Plenty of tab management extensions have been developed to tame tabs, but Tab Candy takes the cake.

Anyone have specific comparisons? E.g. Tab Candy vs Tab Mix Plus?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/58950/

Everyone is acting like Tab Candy is the greatest thing since…well…tabs.

Information overload in the browser will continue to be a problem as more and more of our lives move toward the browser. But casual users–still the vast majority of the people on the web–will have no need for something like this. In fact, they will look at Tab Candy with befuddlement.

For those who have seriously needed tab grouping and thumbnail views, there have been many extensions to tackle the job. I don’t see many power users dumping their favorite tab extension to switch exclusively to Tab Candy. There will be some, but not many.

Don’t get me wrong, Tab Candy will be a welcome addition to Firefox, but I think people are getting way too worked up about it. It’s not going to be a revolution. The sad fact is that there is only so much you can innovate with web browsers before you start getting into bloatware territory, which is where Firefox has been headed since v3.0.

Tabs in Firefox are a pain. New tabs used to open at the end of the tab stack. Now the behaviour has changed to open in the adjacent tab. There was nothing wrong with the previous behaviour apart from the fact that getting to the last tab was a pain!

I’m one of those people that have dozens of tabs open, but eventually, I just get fed up that I’m not reading them and ultimately dump them. All I’ve achieved is to drown polar bears with unneeded computation in background tabs. I’ve tried a couple of tab extensions, but none of them grab me.

You only really need a couple of ‘live’ tabs, the rest may as well be bookmarks. So I say improve the bookmark and history UI.

I just visited my brother, I gasped as I witnessed him using Internet Explorer 6. He doesn’t know what a tab is, and doesn’t care, and will probably be miffed when he finds I updated it to the latest release and installed Firefox. Those new to tabs can have difficulty getting the idea of them at all. It’s easy to loose windows with tabs, watch new comers use the browser. It’s only power users and/or procrastinators that benefit from them.

The nice thing about tabs in something like firefox, is that you can jump from one OS to another and the browser has the same interface.

If you think about it though, it’s the inability to manage your windows, that has led to the emergence of tabs. Each browser, has a different approach to tabs i.e. shortcuts and behaviour. This helps no one ultimately – as you do not have a standard UI. Relearning a new interface takes time, and inconsistencies can be a pain.

Window managers need to step up to the challenge with some radical innovations. It seems to me that too much attention is paid to browser layout engines, while the browser UI remains sorely neglected.

I just want to be able to take command of my computer! I’m not saying that tabs are all bad, just don’t assume everybody wants to use them.

While we may pretend that we can all multi-task, it’s ultimately distracting to have a dozen apps or windows running at the same time. Try using one window at a time, and using throw away bookmarks and see if you can live without them.