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Tracked by: bug 318168

• this bug would be used to track status, target, owner and various deliverables

Goals & Objectives

To drive tabbed browsing by default for Firefox 2.

1. Identify usability landmines surrounding tabbed browsing
2. Ensure compatibility with web applications (window/tab targeting)
3. Find ways to optimize behaviour even more, in sync with Places

Planned Milestones

Overview

Tabbed browsing is one of the most popular features in Firefox, and as users are exposed they react most favourably once past the learning curve. We want to improve tabbed browsing so that it can be the default for all users, in a friendly and intuitive manner.

Background

There is a considerable amount of debate over the "best" setup for tabbed browsing, and indeed there are numerous extensions that implement various modifications to the default behaviour. We need to conduct a significant amount of study in order to identify the best solution for all users and improve our experience based on those results.

User Audiences

1. Hardcore tabbed browsing user (10-20 tabs at once, overflows tab bar)
2. Confident consumer, sometimes uses multiple tabs, primarily single-track browsing
3. Novice, tabs are a means to avoid managing multiple windows.

Functional Requirements

1. Ease of Use
2. Best combination of intuitive and optimized behaviours

Optional:

1. Able to undo tab closing (timed cleanup)

Plans & Design Documents

• User Interface Design
• Code Design
• Test Plan
• Documentation Plan

API Changes Required

• link targeting of tabs needs to be fixed (bug 323810)
• tabbrowser may have additional methods

Impact

The current design impacts the following areas of development

Integration points with bookmarks and multiple homepages

Extensions

Localization

Update

• n/a

See Also

Discussion & Implications

This issue was brought up late in the Firefox 1.5 development cycle, and some good discussion was generated which detailed a lot of the issues and explored several options.

See this wiki page on tabbed browsing behavior as well as bug 308396 for some of that discussion.

There is a cumulative list at of tabbed browsing issues at Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Design/Tab_Overflow and on its talk page Talk:Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Design/Tab_Overflow

Caveats / What We've Tried Before

Security Implications

Privacy Considerations