Thomas Bassetto

Let’s start my first post on MMTC pla­net.

As you may know, my first goal was to deve­lop an exten­sion which ena­ble us to paste an URL into the down­load mana­ger. This action should start the down­load of the file repre­sen­ted by the URL. The exten­sion was just the first part, then I plan­ned to create a bug on bug­zilla and sub­mit a patch on the Fire­fox trunk. The bug is filled (bug 506881) but as you can see it was mar­ked as RESOL­VED WONT­FIX :( I will finish my exten­sion any­way but I had to find a new pro­ject.

So I deci­ded to work on tabs.

I deci­ded to use the side­bar and remove the tra­di­tio­nal tab bar. Let’s ima­gine that you have less than X tabs (X will pro­ba­bly be cal­cu­la­ted from the size of your screen), Fire­fox will dis­play a side­bar with web­si­tes thumb­nails. Moreo­ver, the « new tab » but­ton will have a search field to create directly a tab with the search results.

Side­bar with thumb­nails accor­ding to Alexan­der Limi

Beyond a thre­shold, the tabs will look like a tree (see the exten­sion Tree­Sty­le­Tab), without the thumb­nails.

Tree-style tabs accor­ding to Alexan­der Limi

Those ideas are from Alexan­der Limi, a Mozilla employee. I encou­rage you to read his arti­cle Rein­ven­ting tabs for the brow­ser to bet­ter unders­tand the design pur­po­ses.

If I have more time, I plan to add « work spa­ces ». It’s like a box where you store a set of tabs, for later use.

Work spa­ces accor­ding to Aza Ras­kin