Flow: A Solution to the “Too Many Tabs” Problem

[DavidRegev]

11 years ago, I blogged for Mozilla Labs about my solution to the “too many tabs” problem. Since then, my design has evolved quite a lot. I recently built a demo browser for my master’s thesis:

Flow Browser: The zoomable Web browser that automatically organizes your tasks

The basic concept is that pages that originate from links are grouped with their parents, while pages opened from scratch are opened in new groups. This automatically separate different topics. Moreover, the Back/Forward buttons become superfluous, as each link opens another page in the current group.

These groups appear as stacks of pages in my design, but that way of displaying these page groups is not essential to the solution. Browsers could incorporate my solution in any way they want. I would love to see something like this in both Firefox and Firefox Mobile!

My post explains how the app works in detail, but here’s the full video of my demo:

Thanks! Thoughts? Questions?

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[ikpjr]

I would not want for back forward navigation or history to go away, nor always open pages on new tabs ( which increases tab count on tab bar ). I want the ability to navigate to any other page from the same tab and go back or forward in history/navigation.

Also, automatic tab organization I think is a thing provided by several addons, specially the vertical ( including hierarchy tree tabs ) ones .

Your stack pages visualization seem wasteful:

1) why have page frames on back of current, what information one gains with that?

2) are they an aesthetic thing for pleasure, why a simple list with tab titles or group names wouldn't be sufficient?

[DavidRegev]

All your questions are answered by the full post. It also includes a video of my thesis presentation, which itself has a demo at the end. The demo might clarify a lot for you.