We need a thoughout integration of the desktop and the web - not Tab Candy superfast jellyfish
28 July 2010
This video demonstrates a new tab organising feature called 'Tab Candy' that might make it into a future version of Firefox. Lord help us all if it does.
Embedded below is the promo video:
Sorry, wrong video, below is the correct one, yank alert. (Aside question about the intro spiel: how can he use his browser more than his operating system since the former requires the latter?)
Tab Candy allows you to drag web pages (i.e. tabs) and organise them into little piles. The piles can then be saved, named and so on.
Thinking in terms of a Linux distribution, I am not sure how helpful Tab Candy really is. This seems to be the wrong level of the stack.
Tab Candy is just recreating GUI folders, albeit with a nice zoom out and more automatic groups. Tab Candy not only replicating the desktop, but it is dealing with symptoms of a more basic problem, rather than solving the problem itself.
Browsers are crap at saving Web pages
When you view a web page in the browser, it is represented in the navigation by one tab, this is good. However, on the filesystem, a webpage is represented by its composite fragments - the HTML file, Javascript and CSS includes, images and so on, this is really stupid. This difference makes webpages a second class object on the desktop.
A better approach would be to encapsulate a saved webpage into a single file (internally it could be a zip or similar). Then saving and sharing webpages would be much cleaner and would allow operating system graphical interface designers to create a more beautiful desktop.
Ideally the cache would save webpages in the same form, so saving a page is just copying the file from the cache, rather than downloading it again. The cached version of the page can then be in piles implemented at the desktop level rather than at the browser level.
Piles should be in the desktop shell
The piles being a desktop feature would allow the user to put other things into the piles too: pictures, PDFs, songs and so on. At the desktop level, the feature would be implemented in native code rather than an in-browser cross-platform Javascript mess.
Call me old fashioned but I want my GUI to be fast, efficient with resources and to get out of my way. I don't want browser-based bling using up all my RAM. As I moaned about in the last post, Firefox uses quite enough memory as it is; implementing a desktop GUI in Firefox is hardly a recipe for reducing its memory footprint. It is a recipe for more bloat.
What do you think? Should the browser become the desktop? Or should Firefox be faster and slimmer without these desktop-style features?
1 Rick says...
I already have piles. It's called A New Window.
Posted at 10:03 p.m. on July 28, 2010
2 Matija "hook" Šuklje says...
As a minimalist, you'll probybly moan if I mention KDE, but I'll do so anyway ;)
The future I want (and actually see slowly fold out before me) is to have open standards and protocols to bring my stuff to the net how I want it and from the net to my desktop. I trully feel that the net should be coming to the desktop and not the other way around.
What I see happening now is:
...so where I see myself in two years' time is using KDE (or other desktop) where I locally store my data and where I run specialised programs to use specific data (e.g. addressbook, mail client); which in turn would be connected to my plug computer where the data I would like to push around the net (to certain people); which in turn would be connected to other such nodes.
P.S. yeah, it's late, I've been sitting behind my laptop too long and very possibly what I just wrote is very incoherent ...sorry :
Posted at 12:16 a.m. on July 29, 2010
3 Giacomo says...
Honestly, I think both Mozilla and you are wrong :)
This sort of concept adds overhead. A user would have to manage all this crap, constantly dragging and dropping, creating piles etc? Man, I don't have time to manage the icons on my desktop, the docs in my Home folder, even my browser bookmarks... let alone my tabs!
The computer should be smart enough to do this sort of grouping for me. It should group by website, or by the website that originated the tab, especially if it's a search engine (those four results from Google about cameras? one group). And this just for starters; throw in Bayes and then we're talking about something that might be useful. Drag&drop should be a last resort; for day-to-day, the computer should be able to "read your mind" as much as possible.
There are already extensions out there to manage your tabs using the sort of paradigm used by Tab Candy. I tried them: after 5 minutes, I just can't be ar$ed to keep organizing and re-organizing tabs that I might just use for 5 seconds. Not worth it.
Posted at 9:06 a.m. on July 29, 2010
4 Dion Moult says...
What I do know is that ever since I tried out Opera and put their tab bar on the left as a column, I've loved that layout. Back on Firefox now and using the "Tab Kit" extension, which does it plus colour coding, hierarchies, and a godsend of a scrollbar, what I do know is that I'll never be able to stand using tabs conventionally as a horizontal bar at the top any more. I'm now comfortable using constantly in excess of 30 or so tabs at any one time.
Tab Candy? It definitely screams "bloat", but perhaps it's for the better. Conventional tabs no longer work in modern society. Perhaps it's just some new thing which you'll initially look upon with suspicion, but later learn to love it if you could just swallow your ideals and become a little bit more ... say, flexible?
Posted at 5:52 p.m. on July 29, 2010
5 karfau says...
I see two aspects:
First, doing things based on some kind of context, improves my productivity. When working with Eclipse, it was a great enhancement for me when I started using Mylyn (http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/). And alike I feel like being in control of my really cluttered Firefox-Tabbar again, since I use TabGroups Manager (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/) (in combination with BarTab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/ for the performance). This works great for me, and I think it is more like the way we are thinking/"our brain works" why this (contextual ordering) works so good.
And some more thoughts on performance, if I would use Tab Candy it would replace like 3 to 5 current add-ons, so maybe it is equally performant as my current setting, even with the added drag-drop and fluffy things... So for me the decision would be how robust/performant and feature-rich it will be in comparison to what I have now. And at the moment they support suggestions for all kind of stuff, I would revert to my current setting...
On the other side, just recently I'm recognizing that this way of browsing is letting me do even more things in "semi-parallel", so the mess gets even bigger. Mostly all those open tabs are something I really want to read, but something else distracted me or needed a higher priority. I think this is a side-effect of this flood of information one can be interested in and which is not the easiest thing to filter.
And yes, with base64 and all in-line-scripts and -styles, it should not be so difficult to save a page in one simple html-file or a "z(ipped)html" file, its completely out of my understanding why this is not inside the default FF-installation.
my 2 cents about all this
Posted at 4:31 a.m. on July 31, 2010