Next Generation Browser Tabs Sought
In the context of this year's Design Challenge, the Mozilla Foundation is looking for ideas on how to bring browser tabs into the next generation.
The theme for Mozilla's Design Challenge Summer 09, "Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?," seems like a joke at first. But on further reading the problem becomes clear. Browser users have become so used to tabs that a window will typically have 20 pages open, where the only identifiable hint to each site is the favicon on the tab.
The Mozilla Foundation is therefore looking for new concepts to make multi-tabbed windows more usable and overseeable. A few novel ideas are already out there. For example, tree tabs set up in a Windows Explorer-like hierarchical structure. From Michael Mahemoff, in a blog, we get a thumbnail of ideas to accompany his view that "the browser is the new operating system, the tab is the new system process, [and] the tab bar is the new taskbar."
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