[kibwen]

Is the "Tab Center" feature a prototype for an official version of tree-style tabs, perhaps? I've seen that Servo/browser.html was experimenting with tabs-on-the-side, I'd love to see this graduate to more than just an experiment.

[jgruen]

We don't know exactly what's going to happen with Tab Center--or any of these experiments--in the long run. Our goal here is to get feedback from our users to drive successive UX and engineering iterations.

Once experiments have incubated in Test Pilot for awhile, we will have a number of options depending on each experiment's overall success. We may push them over to AMO, or integrate them directly into the browser. If an experiment is really unsuccessful, we may simply cut our losses and walk away. Test Pilot should help us make these decisions more quickly and effectively.

We'll be blogging more about the overall Test Pilot pipeline in the weeks to come. Stay tuned!

[ploxiln]

What if nothing ultimately makes a significant proportion of users switch from Chrome to Firefox?

When will Mozilla stop flailing and just go back to making a good browser, like they did when they just had a couple thousand users? When they're fully defeated by the multi-market behemoth again?

I still appreciate that Mozilla saved the web from IE, and I still use firefox because it's not yet multi-process and thus not yet multi-gigabytes-memory.

[lmorchard]

Not to be too snarky, but we have more than a couple thousand users these days. You can round up any given thousand users and they will all give you different answers as to what "making a good browser" means.

[chuckharmston]

Potentially!

The simple story is that the current tabbing model in was designed to save you from needing half a dozen browser window open. It just doesn't scale well past a dozen tabs or so, and we know that some users have dozens or even hundreds open at the same time. Tab Center is taking a fresh look at the problem with that in mind.

[chongli]

The whole problem of a tab UI for power users with hundreds or even thousands of open tabs (like me) is mindblowingly daunting. I don't know that tabs on the side is the solution. For a long time I'd been using Tab Groups but I've been frustrated with its limitations.

Ideally, I think I'd like something similar to the spatial system of the Classic Mac OS Finder, which I coincidentally expounded upon recently in another thread[0]. Tab Groups goes part of the way there with its spatial organizational system but it lacks the hierarchy and persistence of those Classic folders and desktop.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11664984

[chuckharmston]

I agree, it is a daunting problem.

Another problem is that it's hard to experiment in the browser; the stakes are very high when bugs or poorly-conceived ideas quite literally break the internet for users. As a result, the development cycle is righteously slow (~18 weeks), the cost of landing code in Firefox is righteously high, and it's just a difficult environment to try new things.

On Test Pilot we aren't trying to build the solution, we're trying to find it. It's a different model of product development than we've historically had at Mozilla. In this case, side tabs are the start, but you can expect new features and concepts to start coming down the pipeline as we start gathering feedback and data about how people use them.

[reitanqild]

Did you try tree style tabs?

It solves the problem for me using a combination of auto indentation and auto collapsing of inactive tab trees.

[chongli]

My issue with systems like this is that they consume valuable horizontal real estate. Like most people, I use a widescreen monitor. To take full advantage of this, I use a tiling window manager (Xmonad) and typically use two browser windows side-by-side, akin to a full two-page broadsheet newspaper. Putting a tab bar on the side of each window would consume nearly 1/3 of the screen and generally get in the way of the content.

[greglindahl]

The Tab Center in test flight mostly collapses the side tab bar unless you hover over it.

[burfog]

I do hundreds of tabs. The UI is fine, but performance is not at all OK.

The tab UI works because it is part of a larger 3-level system. There are tabs, windows, and virtual desktops. With 10 at each level, you can handle 1000 tabs... except for the performance.

It's important to avoid running things on pages that aren't in focus or even in view. It's important to avoid walking data structures that scatter nodes all over the address space, causing swap access and cache misses. Watch your RSS. Keep those extra tabs idle. Make sure the "Esc" key and the stop button actually work, stopping everything (all tabs, all video, all animation, all audio, etc.) until the user explicitly asks for something to run again.

[morinted]

The side-tabs don't have any hierarchy, but already you can fit many more tabs and have them visible at once than the tabs-on-top.

I think the main thing that keeps tree tabs from happening is that it's an advanced concept for the everyday internet surfer, which is what Firefox has been trying to appeal to more and more lately.

[reitanqild]

The thing I think both Mozilla (it seems a few of you hang around here now) as well as others should understand is making certain feature switches available for end users.

Just because something isn't for everyone doesn't mean you can make a browser for everyone by removing said feature for everyone.

This should be obvious but thanks to what seems to be a certain kind of ux designers we are now stuck with lots of pixel perfect and consistent but otherwise broken and unusable apps.

[JupiterMoon]

I would love them to have an option to not use tabs at all. That is the window managers job.

[talmand]

I seem to recall various addons for Firefox over the years that would put tabs on the side. No idea on the current state of such things.

[plorkyeran]

There's been a lot of them, but none of them other than Tree-Style Tabs have been consistently maintained, so as someone that likes tabs on the side but doesn't like everything else TST does, I'd be happy to get off the treadmill of constantly switching to different side-tab plugins every time one breaks.