Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Tabs, Sidebar, Windows

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Contents

Open Current Window In Sidebar

  • Opens a special sidebar that displays the current page
  • All links from the sidebar target the current page's tab
  • A special button at the top to close the sidebar, and reload the page into the current page tab.
  • Would be extremely useful for research: click on each result of a search in turn, without the normal middle clicking of each link followed by the closing each newly opened temporary tab.
  • Very nice for high-resolution monitors, more screen real estate can be utilized.

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.

References

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)
 *edit: opening links from webpage-links, bookmarks, history, search field, address bar should be ALL configurable to open in new tab or not, just like with TMP extension.
  • Ability to turn tabbed browsing off, with a simple check box, 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 drag and drop a tab from one window to another without it having to reload. What if I am filling out a form and I move the tab in the middle of the process?
  • 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.
  • Have a button to fit images and text into the width of the window
  • "Tearable Tabs" - Ability to tear off a tab to spawn a new browser window...similar to how some programs let you tear off their menus or toolbars. (It would be good enough for me to just right click on the tab and select "Show in a Window". -User:Jra)
    • Good idea, but are you aware of the "Tab to Window" extension? --Armaetin 04:56, 23 August 2007 (PDT)
    • I like the old system - can we have a choice between behaviours? See below: 'Dragging Tabs to Desktop/Directories'
  • Allow the Open link in a new tab function behaves just like in IE: when acessing this function (via Ctrl+LeftMouseButton, MiddleMouseButton or via Context Menu), the link opens in new tab which is adjacent to the current tab. This way, the tabs are kept grouped by subject. It will be very useful for those who uses many tabs at the same time (I think the most of Firefox users), and for a long time I want an implementation like that! :)
    • A possible improvement: make it just for the Ctrl+LeftMouseButton and MiddleMouseButton; for the Context Menu, the new link opens after the last tab openned (the current behavior in Firefox 2.0).
    • edit: make it also for Duplicate Tab function!--F u r u y á 22:12, 8 July 2007 (PDT)
    • I very much like the tab grouping. In Firefox 3.0, there are extensions to do this somewhat, I however, miss Tab Mix Plus.See my page for example.
  • Javascript toggle on each tab to turn Javascipt off per tab view thereby preventing malware from MySpace and similar websites infecting the system or generally using too many resources unnecessarily.
    • There are extensions that allow this, examples are: Stop Autoplay(which I do use, stops all Flash animations), Flashblock(think it does the same thing), and NoScript(Which can stop any and all JavaScript, Flash, Shockwave, or Java code on any page). These are all enabled or disabled immediately at your option.
  • Ability to collapse a free standing window into a tab. That is to drag a new window back into the tab space menu.
  • colorizing the active tab should be a must to stand out from the other tabs.
    • I also would like to be able to colorize unread tabs to stand out from the other tabs. Both options were available in Tab Mix Plus. See my page for more details.
  • Duplicate Tab | Right-Clicking on Current tab provides Menu Option to Duplicate window to new tab
    • Useful for web applications (CMS Admin's etc)
  • Option for tab name marquee (or it switches between two names periodically eg. Digg for ten seconds, then Technology for ten seconds) or double click tab name to rename with option to use use new name for website by default
  • When multiple tabs are open with the same web service login, for example "Google Docs", ability to logout from all of them when logout from one.
  • The ability to select multiple tabs in a window by shift+click or ctrl+click for the purpose of dragging multiple tabs into a new window or location.

Tab appearance

  • Display a sound icon (e.g. the speaker with waves) when a certain tab is outputting sound. This prevents you from closing the tab which contains the media (e.g a YouTube Video) you are listening to. Useful when you have multiple Facebook or Youtube tabs opened at the same time.
  • UI for modifying tab width (f.e. splitter between tabs that can be dragged to change the width of all tabs)
    • Maybe take the windows taskbar idea to it, letting users lock and unlock (which would allow resizing tabs to desired width) it. --FlyingIsFun1217 06:04, 13 February 2007 (PST)
  • 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
  • Allow the close tab button to be moved to the left side of the tab (or hidden from view) --Richard Lee 01 March 2007 (GMT)
  • Some way of grouping tabs into "ideas". For example say I'm looking at football news and open a tab to research a player, whilst at the same researching cats for a school project I'd like a way to group the related tabs by both colour and location on the tab bar, I'd also like to be able to close all related tabs at once. Maybe even expand this into some form of mind map view of my browsing on a particular subject.
  • Tab Context-menu has icons for all items, namely New Tab (New tab icon), Reload (Reload icon), Bookmark This Tab (Star icon), Close Tab (usual X button icon)

