Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:URL Handling

See Get URL of current page

Sometimes web pages contain effective links (i.e. something like http://www.foo.bar.com) without this being encoded in html, so it is not directly clickable. Instead of going the procedure

1. select link text
2. Ctrl-C
3. New tab
4. Focus in address bar
5. Ctrl-V
6. Return

it would be nice to rather do

1. select link text
2. Ctrl-...

and the link opens already in a new tab. Here "..." should be a carefully chosen letter on the keyboard.

(possibly implementable by addon)

--ThomasP, Jan 2009

Correction: The current procedure is only

1. select link text
2. Ctrl-C
3. Ctrl-T
4. Ctrl-V
5. Return

Further note: The idea might be better extendable to the case of _googling_ a selected text with one key shortcut.

Entries in that history list should not be just left-clickable (then guiding the current tab to that location), but give more actions in a context menu - maybe simply the ones appearing in the context menu of a link.

Advantage: Imagine you are filling out a form as part of a registration or similar linear process, and you come at a page where you want to go back one page to (re-)look something up for the filling out. Then you could go to the back button history, choose the previous page and on it right click to open it in a new tab.

A further functionality related to this is cloning a tab (together with its history). This could be added to that context menu and to the context menu on the tab heads.

--ThomasP, Jan 2009

The previous section mentioned cloning of a tab. Further Ctrl-T opens a new empty tab. What about having Ctrl+Shift-T opening a new tab and having the currently focused tab cloned to it (together with its history).

--ThomasP, Jan 2009

Additionally, when you right-click a tab, there could be an option just like "Detach Tab", wich would open the contents of that tab on a new window (mantaining history).

Often in one session one opens twenty or more tabs, leading to a long tab bar (which then has to be scrolled, especially as a new tab is currently appended at the end, not next to the originator tab). It would be good if related tabs could be associated somehow.

"related" could mean: opened from the same originator tab, or, belonging to the same site.

For "associated" there are many possibilities thinkable:

1. A grouping similar to the behaviour of the task bar (collating many instances of the same app, drop down menu to choose one of them).
2. Having two tab bars: an upper for a site/topic, a lower for pages within that site/topic. The second bar could either vanish (then behaviour is similar to 1.) or stay visible until another upper level tab is clicked.

The point for this feature is that it would be once again an opportunity to show off the bleeding edge innovation speed of open source versus proprietary development. It is not a support for a further video format or a deeply hidden short cut; no, it is an immediately visible feature that furthermore has a direct effect on the browsing experience of a large user group.

--ThomasP, Jan 2009

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