Firefox Future has No Tabs

Can you imagine your firefox with no Tabs? Apparently it is a possibility according to Mozilla. According to Oliver Reichenstein, head of user experience at Mozilla

Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, twenty+ parallel sessions is quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. If you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. Also, God said that tabs don’t work if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment. And that’s just what they should continue doing. For the overall organization of your browsing, a cloud file system works much better.

He's vision of a new interface is looks more like iTunes with folders, libraries, and bookmarks in a sidebar. So Mozilla is thinking of redesigning our beloved firefox from moving tabs on the side or removing the tabs completely.






I think these proposals are good ideas and can provide a different user experience. Although the second screenshot above looks like Google Chrome, Reichenstein argues:

To be clear: It’s not what Safari or Chrome do. The idea is not to show screen shots but to turn the browser into a media system organizer more than a media display application. Instead of structuring a browser to keep the screen tidy for the moment, we thought that it’d be awesome to structure the browser as a (multi media) file system. Like iTunes. With predefined folders. Like OSX. So whenever you open a new tab you see what you last saw in your iTunes, uhm, Firefox library.

As one of a millions of firefox users, I will surely be waiting for these features to be reality.