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 tab browser.
    • 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 behavior 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.
  • Multi-row tab strip
    • When tab strip becomes too crowded a new row appears
    • Or allow tab strip to be resized vertically (like Window's Taskbar) to allow multiple rows of tabs
    • Simple solution to the many tab problem
    • Easy for all users to understand
    • See text editor UltraEdit (Windows only) for another example

Tab focus behavior

  • 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.
  • Option for disable sounds coming from non-active tabs. Often there are a lot of commercials or flash-intros playing sounds at the same time when opening a lot of pages in new tabs (i.e. opening the first 10 hits on a search-page).

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 + switching animation
  • Add a force close option under the right-click menu from a tab. Force close should completely bypass web page codes that trap close or navigate-away actions. The browser should immediately stop all operation on that page and simply close the tab. This would prevent malicious websites from hijacking user consent to navigate away from a page.
  • 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.
  • Provide a user sub-option to: receive the warning when closing multiple tabs, EXCEPT when closing Firefox from the Exit command in the File menu. The current need to respond to many sequential warnings when one is intentionally closing all windows (exiting) is silly and frustrating.
  • 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
  • Keyboard shortcut to undo close tab (ctrl-z or whatever) instead 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 address 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. Locking a tab should open links in another one (right next to it is most confortable ;), links from flash should too.
  • 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 address 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
  • When clicking on the mouse's middle button (wheel) on a tab, it should duplicate it instead of closing it. Just like with links.
    • 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
  • Capability to close all tabs without a given color

That functionality 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.
    • This is exactly the function that I miss!
  • 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.
  • If "Close other tabs" is chosen from the tab context menu, Firefox should bypass the "confirm closing multiple tabs" warning.
  • When closing a tab Firefox should restore the previously open tab. For example, if I open a tab from gmail, when I close that tab it should go back to the gmail tab I was just using, instead of the tab to the left of the new tab.
  • When closing a tab Firefox should remember the history of active tabs to return to the previously active tab. This history should track all tabs opened. For example if I open a new tab by clicking on a link in Google Reader that takes me to a site and I click a link on that site that opens another new tab then Firefox should take me back to the previous site when I close that tab and then back to Google reader when I close that tab as well.

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 behavior, 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
    • Three reasons this won't (well, SHOULDN'T) happen: Thunderbird and Sunbird are both extra software titles that can be downloaded from Mozilla, not required things to be able to run Firefox, so adding something like this will only bother users who don't want it. Second reason is that something like this would be better as an extension, so it probably will be kept as such. Third, This basically reproduces parts of the Mozilla suite, so if you need something like this, it would be best to just use Seamonkey. --FlyingIsFun1217 06:12, 13 February 2007 (PST)

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
    • This sounds really nice. I would like to see it. See below.
  • 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: New tabs open at the top of the stack. When the tab at the top of the stack is closed, the next tab in the stack opens. Allow users to move tabs around in the stack, and preview tabs in the stack.
  • 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
  • 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.

  • Ability to save tabs like when you close firefox with ctrl+alt+supr and you restore the tabs you had.

See: bug 505214 ("Implement Workspaces").

Darkangel 20:54, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Session saving/management

  • Support session savings. Enables the user to save a session where he/she has, say, 18 tabs open, to another time.
    • You can do this using Tab Mix Plus with pre-Firefox 3.0, which does include a session manager with this feature. And in Firefox 2.0 or later, you can use an extension called...Session Manager!!! Also allows you to do this.
  • Implement some method to deal with session sets
  • Make session restore fast and precise (save and restore DOM, or use FastBack data)
  • Have a way to drop down a list of the URLs that were open in the last session, when asking whether to restore the session or start anew; sometimes the user can't remember what was open in the last session.

