587969 - Suggestion: Tab Groups as a Toolbar

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Panorama, enhancement)

Description

[patrickjdempsey]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b4pre) Gecko/20100816 Minefield/4.0b4pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b4pre) Gecko/20100816 Minefield/4.0b4pre

As an addition or even alternative to the Tab Candy interface, basically everything that it does could be reproduced in a simple toolbar.  On first run there would be a start-up "group", a box named "Ungrouped Tabs", all ungrouped tabs would live there.  The most recently viewed tabs would be visible as favicons.  To accommodate both the favicons and names, the Tab Groups would be about 3em tall.  The Ungrouped Tabs group would always be present as a container for tabs opened from external applications.  Dragging a tab to a blank on the toolbar would create a new "group" with that tab's favicon on it, and remove the tab from view.  Tabs could then be dragged into that group or a new group from the tab strip.  When you hover your mouse over a site favicon within a group, it would show the preview and title of that tab in a tooltip.  It would be very fast to switch between groups as if they were "super tabs".  Tabs could be rearranged within groups from the tab strip or by grabbing the favicon from within the Tab Group Toolbar.  When you click on a Tab Group, the site favicon you clicked on would open as the selected tab. 

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[patrickjdempsey]

Attachment: tab groups illustration

Comment 2

[Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine [:mitcho]]

Looks cool, but punting to the future. This would be a great place for an add-on to step in.

Comment 3

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

I think this one is perfect for an add-on.  We're not likely to create another toolbar when we're in UI reduction mode.