SorTabs - mozconcept

hello community.
My name is Marcello Cardoso and Im an Interaction Design student at IEC here in Brasil.

I will show you the results of my study in Mozilla's Firefox tab navigation, and i call it SorTabs.

Tabs are a great tool and so it became a market standard. it's not my intention to change it completelly but to improve it by adding resources to deal with the new cenario of advanced browsing users.

We cant loose focus of efficacy. Tabs works neat if we have just a few open, not so fine with large ammounts. That's our target, then.

To do so, we are looking for efficiency. Build tools to organize, sort the content. Those tools may be handy to the PRO user but can't be in the begginers way.

Learnability is the key. Keep it simple, and use commom metaphors. Another way to help the learnability curve to decrease is to add shortcuts with commom tasks.

Lets go for minimal design. A browser is a tool to do everything, not the final goal. We don't want to fight for attention with the websites, do we? Not beyond the nescessary.

This is sortabs.

As you can see, i redesigned the browser to remove all i could. The tabs dropdown moved to the up-right corner and gainned a text label so it can be easily found.

When clicked, the expanded menu shows more information and looks like the URL field one. The focus tab shows a background.

we also have a new feature to organize tabs by date open or name, ordering it alphabetically.

Other new feature is the group by domain button, that does exactly what is expected when clicked, resulting in a dropdown like new tab.

The parent tab of the dropdown tab will be the higher domain level one. If google and gmail are both open, they will be grouped under the google tab.

but if a lower domain level is the focus tab, then he will be the parent of the dropdown like tab.

if we click on the dropdown arrow, we dont activate other tab. it only occurs if we click in the name or icon of a website. that way we can explore closed tabs without changing our navigation.

but if we click in the name or icon of another tab then it activates and this tag becames the parent of the dropdown tab, as any other dropdown.

another feature is a search field inside the tabs dropdown. it works like the ctrl f feature, highlighting tabs that contain that string in the title, url or description.

if we disable group by domain feature, it stills working.

I think that would be handy, but we could go a step further messing with contextual menus.

first, i changed the navigation to icons. second, i added a simplified version of the upper tabs menu here.

that is it! i have much more ideias but would be hard to explain by video.

so thank you community! See you next time!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• mozconcept
• mozilla
• firefox
• mcardoso
• joejoe

[joejoey]

hahaha, you must be kidding! (-:

[AwesomeHackTutorials]

has anyone ever told u, u look just like jack black?

[joejoey]

i cant find your submmit... can you send me the link pls? (o:

[beedeeuniko]

We had some ideas in common... ;)