Tabbed Browsing/User Interface Design
From MozillaWiki
Introduction
Tabbed browsing is one of the most visible aspects of Firefox, and has a large number of use cases.
Improvements in the Firefox 2 cycle will focus on the following aspects:
- Shifting to new tabs instead of new windows by default
- Improving discoverability for tabbed browsing
- Support close buttons on tabs for initial discoverability
- Providing a solution to tab overflow (too many tabs)
- Providing support for reopening closed tabs
- Handling "open in tabs" better and more consistently across the UI.
- Examining foreground vs. background heuristic for consistency concerns
Requirements
- Tab ordering/reordering should be preserved
- Research on frequency of use cases should be done, probably via instrumentation+flexible tab prefs, in order to optimize for the most common use-cases.
- Full keyboard access (implemented for Firefox 1.5) should be preserved.
- Needs to be flexible enough to fit the needs our current users have, while providing a more obvious and understandable default configuration.