236798 - All currently open tabs should be listed in a sidebar, grouped by window.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Luhmann]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040307 Firefox/0.8.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040307 Firefox/0.8.0+

Currently, if there are many tabs open, it is impossible to read the titles of
those tabs, or to easily navigate between them. It is also impossible to easily
move tabs from one window to another (without first repositioning the windows
for drag-and-drop). All this and more could easily be accomplished if there
existed a "tabs" sidebar. The full text of the title could be listed. Tabs could
be navigated, grouped by window, moved from window to window, bookmarked, etc.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

Confirmed RFE.

All/All

Comment 2

[peter]

I was just about to enter the same RFE, and so I second this.

At the risk of muddying, it might also be useful to be able to reorder tabs by
drag and drop.

--peter

Comment 3

[Martin Arndt]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I was just about to enter the same RFE, and so I second this.
> 
> At the risk of muddying, it might also be useful to be able to reorder tabs by
> drag and drop.
> 
> --peter

This can be done easily by using the "Tabbed Browser"-extension... ;) :)

Comment 4

[Jon Henry]

An interesting way to implement this is suggested by Daniel Glazman in a comment
on roc's blog:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2005/05/rendering_web_p.html

He suggests using roc's new "render webpages to an image" feature to create a
tab sidebar which includes a thumbnail image of each tab. How slick would that be?

P.S. I'm reassigning this bug to default contacts, because to my knowledge Blake
Ross is not an active Firefox developer at this time.

Comment 5

[Jon Henry]

Also, much of this has now been implemented in a Firefox extension: Tab Sidebar. See http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/tabsidebar/index.html for details.

Comment 6

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

*** Bug 325490 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Thomas Winwood]

I made the point in my duplicate bug that the difference between the inbuilt tab sidebar and the Tab Sidebar extension would be that the inbuilt bar would not be integrated into the sidebar since people use that for other purposes. I imagine it would work similarly to the KDE "which side of the screen do we put this bar" option in the control panel.

Comment 8

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

We're still looking at ways to get harder data on this, but most users seem to have a handful of tabs at any given time and don't end up in overflow situations.    If you never get past five or six tabs, losing enough horizontal space to have a useful label is wasting a ton of space.  For mousing, wide and shallow vs. deep and narrow is also a big win.  

There will be a better solution in Fx2 for running out of room on the tab bar, but this isn't it.

Comment 9

[Thomas Winwood]

Is there a relevant place for making suggestions as to how Fx2 will handle tabbed browsing? Should I file it as a feature request, or add it to a wiki page, or something else?

Comment 12

[Mardeg]

Thought it'd be worth mentioning this link for people finding there way here:
http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/2011/06/13/community-concepts-ubiquitous-firefox-part-2-solving-tab-proliferation/