-Jevon 16:41, 16 May 2007 (PDT)

    • I would like to see this in either one of the session manager extensions(using Session Manager now), or in Firefox itself, but only if user could save session themselves at any time(like above).
  • 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

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.
  • Multi-row tab strip
    • When tab strip becomes too crowded a new row appears
    • Or allow tab strip to be resized vertically to allow multiple rows of tabs
    • Simple solution to the many tab problem
    • Easy for all users to understand
      • Not radically different than existing Tab interface
      • All tabs are visible together
      • Can accommodates a large number of tabs
      • Tabs are easy targets for the mouse compared with solutions that force the user to click on tiny arrows
      • Does not require multiple options to be set which only caters to 'advanced users'
    • Examples of this functionality include,
      • Window's Taskbar (resize vertically for multiple 'tabs')
      • UltraEdit text editor
  • Another possible method to handle tab overflow : Automatically spawn a new window.
    • This solution defeats the purpose of tabs
  • 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.
    • Does not allow all tabs to be visible
  • 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.)
      • This could be nice. As I understand it, all the tabs are tiny but on mouseover the size expands to reveal the name
    • 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.) That can be done easily using ctrl+w. The close buttons on each tab are usefull because one may want to close a tab easily without switching to it or rapidly close the unnecesary tabs in a session with lots of them

Advanced tab loading control

  • When I load a session or start firefox, I don't want all the tabs to load, just some of them. The rest should load only when I tell them to (refresh them) later. I hate having to wait until all the tabs load simultaneously and eat my connection speed.
  • Even if I could just tell firefox to load the session without reloading the tabs it would be great. I would just refresh the tabs I want to see this time. This is really easy to implement.
  • Some pages have annoying components which make the tab reload every once in a while. There should be an option to freeze a tab so that no activity is allowed in that tab.
  • I hate the fact that firefox 2 does not save those tabs that have not loaded completely as part of the session. Sometimes I stop a tab before it loads completely because it is already displaying the info I want. But next time I load the session that was supposed to include that tab, the tab is not there!
  • In addition to "reload all pages" option, how about an option to reload only the pages that failed to load? I would usually want only these reloaded.

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

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)

Sidebar

  • Option to have sidebar not "push" or "scoot" the main browsing pane out of the way; rather, the sidebar can open on top, covering but not disturbing the main view pane. especially useful for users who don't keep, say, bookmarks pane open, but rather just open it to click a bookmark and then close it back up. It's a jarring visual effect to constantly have your main viewing window jostled.--Rmlrml 17:42, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Option to open "Options" menu in sidebar, for convenience when changing/reverting settings temporarily
  • Sidebar animation
    • Keep it simple, keep it light. This only adds to the amount of processor needed. --FlyingIsFun1217 06:14, 13 February 2007 (PST)
  • 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.
  • Ability to tie a sidebar to the browser tab is was 'requested' from. This would allows me to keep my bugzilla sidebar separate from my browser history sidebar [which I use when googling] Rhyre 09:54, 8 August 2007 (PDT)

Various Ideas for Tabs, Toolbars, and Windows

  • goto top of the side by doubleclick tap
  • 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)
  • Ability to change window titles and save window 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 behavior 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)
  • Related to "Application Mode". A windowed full screen mode. Effectivly hiding all GUI. Shortcut could be "Shift + F11". Would be useful when working with two windows side-by-side. With windows 7 split screen (pin to side) feature, this will become a more popular way to browse two pages at once, especially webapps.
  • 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.
  • On FireFox for Windows platform, when I minimize FF I expect it to show up as the last item when I alt-tab. Currently I minimize it and it will show up as the first or second, now when I alt-tab it will go back to FF. This seems inconsistent with just about every other windows application.
  • Tab search
  • Options:
    • Setting tabs to refresh every X seconds.
    • Turning off the close button on every tab.
  • Possibility to add another sidebar on the right (useful especially with wide-screen monitors)
  • Ability to undo close-window feature implemented the same way the undo close tab feature. If there is only one window open and it is closed, allow this feature from the next opened window.
  • Ability to restore previous session without a prior crash (not the same as in the preferences, give option at startup)
  • Forcing all separate Firefox windows under one tabbed window with single action.
  • Add "always on top" option for open window(s). I've always wanted to do this for certain things, especially for the pop-out player on Hulu.com

References:

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)
  • Allow the user to set a timeout for recently closed tabs. While I like knowing which tabs I closed four and a half days ago, the memory usage is rather high after a day of "normal" browsing. I don't like having to close Firefox too often, and this functionality would greatly improve my multi-day browsing session experience. --Invariel 09:41, 18 November 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:

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.

  • Always open URLs starting with "javascript:" in the same window.

This prevents a new blank tab/window from opening.

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.

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 in case some find this aesthetically displeasing. --Armaetin 23:34, 12 January 2007 (PST)
      • Agreed! --FlyingIsFun1217 06:18, 13 February 2007 (PST)
      • A good idea as well to be configurable in the options pane, would be to put the close button that in firefox 1.5.x appeared on the right, because there's a lof of people who miss this feature. I think that just adding this button will make the navegation easy and there's a lot of people who miss this button. (Adding this button should not remove each tab close button). What do you thing about?

