop-ups except from this site list" option, also have "block pop-ups from this site list"
Add a global see of the tabs, as on IE 7, it's very useful, you can do it on the back of the right tabs arrow.

References

Tab recovery after a crash

This would be useful when windows or firefox crash when you are opening ~5+ tabs...

Already in Firefox 2.0

Why using "Tabs recovery" ONLY after a crash ? We can imagine to configure Firefox to open, at startup, number of Tabs configured, on address configured. Like we have the "Default startup page link" to configure on our broswer(s), we can imagine to have on Firefox to have to configure many "Default startup page" opened by Firefox on different Tabs at startup. (fr)

Tabs permissions

This would be useful to can set permissions for each tab (enable/disable javascript, images, frames, redirections, extentions, referer, etc...)

Tab dragging

When you drag a tab from one window to another, close the original tab and copy the history (back, forward, etc.) to the new window

Unclose tabs

Make the unclose tab a button able to be dragged into the menu bars, si it can be reached much more easily. The way it is now makes that if you have only 1 tab (and you have enabled the option to hide the tab's bar if there's inly 1) you got to open a new tab just for unclose.
- There is an extension for this, but completely I agree; there should be a button to open a recently closed tab. --Armaetin 18:25, 18 January 2007 (PST)

Tabbar; Sidebar; Previews

Have the ability to position the tabbar anywhere on the window using Customize Toolbar. (Below or just above the status bar. Above or below the navigational bar or at the top of the window.)
Also moving it to the right or left of the window should put the tabbar in the sidebar either on the left or right of the window.
Have an option to be able to view previews of each tab in the sidebar, (aswell as the normal tabbar or when putting the tabbar in the sidebar using the method above) in a new special tab or through clicking on Tools > Preview Tabs.

Tab Status

When webpages are loading in tabs indicate the percentage that has already downloaded (show the percentage on each tab).
- Should be optional, to avoid clutter. --Armaetin 23:49, 12 January 2007 (PST)

Open Link in Same Tab

Sometimes the user and the web designer disagrees over whether a link should open in a new window. While there has been many ways for the user to force a link to open in a new window, there has been few options available to force a link to open in the SAME window. Sometimes the user does not want a new window to open. The following features aim to rectify this situation:
- New keyboard shortcut (a modifier key + left click combo) for forcing a link to open in the same window (which really should not conflict with pre-existing keyboard shortcuts in SeaMonkey, Safari, et al).
- New contextual menu option that reads "Open Link in Same Tab," or perhaps "Open Link in Same Window" when the tab bar is hidden.
- While hovering over a link, the "hand" cursor will change to having a plus sign next to it, to indicate that the link will open in a new window. This is in order to help prevent unwanted opening of a new window. This portion of the idea was also cross-posted at Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Other or Uncategorized#Mouse cursor variation because at first it didn't really seem to fit in here, albeit being related.
- When a new window is opened by accident, a way to "undo" this action by "stitching" the page back into the same window. This action will be accessible from the menu bar. It will destroy the unwanted new window and move the loaded page back into the original window, creating a new entry in the browsing history of that window as if the link was never opened in a new window in the first place. (Note: Where I say "new window," I really mean "new window or new tab" most of the time, since Firefox now has an option to open links by default in new tabs instead. This was abbreviated to make the text more legible.)

- (addition to original posting) There is a power feature in Firefox that allows you to click the middle button and open the link in a new tab. This feature is not well advertised and perhaps should be. It is very useful when browsing through google search results, and if you want to keep the original results in a separate tab. There are a couple of related right click menu items:

== Open Link in New Tab == and == Open Link in New Window ==. This menu could be enhanced to add: == Open Link in Same Tab == (along the lines of this original posting). This would override web page behavior that launches a new window. Also the user preferences could be enhanced to allow choosing of which of the middle click behaviors you would like to default to; ie. Open Link in New/Same Tab or Window.

Hide Tabbar

Have an option to be able to hide the tabbar (even when more than one tabs are open) using a keyboard shortcut.
Have an option to have the tabbar auto-hide when the mouse is not hovering over it.

Full Screen

Have the ability to choose what you want hidden when you toggle full screen. (Tabbar, Navigation Toolbar, Status Bar, Extension Toolbars, etc.)

I use the extension Full Fullscreen to get rid of the Navigation Toolbar and Tabbar when using full screen so I have the full monitor to display the webpage.

In 3.0 it would be nice to have the full screen, but not having to use the Full Fullscreen add-on as it does not show a address bar. It would be nice to have it so that when entering full screen it goes up. Then when you mouse over at the very top it comes back down.

Link drag&drop between Tabs

Practical Example: in my browsing session i have _many_ open tabs and there's a link in the specific page i'm reading that i want to open between two tabs because i want that specific info right beside a specific tab.

