474265 - Suggested improvements to new tab previews

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 465076

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Michael]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090118 Minefield/3.2a1pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090118 Minefield/3.2a1pre

The new tab overview with the web page thumbnails is a nice feature, but could be improved in several ways:

1) Speed is currently poor.  Perhaps the thumbnails could be pre-rendered after the browser finishes downloading all currently downloading tabs?  Of course, there is a CPU and memory cost there...

2) The thumbnails are very large, but there are always 9 of them (or positions for 9).  If more than 9 tabs are open, additional tabs can be accessed by clicking on a dot in a sort of iPhone-like interface.  But this is much slower than having an overview of all tabs, or having a list.  This could be improved by creating smaller thumbnails, but having a thumbnail for each page.

3) A separate button for the tab list and the thumbnails would be really useful.  Sometimes titles in a list would be the best way to find something.  Sometimes, thumbnails would be.

4) The translucent background takes up a HUGE amount of screen space (about 1920x1200 on a 2560x1600 display).  Why?

5) Most thumbnails show the top left corner of the open web page (or at least the top left corner of the currently open view), at what looks like 50% scale.  Unfortunately, it can be hard to tell what the page shows from that context, because most of the page is clipped out.  An easier to navigate view might be one that shows the entire page in a smaller thumbnail (see iPhone for a good example).  You get much more context from the whole page than from a few words clipped from a larger view.

6) Thumbnails appearing above tabs might be very useful.  :-)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
N/A

Comment 1

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

This is still under active development and currently most of these items are fixed in bug 465076, so I'll dupe this to that bug.