Tab Candy: Firefox Invents a Better Way to Manage Tabs

Mozilla Creative Lead Aza Raskin has released Tab Candy, an experimental feature for Firefox that reimagines tabbed browsing through tab groups and reorganization

In a post on his blog, Raskin introduced the new tab management system. Tab Candy is launched via a small button to the right of your tabs, but it packs a lot of functionality.

Here’s how it works:

- When you click on the Tab Candy button (or hit Option-Space on the Mac or Control-Space onWindows, it will take you to a tab overview page that lets you scan all of your open tabs.

- Tab Candy lets you drag-and-drop tabs into related groups. You can even name the groups for easier tab management.

- When you open up a tab, Firefox will only open up tabs that are part of its group. This means the end of the over-cluttered tab bar. You can switch your tab groups by going back to the Tab Candy overview page.

- Tab group sizes can be changed and groups can be rearragned so that important tabs such as your email and calendar are easy to find and scan.

Raskin says that this is only the beginning: features such as universal tab search, save for later, advanced tab memory management, automatic tab group assignments, multiple profile support and tab group customization are eventually coming to tab management tool.

Because Tab Candy is an early alpha prototype, the only feature this build includes is the tab group management. You can test it out now though through an early build of Firefox 4 Beta. Tab Candy is not an extension.

The web and the browser have evolved due to the rise of cloud computing and the creation of highly-functional web apps, but tabs have remained pretty much the same for the last few years. While extensions such as Tree Style Tab have addressed some of the issues surrounding tabbed browsing, they don’t redefine the experience as Tab Candy does. We’re going to be watching this project very closely.

Source: Mashable