Post We need a thoughout integration of the desktop and the web - not Tab Candy superfast jellyfish

This video demonstrates a new tab organising feature called 'Tab Candy' that might make it into a future version of Firefox. Lord help us all if it does.

Embedded below is the promo video:

Sorry, wrong video, below is the correct one, yank alert. (Aside question about the intro spiel: how can he use his browser more than his operating system since the former requires the latter?)

Tab Candy allows you to drag web pages (i.e. tabs) and organise them into little piles. The piles can then be saved, named and so on.

Thinking in terms of a Linux distribution, I am not sure how helpful Tab Candy really is. This seems to be the wrong level of the stack.

Tab Candy is just recreating GUI folders, albeit with a nice zoom out and more automatic groups. Tab Candy not only replicating the desktop, but it is dealing with symptoms of a more basic problem, rather than solving the problem itself.

Browsers are crap at saving Web pages

When you view a web page in the browser, it is represented in the navigation by one tab, this is good. However, on the filesystem, a webpage is represented by its composite fragments - the HTML file, Javascript and CSS includes, images and so on, this is really stupid. This difference makes webpages a second class object on the desktop.

A better approach would be to encapsulate a saved webpage into a single file (internally it could be a zip or similar). Then saving and sharing webpages would be much cleaner and would allow operating system graphical interface designers to create a more beautiful desktop.

Ideally the cache would save webpages in the same form, so saving a page is just copying the file from the cache, rather than downloading it again. The cached version of the page can then be in piles implemented at the desktop level rather than at the browser level.

Piles should be in the desktop shell

The piles being a desktop feature would allow the user to put other things into the piles too: pictures, PDFs, songs and so on. At the desktop level, the feature would be implemented in native code rather than an in-browser cross-platform Javascript mess.

Call me old fashioned but I want my GUI to be fast, efficient with resources and to get out of my way. I don't want browser-based bling using up all my RAM. As I moaned about in the last post, Firefox uses quite enough memory as it is; implementing a desktop GUI in Firefox is hardly a recipe for reducing its memory footprint. It is a recipe for more bloat.

What do you think? Should the browser become the desktop? Or should Firefox be faster and slimmer without these desktop-style features?

5 thoughts on “We need a thoughout integration of the desktop and the web - not Tab Candy superfast jellyfish”

I already have piles. It's called A New Window.

As a minimalist, you'll probybly moan if I mention KDE, but I'll do so anyway <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/wink.png">
The future I want (and actually see slowly fold out before me) is to have open standards and protocols to bring my stuff to the net how I want it and from the net to my desktop. I trully feel that the net should be coming to the desktop and not the other way around.
What I see happening now is:
<ul class="simple">
<li>W3C coming up with pushing hard to connect basically anything to anything and everything. I was talking one of the guys from W3C and he said in two years' time it won't matter where your data is or where the computation will be scattered — you'll have control over it and that's the important bit.</li>
<li>more and more protocols aimed at interconnecting data are popping up like mushrooms after rain</li>
<li>semantic web is the bee's knees nowadays — FOSS knows that, Google knows that, Yahoo, FaceBook ...</li>
<li>trully free solutions to take back control from the clouds are emerging fast — ownCloud, GNU Social, Diaspora, Elgg, EtherPad, Libre.fm, ...</li>
<li>plug computers are starting to become more and more powerful and are already cheaper then 100 €.</li>
<li>with NEPOMUK, Akonadi etc. KDE is leading the semantic and social desktop trend and I suppose many will (if they haven't yet) slowly realise they have to catch up fast!</li>
</ul>
...so where I see myself in two years' time is using KDE (or other desktop) where I locally store my data and where I run specialised programs to use specific data (e.g. addressbook, mail client); which in turn would be connected to my plug computer where the data I would like to push around the net (to certain people); which in turn would be connected to other such nodes.
P.S. yeah, it's late, I've been sitting behind my laptop too long and very possibly what I just wrote is very incoherent ...sorry :