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...)

  • This is an excellent idea! If this idea takes off, Firefox will take tab-browsing to the next level thus making internet browsing so much more user-friendly. It saves valuable time from having to look up all those important pages you don't want to close maybe because you're not done with them. It will, effectively, create a so-called research trail that can be indispensable when doing research. I totally support this proposition! -Dat789 03:47, 28 February 2007 (PST)
I have found this extension/add-on that resolves this need. [1] --Dat789 04:49, 18 March 2007 (PDT)

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 each other transparently. 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.

  • But in normal MDI apps you have children window to transport specialised data from one window to another (e.g. copy/paste shapes between different images); there is no data to transfer between webpages, so simply opening up multiple Firefox's, and using Windows' tile options may be better for this situation. -Jevon 16:44, 16 May 2007 (PDT)

I would like to be able to drag tabs (or subwindows if this approach were implemented) onto other monitors so when I am browsing multiple sites I can easily see both side by side. Right now I have to open two browsers and then open the second tab in the other browser, which sucks because I have to also be careful to close that one FIRST or else it will be remembered as my tab selection and I'll lose all the tabs I had open in the original browser too. If I could just drag windows across to the other monitor like I do in Adobe Photoshop, that would be ideal. It would be nice to be able to drag a tab from the tab bar and drop it on the 2nd monitor's desktop background and have it move the tab window over there automatically. Right now it just saves a URL link on the desktop. I think this feature would be as useful to me as the Find feature, which is huge, the main reason I quit Internet Explorer.

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.

Opening Multiple Tabs

Every now and then, I accidentally click "Open All in Tabs" under bookmarks, which opens all of my bookmarks in tabs. I suggest that, under the "Warn me when opening multiple tabs that might slow down Firefox" option, there should be a "Warn me when opening two or more tabs" checkbox option.

Also, I like to keep my open tabs while opening a whole bookmarks directory, so the "Open All in Tabs" button could leave the current tabs open and open new tabs for those bookmarks.

Tab Navigation Using Keyboard

Konsole, the terminal used under KDE, has a nice feature that allows you to use Shift+ (left/right) arrow to navigate between the opened tabs. It would be nice if Firefox has such a feature.

  • CTRL+TAB / CTRL+SHIFT+TAB currently allow for switching tabs on Windows (it's the OS default for switching tabs). MarkFinkle 07:39, 29 January 2007 (PST)
  • Mark, that may be the case for Windows but a Firefox Native tab switching key (like the example given in the first post) would make it a lot easier. Also the featur for going up/down (like in the example) would make Firefox a much easier to use application for every OS. Bobbocanfly 17:38, 06 February 2007 (GMT)
  • Then make the default tab-switching keys for Firefox Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+Shift+Tab. Then, it will not interfere with Windows Functionality and give the other OSes a way to navigate between tabs with the keyboard. --Armaetin 14:19, 27 February 2007 (PST)

Opening Tabs as Windows

When right-clicking tabs, add the option to "Open Tab as New Window", while simultaneously closing the current tab.

  • This is similar to Shift-Left Click at a link. Opening a new tab just to open it in a new Firefox window then closes the tab is redundant.Dat789 03:58, 28 February 2007 (PST)
    • No, I think the author meant a way to move a tab to a new window. The "Tab Dragging" suggestion above would effectively do this, if implemented at all and correctly. --Armaetin 16:07, 28 February 2007 (PST)
      • Could "convert tab into a window" be implemented as well? If I didn't get it wrong, none of the above fulfill this functionality

Keyboard shortcut for moving around tabs more easily

When a Tab is selected, pressing a key combination such as "(Ctrl+)Shift+Right Arrow" will move that tab to the right (like you would drag it with the mouse), "(Ctrl+)Shift+Left Arrow" will move it to the left.

  • Ctrl+Shift+Arrow is already used in selecting text. --Armaetin 22:48, 23 February 2007 (PST)

Tab "Home-ing"

This would be useful for people who (like me) run tabs dedicated to single activities.

Let's say I've got a tab for Google, a tab for my favourite message board, a tab for eBay, and a tab for my corporation's web page. I've set these as my home pages. I basically keep these tabs open all day, switching between them as necessary.

After I've surfed around I may want to send a given tab back to it's respective home page, without affecting the other tabs.