How? "CTRL+mouse1" to select the link and "drag&drop" between tabs to open it right there where is dropped. To show an arrow would be useful to know when to drop the link between tabs. (just like when you move one tab)
- Good news: this is already possible, at least in 1.5 (not tested on 2). Just left-click and drag your link to the tab-bar, and there will be an arrow if you drop between tabs. DAllen 07:29, 13 January 2007 (PST)

Last Tab stretches all the way to end

Pre-ff2.0 behavior of closing tabs was that there was a close button on the right of the tabs and you just had to click it multiple times to close tabs, since ff2.0 the close button is now on the actual tabs. Although it is nicer it has the disadvantage that you have to move the mouse to each tab to close it. I propose that the last tab should stretch to the end so when you need to close lots of tabs the close button of the last tab always appears on the right, which will result in less mouse movement.
- So basically don't have a maximum width for your tabs, then the last tab will always be "stretched" to rightmost end of the tabbar. Along with control over the minimum tab width, this should be controllable from the options pane, the "tab" tab in the options pane has plenty of room!
  - This should be optional and turned off by default. --Armaetin 23:34, 12 January 2007 (PST)

Saving "opened-tabs-sessions"

- example: when you are browsing webpages and like 10 different tabs are open, here should be a "save session" (or something) button.

- effect: it stores the urls of the currently opened sites, and next time when you open ff, and click on "open session" and select the previous session you saved, all of the tabs would reopen. (either reloading the whole stuff or from the cache...)

Visibility and audibility

Because changing to a different tab changes focus of the visual part of a website, it would only make sense that an invisible tab can't be heard either. After all, being able to hear all tabs at once is about as sensible as having all tabs overlaying eachother transparantly. Sites with background music that can't be turned off have to be closed now to get rid of the noise, which can be undesirable if you were still interested in other content of the page but want to switch to other tabs and keep the page with background music (or other audio) for later.

Of course, sometimes there are websites that do have useful audio features (for example a jukebox site or something like that with streaming music). In that case the above suggested "tab permissions" could allow you to give a tab permission to play audio all the time, even without focus.

A totally different approach

After coming across suggestions like having the browser split down the middle to see 2 tabs at once and opening tabs in the sidebar I came to the conclusion that there might be a lot of users that could appreciate a classic MDI approach. MDI as in Multiple Document Interface . Imagine that every tab you have open is like an open Adobe Photoshop document (can't think of another example right now, Microsoft Word used to work like this as well but Office XP Word seems to open new windows for each document). It has it's own "mini window" inside the Firefox Window container, the parent window. This would allow you to place them side by side and "split" firefox in 2, you could even have 4 pages open at the same time or more, maximizing one tab would integrate it with the main firefox parent window with small close/minimize/previous size buttons below the equivalent parent window's buttons. As you can read on the wiki this interface type is criticized often, but also has appealing benefits, because it basically allows you to treat websites as the documents that they really are, comparing them side by side and things that you generally need two windows for. But you still keep the single taskbar item of course. The sidebar could provide an easy overview of all open tabs, negating the primary problem of this type of interface. This would also mean that popups are treated the same as tabs, because they really are nothing more than other windows, except now they can be inside the parent container!

This functionality would be most useful to me when editing webpages, so that I can open the source and various versions of the same page at once and overview them all. When having a ton of open tabs this would become a very troublesome interface I expect. The statusbar could additionally double as a "taskbar", to contain minimized tabs.

Exposé integration

I'd like to expand on the above ideas for "tab exposé" features.

My motivation is from switching to using a Macintosh at home. I use Exposé much more frequently than I thought I would, and want to see its power available to Firefox 3.

Two thoughts:

There should be a "split these chosen tabs into windows" and "join these chosen windows into tabs" feature. With that addition, I could easily use mac's exposé (and presumably linux users could use their available exposé as well).

Additionally, there should be a feature to minimize all tabs on a window to graphical thumbnails, in-place in the window. The thumbnails should be movable, which might also move the order of the tabs. Possibly the amount of zoom should be customizable, so there can be variable amounts of empty (grey?) space around the tabs. Possibly, if there is empty space available, the thumbnails should be able to be user-clustered so they aren't in a rigid grid, but rather more like icons on the desktop. Possibly, this should include the entire webpage not just the subwindow currently visible on the main screen. Of course, this would need sanity-checks, but instantly viewing all pages at 10x zoom out would give the user more context for their webpages and tabs.

Basically, I'm looking for an expansion from linear tabs to two-d (three d?) thumbnail representations of the webpage, where the positioning is optionally chosen by the user.

See my userpage for more thoughts on these: DAllen 05:43, 13 January 2007 (PST)

Open multiple URL (in multiple tabs)

A way to open multiple pages at once. A File > Open multiple pages dialog window with a multiple-line textbox where each filled line would result in opening one tab.

Example:
Snapshot example
When the OK button is clicked, three new tabs are created:

one for http://www.firefox.fr
one for www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/
one for wp Firefox (uses the keyworded "wp" bookmark)
- Or perhaps we should be able to open multiple pages via something like this typed into the address bar: http://www.examplepage.com,http://www.blah.com
  If the comma or semicolon cannot be used as a separator of URLs, then another symbol should work just fine. Maybe a comma or semicolon followed by a space.

@@ Line 319: / Line 319: @@
 == Unclose tabs ==
 * Make the unclose tab a button able to be dragged into the menu bars, si it can be reached much more easily. The way it is now makes that if you have only 1 tab  (and you have enabled the option to hide the tab's bar if there's inly 1) you got to open a new tab just for unclose.
+**There is an extension for this, but completely I agree; there should be a button to open a recently closed tab. --[[User:Armaetin|Armaetin]] 18:25, 18 January 2007 (PST)
 == Tabbar; Sidebar; Previews ==