Honestly, I think both Mozilla and you are wrong <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/smile.png">
This sort of concept adds overhead. A user would have to manage all this crap, constantly dragging and dropping, creating piles etc? Man, I don't have time to manage the icons on my desktop, the docs in my Home folder, even my browser bookmarks... let alone my tabs!
The computer should be smart enough to do this sort of grouping for me. It should group by website, or by the website that originated the tab, especially if it's a search engine (those four results from Google about cameras? one group). And this just for starters; throw in Bayes and then we're talking about something that might be useful. Drag&drop should be a last resort; for day-to-day, the computer should be able to "read your mind" as much as possible.
There are already extensions out there to manage your tabs using the sort of paradigm used by Tab Candy. I tried them: after 5 minutes, I just can't be ar$ed to keep organizing and re-organizing tabs that I might just use for 5 seconds. Not worth it.

What I do know is that ever since I tried out Opera and put their tab bar on the left as a column, I've loved that layout. Back on Firefox now and using the "Tab Kit" extension, which does it plus colour coding, hierarchies, and a godsend of a scrollbar, what I do know is that I'll never be able to stand using tabs conventionally as a horizontal bar at the top any more. I'm now comfortable using constantly in excess of 30 or so tabs at any one time.
Tab Candy? It definitely screams "bloat", but perhaps it's for the better. Conventional tabs no longer work in modern society. Perhaps it's just some new thing which you'll initially look upon with suspicion, but later learn to love it if you could just swallow your ideals and become a little bit more ... say, flexible?

I see two aspects:
First, doing things based on some kind of context, improves my productivity. When working with Eclipse, it was a great enhancement for me when I started using Mylyn (<a class="reference external" href="http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/">http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/</a>). And alike I feel like being in control of my really cluttered Firefox-Tabbar again, since I use TabGroups Manager (<a class="reference external" href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/</a>) (in combination with BarTab <a class="reference external" href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/</a> for the performance). This works great for me, and I think it is more like the way we are thinking/"our brain works" why this (contextual ordering) works so good.
And some more thoughts on performance, if I would use Tab Candy it would replace like 3 to 5 current add-ons, so maybe it is equally performant as my current setting, even with the added drag-drop and fluffy things... So for me the decision would be how robust/performant and feature-rich it will be in comparison to what I have now. And at the moment they support suggestions for all kind of stuff, I would revert to my current setting...
On the other side, just recently I'm recognizing that this way of browsing is letting me do even more things in "semi-parallel", so the mess gets even bigger. Mostly all those open tabs are something I really want to read, but something else distracted me or needed a higher priority. I think this is a side-effect of this flood of information one can be interested in and which is not the easiest thing to filter.
And yes, with base64 and all in-line-scripts and -styles, it should not be so difficult to save a page in one simple html-file or a "z(ipped)html" file, its completely out of my understanding why this is not inside the default FF-installation.
my 2 cents about all this

Rick on July 28, 2010 at 10:03 p.m. said:

I already have piles. It's called A New Window.
Matija "hook" Šuklje on July 29, 2010 at 12:16 a.m. said:

As a minimalist, you'll probybly moan if I mention KDE, but I'll do so anyway <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/wink.png">
The future I want (and actually see slowly fold out before me) is to have open standards and protocols to bring my stuff to the net how I want it and from the net to my desktop. I trully feel that the net should be coming to the desktop and not the other way around.
What I see happening now is:
<ul class="simple">
<li>W3C coming up with pushing hard to connect basically anything to anything and everything. I was talking one of the guys from W3C and he said in two years' time it won't matter where your data is or where the computation will be scattered — you'll have control over it and that's the important bit.</li>
<li>more and more protocols aimed at interconnecting data are popping up like mushrooms after rain</li>
<li>semantic web is the bee's knees nowadays — FOSS knows that, Google knows that, Yahoo, FaceBook ...</li>
<li>trully free solutions to take back control from the clouds are emerging fast — ownCloud, GNU Social, Diaspora, Elgg, EtherPad, Libre.fm, ...</li>
<li>plug computers are starting to become more and more powerful and are already cheaper then 100 €.</li>
<li>with NEPOMUK, Akonadi etc. KDE is leading the semantic and social desktop trend and I suppose many will (if they haven't yet) slowly realise they have to catch up fast!</li>
</ul>
...so where I see myself in two years' time is using KDE (or other desktop) where I locally store my data and where I run specialised programs to use specific data (e.g. addressbook, mail client); which in turn would be connected to my plug computer where the data I would like to push around the net (to certain people); which in turn would be connected to other such nodes.
P.S. yeah, it's late, I've been sitting behind my laptop too long and very possibly what I just wrote is very incoherent ...sorry :
Giacomo on July 29, 2010 at 09:06 a.m. said:

Honestly, I think both Mozilla and you are wrong <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/smile.png">
This sort of concept adds overhead. A user would have to manage all this crap, constantly dragging and dropping, creating piles etc? Man, I don't have time to manage the icons on my desktop, the docs in my Home folder, even my browser bookmarks... let alone my tabs!
The computer should be smart enough to do this sort of grouping for me. It should group by website, or by the website that originated the tab, especially if it's a search engine (those four results from Google about cameras? one group). And this just for starters; throw in Bayes and then we're talking about something that might be useful. Drag&drop should be a last resort; for day-to-day, the computer should be able to "read your mind" as much as possible.
There are already extensions out there to manage your tabs using the sort of paradigm used by Tab Candy. I tried them: after 5 minutes, I just can't be ar$ed to keep organizing and re-organizing tabs that I might just use for 5 seconds. Not worth it.
Dion Moult on July 29, 2010 at 05:52 p.m. said:

What I do know is that ever since I tried out Opera and put their tab bar on the left as a column, I've loved that layout. Back on Firefox now and using the "Tab Kit" extension, which does it plus colour coding, hierarchies, and a godsend of a scrollbar, what I do know is that I'll never be able to stand using tabs conventionally as a horizontal bar at the top any more. I'm now comfortable using constantly in excess of 30 or so tabs at any one time.
Tab Candy? It definitely screams "bloat", but perhaps it's for the better. Conventional tabs no longer work in modern society. Perhaps it's just some new thing which you'll initially look upon with suspicion, but later learn to love it if you could just swallow your ideals and become a little bit more ... say, flexible?
karfau on July 31, 2010 at 04:31 a.m. said:

I see two aspects:
First, doing things based on some kind of context, improves my productivity. When working with Eclipse, it was a great enhancement for me when I started using Mylyn (<a class="reference external" href="http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/">http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/</a>). And alike I feel like being in control of my really cluttered Firefox-Tabbar again, since I use TabGroups Manager (<a class="reference external" href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/</a>) (in combination with BarTab <a class="reference external" href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/</a> for the performance). This works great for me, and I think it is more like the way we are thinking/"our brain works" why this (contextual ordering) works so good.
And some more thoughts on performance, if I would use Tab Candy it would replace like 3 to 5 current add-ons, so maybe it is equally performant as my current setting, even with the added drag-drop and fluffy things... So for me the decision would be how robust/performant and feature-rich it will be in comparison to what I have now. And at the moment they support suggestions for all kind of stuff, I would revert to my current setting...
On the other side, just recently I'm recognizing that this way of browsing is letting me do even more things in "semi-parallel", so the mess gets even bigger. Mostly all those open tabs are something I really want to read, but something else distracted me or needed a higher priority. I think this is a side-effect of this flood of information one can be interested in and which is not the easiest thing to filter.
And yes, with base64 and all in-line-scripts and -styles, it should not be so difficult to save a page in one simple html-file or a "z(ipped)html" file, its completely out of my understanding why this is not inside the default FF-installation.
my 2 cents about all this

Zeth's homepage

The best of Zeth

We need a thoughout integration of the desktop and the web - not Tab Candy superfast jellyfish

5 thoughts on “We need a thoughout integration of the desktop and the web - not Tab Candy superfast jellyfish”