  • In Firefox2, pressing the home buttons opens 4 NEW tabs. Not so good.
  • It would be useful if I could control-click tabs to highlight them, then send them "home" with a home button.

There are other options.

  • In the current version, right clicking on a tab opens a context menu -- it should be possible to add a "send tab home" function here.
  • Perhaps there's a way to send the currently focussed tab home using the home button on the toolbar?

Open source in tab

I liked this Extension because opening the source in a new window is very irritating. I am often suprised that there are still some windows open when i close the main firefox window. I would appreciate that this feature if it is supported nativly by firefox because the extension isn't enhanced anymore since version 1.5. Of course this is a feature that is intended for webdevelopers, but i think it would be worth to replace the functionality of the "Show Source" button with this feature.

If this is out of question, maybe it would be a solution to give an option in the "Advanced" field. So the user can pick wether he wants to open the source in a tab or in a new window.

I don't think that this feature is hard to implement because opening the source in a tab is allread possible if you prefix the url with "view-source:".

In addition to this feature (if it is implemented) i would suggest the source tabs are marked in a special way so you can recognize them fast. Either by text or with a special additional icon (i don't know if there are problems with the favicon if this is implemented). --Prophet 02:47, 3 March 2007 (PST)

Undo Closed Tab button in Navigation Bar

I really like the 'Recently Closed Tabs' feature in the History menu in Firefox2. To make this feature more accessible, I would like to see an 'Undo Closed Tab' button on the navigation bar. There is an extension that already does this but this feature is so good - so useful, I think it should be implemented directly into Firefox3. It is not ideal to have to click three times just to re-open a tab. i.e. Clicking on the History menu then clicking on Recently Closed Tabs and then clicking on the last closed tab takes way too much time just to bring back a tab you just closed. Having a handy, easily accessible button on the Navigation tool bar is much better implementation of this feature. (Also, if you choose to implement a button such as this, can you please make it have a little arrow-menu beside it [like the back button] so I can undo a tab I closed a while ago? The icon of that button could be a recycle bin, containing the recently closed tabs.

  • Also, could you make a middle mouse button click work on the "Recently Closed Tabs" menu. It works on every other page link in Firefox, except this one, which is explicitly described to open a new tab! -Jevon 16:46, 16 May 2007 (PDT)

"New tab" button

The current new tab icon and its position in IE7 is good. It makes logical choice where to add the new tab. However don't show the tab when the single page is open by default. It is visual noise.

  • A new button is not necessary; a new tab can be opened using Control+T or the File -> New Tab menu item.
    • The problem is that not everyone knows about the keyboard shortcuts or that tabs even exist. An optional new tab icon in the tab bar would be brilliant because it could introduce new users to a feature they may have never seen before. SeaMonkey has it and Mozilla had it, and the people I know who still use IE use the new tab button. Even I'd use it, because, when I'm browsing, I mostly use the mouse. --Fyc 22:12, 4 April 2008 (PDT)
    • Not many people use keyboard shortcuts and I think putting a new tab button is a strong necessity.I guess the only popular browser not having a new tab button is Firefox.

Page thumbnails for tabs

There should be a way to see all the page images at the same time of all or at least 4 tabs for normal and 6 for wide screen. You can take a tip from compiz. Such a feature can be inserted in the bottom arrow present in the tab bar extreme right. Pressing Ctrl + Q (a IE7-like behaviour) to show thumbnails of all opened tabs would be cool.

There are several add ons that implement this feature, such as Josep del Rio's "Firefox Showcase" or Dão Gottwald's "Ctrl-Tab". I'd like to see mozilla work with them to integrate this beautiful and useful feature into firefox.

Another cool feature that could utilize the thumbnails would be to show a preview of the tab when cursor is paused over a tab. This could should show a floating thumbnail of the page if it is not the active tab.

Tab coloring

When multiple tabs have been opened in the background they should be coloured in such a way as to to show that they have not been viewed during the current session - useful for those on dial-up connections who surf and open tabs whilst reading current view. Some links are not compatible with the opening in a new tab : when we click upon the scroll wheel, it opens a blank tab because it is a javascript pop-up for instance.

  • Perhaps tabs can be colored by age too.

Refresh all "Problem loading page" tabs simultaneously

When users on dial-up connections open a large number of tabs, most of the tabs fail to load due to time out. Users generally have to click on each such tab and manually click reload.

