~robcee/ field notes of a pyroentomologist, now 33% snappier!

Rediscover the Tab Bar

It’s a Saturday. And as the machinery churns towards the inevitable final release of Firefox 2.0, there’ll be a number of users finding the new and improved tab bar a little different.

This first thing most people will notice in Firefox 2.0 is there is no longer a “close-tab” button on the right of the tab bar. Each tab gets its own close button now. The second thing a new user might notice, is the little half-tab arrow on the right of the tab strip. This is the “all tabs” drop-down and when pressed, will bring up a list of all the available tabs in the window.

As they say in show business, “But wait! There’s more!”

Open enough tabs in a single window and you’ll see a magical thing happen: a smaller pair of tabs appear on either side of the tab strip containing arrows. These are the tab strip scroll buttons and they can be used to move the tab strip left and right — to “scroll” within the strip revealing the tabs that wouldn’t all fit within the single window. If you want to jump to a particular tab immediately, you can use the all tabs drop-down to list them in a menu and pick the one you want.

Ever accidentally closed a tab and instantly regretted it? Frustrated, you open a new tab, reach for the history menu or sidebar and select the last thing in your history to get it back… well no more! Now, a mere right click on the tab strip will give you the option to “Undo closed tab” and it’ll reappear right where it was when you closed it. Want still older closed tabs? The history menu now gives you the option to select from a list of “recently closed tabs”.

Want to move a tab to another window? You can do that too. Open a new window and drag the tab you want from the first window onto the tab strip of the second window and it will load there (albeit without history). Drop the tab onto an existing tab, and the location will replace it. If you drag it onto the “all tabs” button, the location gets created in a new tab.

These are relatively simple additions on their own. Together they make a powerful new way of navigating the web and managing content within the browser. But we’re not stopping there. Before Firefox 2.0 is even released in its final form, we’ve already started work on the next generation of the browser and tabbed-browsing. Feel free to join in and drop a suggestion. It’s your browser, after all.

Mejoras en el manejo de tabs de Firefox 2.0…

Uno de los colaboradores en el desarrollo de Firefox describe en su blog las nuevas capacidades que incluirá Firefox 2.0 para manejar los “tabs” o pestañas de navegación:

Rediscover The Tab Bar

Es decir, las conveniencias para manejar …

/ Ever accidentally closed a tab and instantly regretted it? /
Yes, thanks to the new design.

/ Want to move a tab to another window? /
None of those are new.

I agree with Anonymous.

I’ve set the option browser.tabs.closeButtons to 0. That way, only the active window has a close button. This is much better, because you never want to click on the active tab and thus can never accidentally .

I don’t see why this wasn’t made the default. I understand that there are user-experience studies that showed that ‘ordinary’ people found the previous location of the close button difficult to find. But how could the previous argument against having buttons on all tabs be discarded so easily? It is so frustrating, and it happens to me all the time in e.g. Eclipse that I accidentally click on the close button! I’d say this setting I’ve now made would have satisfied both views.

~Grauw

I did exactly the same thing that Laurens Holst did – I set browser.tabs.closeButtons to 0. I really feel that this should be the default.