  • Perhaps there can be a keyboard shortcut or button or right-click menu option which can reload all tabs with title "Problem loading page" in a single go.
  • An additional feature would be to repeat the above at a user defined time interval (say 1 minute), since all tabs would not load correctly with a single reload.

--Etechnophile 11:12, 22 April 2007 (PDT)

  • I think this is a reasonable idea. Also, perhaps users should be given a simple way to set how long a page (or specific tab) fails to load due to time out.

--Armaetin 12:56, 22 April 2007 (PDT)

  • Though the idea of a single action to refresh all problematic tabs is good there should still be an easier way of refreshing tabs individually. Double-clicking a tab would be a convenient way of doing so.

Correct the tab managemet

  • When reading a pdf file with adobe acrobat reader in a tab, [ctrl]+[w} should close the windows, up to now, we can only click on the cross of the tab to close acrobat. Little bug, but it will be very usefull.
  • When using acrobat/other embeded players, the navigation with [ctrl]+arrows and the creation of a new tab with Ctrl+T are disabled! we have to double click on the current tab to restore thoses functions. Why?? Moreover, if there is only one tab opened, we have to use the menu...

Search function

When searching for a string on the page, enter should load the link we are on, as it did on mozilla.

  • Some people might want enter to search for the next instance of that string. Maybe users should be able to set, in Options, whether they want Firefox to treat enter as though clicking a link or as though hitting "Next." Whichever is default really doesn't matter. --Armaetin 16:24, 14 May 2007 (PDT)

Window Resizing Websites

Allow users to have the option of, when a webpage automatically resizes a window that has already been open and in use (ie, not a popup window), having Firefox not allow that webpage from resizing that window.

Recently Closed Windows

Users should be able to open Firefox windows closed within the session, similar to the Recently Closed Tabs function. However, this should be optional to the user, as users might not like the idea of Firefox hogging up computer memory for this feature. Recently Closed Windows would be a nice feature because it would allow users to return to closed tabs in closed windows (Firefox only lists the recently closed tabs that were closed in the current active window).


Tab favourite Strip

It would be good if the user can see all the favorites of one folder in a strip with a previsualization. This previsualization is updated each time that you visit the page. This previsualization strip will be used with a shift bar to move a small tabselect-window all over these favorites (over the strip). This window will select or highlight only the links/webs that we want to have opened in firefox. That it is to say, when you move the window over the favorite strip one position to the left, one new favorite will be openened and the favorite that is most to the right will be close. The maximum size or width of this window must be configurable, for example 7 tabs. This will save a lot of memory usage in firefox and will let you see all your favorite webs (for example 40) without problem because you will have only 7 web pages opened simultaneously. If this width is reduced from 7 to only 1 what we have is a powerpoint slice "WEB" presentation!!!

"new tab" function by default

I had noticed ever since the first Firefox release, the "new tab" function is not on the default navigation toolbar upon installation. I suggest making "Open a new tab" as a default icon on the navigation toolbar because it will be more convenient for new users of Firefox as well as older users. They will have no need to personally customize the navigation toolbar themselves. Kiewzhenyi 06:39, 16 November 2007 (PST)

Expand/Collapse groups of tabs for matching addresses

I tend to have a lot of tabs open at once. So unless I open multiple copies of Firefox to browse different sites, my tab bar is filled fairly quickly. A good way in my opinion to resolve this would be to group site tabs to a single tab which expands when you click it.

For example, a user is browsing 2 sites at once lets call them "ABC.com" and "123.com". To begin with they have 2 tabs, one for each site. The user then follows 2 links from ABC.com opening them each into new tabs. The total number of tabs open at this point would be 4. The user then needs to go to 123.com so they click the 123.com tab they have open, at this point all the ABC.com tabs collapse into a single tab. After finishing browsing 123.com they need to go back to one of the tabs from ABC.com. Upon clicking the ABC.com tab any 123.com tabs they had open collapse and the ABC.com tabs which they were browsing expand out again allowing them to continue browsing at their leisure.

Naturally this feature would be optional, but in my case heavily used!

--Robosatan 18:34, 2 December 2007 (PST)

tabs sidebar

It would be great if there were a tabs sidebar akin to the history and bookmarks sidebars. Then I could use the realtime search box at the top to find a particular one of my 150 open tabs by name. Or when doing my tab "garbage collection" pass I could scan through the list, highlight a bunch of tabs I want to close and then hit delete to close them all.

CPU/memory usage reporting

When firefox is using 100% CPU or a lot of memory, I have no way of knowing which tabs I can close to fix this. It would be great if this could be integrated as sortable columns in a tabs sidebar feature, but just knowing which ones were hogging the resources would be fantastic. Also, while I have heard Firefox 3 will greatly improve many resource hogging problems, I don't think ver 3 will be able to cure this. Anyway, an option to see an indicator bar of some kind in the tabs, to show resource usage, is almost necessary. And perhaps with something as simple as a hot key which would change focus to the offending tab, since calling up additional add-ons, such as to view a list of the tabs, can be difficult when processor usage is at 100%. If we had such, a constant resource indicator in the menu bar would be important also. I've been praying for resource indication for quite a while.

Nested tabs, structured by user's page traversal

When I open a link from one page to another, I'd like the new page opened as a child tab. If I then open another page from that new page, it should be a child of the new tab (a grandchild of the first). If I then visit the grandparent and open another link as a new tab, it should become a sibling of the first child. If I decide one branch of my search isn't going anywhere, I should be able to prune that whole branch in one operation (close tab and all descendants). I should also be able to just close the parent, promoting its children.

Refresh Setup Off Tab Menu

I am really annoyed at these various sites where I need to keep refreshing periodically to keep my session from expiring. The refresh should also retain any form fields that may be filled in. [[2]].

Option of opening link in background tab or foreground tabs

I want a menu item "Open link in Background Tab" if Tools>Options>Tabs>When Opening a new tab from link, switch to it immediately is enabled OR "Open Link in Foreground Tab" if that Option is disabled.

Individual control of tab's audio volume

I think an implementation similar to windows vista's volume mixer would prove extremely useful. This would allow for each tabs output to be made the dominant noise and will allow for muting all tabs but one.

Show what part of the view is new after a page-down

Problem: A standard page-down jumps to a new view that overlaps the old view, and the boundary isn't marked in any way. When near the end of a file, finding your place on the page can require an annoying search, because the jump distance is unpredictable.

Proposal: Overlay the new region with a light gray when it appears, and fade out the gray about 1/4 second. This gives the new region a visible "entrance", making a momentary visual distinction between regions that are, in fact, different to the reader at that moment. I think I'd this a lot, and that many other apps would copy it. (Firefox blazes the trail!)

Increased efficiency of right click - New Tab - context menu

Probably the most frequent browsing action after clicking a link is Right Click - Open Link in New Tab.

Problem: To enact this, the user must maneuver his mouse right and all the way to the top -- but not QUITE the top -- of a tall stack of choices.

This maneuver requires a bit of concentration and takes maybe a second to perform. (And still I sometimes accidentally open a link in a new window instead of a tab.)

On an average day, I probably open 200+ new tabs.

That's 3.3 minutes a day -- over 1200 minutes a year -- over 20 HOURS.

Solution: Arrange the right-click choices so that Open Link in a New Tab is exactly to the right of the mouse as soon as you right click a link.

This small change will save users millions of collective hours a year.

Related: maybe, depending on the element being right-clicked, the choice to the immediate right could be the most frequently used choice.

This could perhaps be customized by the user.

Allow for hiding and restoring tab groups in-session

Firefox and available extensions already allow for session saving, but don't have a way (to my knowledge) of allowing the user to save a part of their session for later in that session. As an example, I tend to have a large number of tabs open at once, as do many people I know; a lot of these tabs are things to get to later, links from IM/e-mail that weren't of immediate concern, things I need at hand to refer to periodically, etc. The user could simply bookmark these, but to do that in an effective manner for this purpose seems tedious when all they really want to do is get rid of the immediate clutter, easily get it back when needed, and then forget about it when it's done. What I propose is something similar, but more streamlined: Joe should be able to just select several tabs, hit a button/kbd shortcut, and have them disappear (say, iconified to a toolbar) Restoring them (and their state) should be just as simple. The advantage of this over bookmarking them is that the user can just stick some tabs somewhere, and get them back, without worrying about the actual process of doing so.

Stop execution in invisible tabs

Add an option to stop all javascript execution, all animations, all timer, all auto-refresh in tabs that are not visible because another tab is active or the window is minimized. I routinely have 20 windows with a dozen tabs each open (yes, FF is my operating system for all intents and purposes) and often some stupid site chews up tons of memory and cpu time due to javascript or animations that I don't even see.

Tabs separated when previewed with Windows Aero

When you have several Windows Explorer windows open, you point to the Windows Explorer icon on the task bar and a preview of all windows are displayed. Even with basic functionality (without transparency), a list of the windows are displayed. Tabs in Internet Explorer 8 and Safari 4 are treated like this, they show as separate "windows" when you point to them. This is quick because you can preview/jump to the tab quickly by clicking the preview/list. For Internet Explorer, you can also point to the preview to display the tab contents. This does not work for Safari if the window is minimized, but at least the preview thumbnail does show the tab contents. With Firefox, when the Firefox icon on the taskbar is pointed at, only the active tab in the window(s) is previewed. It would be nice if all the tabs were visible with Aero Peek.

Lock a tab

When right-clicking a tab, just add one more option there to lock the tab, which will keep you from accidentally closing the tab (i.e., it has the action of removing the little "x" button on the tab that closes it, and removes the "close tab" from the menu that you get when you right click on the tab). Obviously, a little "lock" icon would need to be added to the tab to signify that it is locked.

Also, and more importantly, the user cannot change the current domain in a locked tab. This means that any address typed in the address bar will open another tab instead of using a locked tab (if a locked tab is active), and any links clicked in a locked tab open in another tab, provided that the link points to a different domain.


This is useful when users have a tab or two (or a few) that they want to have open all day long (such as gmail and google calendar), but browse in the other tabs.

Freeze a window

Have the option on rightclicking to allow the tab to be "frozen". Meaning tabbing to this frozen window will depict a screenshot of the page (of course, all text is cursable etc).

Of course, doing this to too many tabs should pop up a warning indicating more freezing can result in memory loss.

Hold Shift when closing FF to save tabs

The majority of the time I do not save my tabbed sessions. Thus, I keep the notification to save tabs disabled in the options menu. However, there are times when saving a session is desired.

A nice feature would be allowing the user to hold the Shift or Alt key when closing the browser to quickly save the open tabs.

Closing inactive tabs

When browsing open tabs with the mouse, it frequently happens to accidentally click on the little [x] button, which closes the tab, and is undesirable.

Clicking the close [x] button on inactive tabs should first enable them, just like clicking any area of the tab, and then restoring normal close action.

Of course, clicking the middle mouse button on inactive tabs should continue to close them.

Nevertheless, an option to enable this behavior is just as fine.

Better Multi-monitor support

Firefox should automatically resize the content of a site when opened on a monitor of a different size or resolution than that of the monitor on which its currently running. As of now, my super old 2nd monitor shows me basically the left half of a site when I drag a tab from my nice new monitor onto it.

Dragging Tabs to Desktop/Directories

The behavior for this has been changed recently. It used to be that dragging a tab in Windows XP (and probably other Windows OS) to the Desktop, a directory on the Desktop, or an open Windows Explorer window, would create a shortcut to that URL (a .url file I believe) in that location. Now dragging a tab to pretty much anywhere that isn't a Firefox TabBar causes it to open in a new Firefox window and be removed from its old window and location.

While this might be popular with some, if you have several or many tabs open and you want to quickly store their URLs in a directory (for later use) it is not ideal:

  • the new system requires that you click on a tab and then drag the button on the left of the URL (not sure of its name, it's between the 'Home' button and the URL at the top of the window, and it shows the icon of the web site or page, eg an open book right now...) to the desired destination. That's one click, then a mouse movement, then a drag per tab which with a lot of tabs adds up quickly, and the mouse movement is fiddly if you do it a lot.
  • the old system allowed you to just drag the desired tab to the destination immediately - just one drag, much quicker and simpler.

Please please please can we at least have an option to choose between the two behaviours? I use this a lot!

Storing URLs as shortcuts

On a related note to the point immediately above, the URL file is given a name taken from the title of the web page being stored (it's the same as that in the Title Bar of the window). Many web pages give all of their pages the same Title and that means that storing multiple URLs from such a site is incredibly inconvenient since you have to rename each shortcut before doing the next. Could we have other options to help with this:

  • If the file already exists (ie a shortcut with the same name is already there), automatically add an incrementing number to the end of the name as is standard for other similar situations eg 'Title', 'Title (1)', 'Title (2)'. You could ask the user for confirmation if necessary, that would still be much quicker than now, and could be a third option in an 'Overwrite/Cancel' dialog box, or allow the user to choose the default behaviour in Preferences.
  • Add some other distinguishing item to the name, eg time, URL (though this would probably cause problems with file name length), Querystring, or whatever.

Again, at least an option in Preferences allowing something like this would be great.

PS. I know this isn't the ideal location for this idea but I could not spot a better match for it and it relates to the idea above.

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