Tab Sort — Improving Tabs in Firefox

During a three day workshop with the Firefox Design Team, we developed concepts to improve tab management in Firefox.

Everyone who has ever used a modern web browser knows this problem: After a while of surfing the web the tab bar is stuffed full with tabs and finding that specific tab you are looking for always is a hassle.

On Tabs

Web browsers started introducing tabs around the turn of the millennium, with Firefox implementing them in 2001. Their popularity is based on their big advantages: Rather than the desktop being cluttered with a large number of windows for multiple documents, they can be be grouped into one window. Tabs are also a space-saving way of navigation and are generally well understood by users. But when too many tabs are opened at once it is very easy to lose track of them. All tabs look roughly the same, and either have to be squashed or be hidden under a scrollable view to save space.

This problem has long been recognised by the Firefox design team and they have tried multiple ways of fixing it. They challenged us to have a crack at it and find our own solution during a three day workshop at our university.

How might we help?

A short dialog to summarise what the users told us

When we asked our peers how they wind up with too many tabs the answers were surprising. A lot of them keep their tabs open to revisit them. But they don’t save them as bookmarks because they’re not important enough. Additionally the history ends up being too messy to find things that have been closed.

Based on these conversations we came up with three „How Might We“-Questions to help us find a solution:

1. How might we help the user not to lose track of his tabs?
2. How might we help the user to reduce the number of tabs?
3. How might we help the user not to open too many tabs?

We believe that in order to solve the problem permanently all three questions will have to be answered. Given our time constraints we decided to focus on the first question: The user has already too many tabs open — how can we help her not to loose track and find the one she needs at the right moment?

Introducing Tab Sort

Tab Sort is a simple and unobtrusive way to locate your most relevant tabs. It sorts your tabs into different groups. These will help you find exactly the tabs you are looking for and eliminate unnecessary ones.

It’s not trying to force a new interaction level with a whole new interface onto you like other Tab-Managers. It keeps your effort of learning a new interface low by sorting the tabs inside of the existing tab bar. Additionally it is a lightweight solution which allows you to quickly get in and out.

It offers you a few different options to sort by:

• Search
  Just type in the keyword you want to search for and it will sort the tabs based on the relevance to this search word.
• Last Visit
  Last Visit sorts by the time that passed since you last interacted with the tab. This quickly gives you an overview over which tabs you frequently visited vs. the tabs you haven’t visited since days.
• Domain
  Through sorting by domain we can remove a lot of visual clutter by moving the favicons out the different tabs. This way all your wikipedia-research tabs get instantly visible.
• Category
  Have you been on a shopping spree lately? Or searched for news on multiple sites? By sorting via category the tabs get grouped in a thematic way.
• Referral
  This groups the tabs by the source from which they were opened — for example all tabs opened from the same Google search result page will end up in one group.

But let’s dive into a few different functionalities to make it more clear how Tab Sort could improve your workflow.

Activate the sorting
Through a dropdown menu at the top right of the browser you can easily switch into any desired sorting mode. Via a shortcut you can quickly jump in and out of your last visited sorting.

Select your type of sorting through a dropdown menu or jump to the most recent sorting with a shortcut.

Switching and closing tabs
While the sorting is activated you are able to switch between tabs and close irrelevant ones. Jumping between tabs and whole groups of tabs is possible via shortcuts.

While the sorting is activated, switching and closing tabs is possible.

Automatically deactivate the sorted mode
When you start to interact with the page (either by scrolling or clicking), the sorting is reset to it’s default state. This gives the whole flow a lightweight feel.

When starting to interact with the page, the sorting automatically gets deactivated for a lightweight feel.

Searching your tabs
You can search for anything you like, which then sorts your tabs by your entered keyword.

Reflection

We are aware that this might not be the perfect solution for every use case and it would have to be tested extensively, but we hope to inspire new ideas on how to solve this problem and give impulses for action. We are happy to have gotten the opportunity to work with the support of the Firefox design team for three days and would like to thank them for their great feedback and guidance.

Project by Nikolas Klein, Bernadette Krehbiel, Christoph Labacher, Florian Ludwig and Barend Visser, 11/2016

Thanks to Philipp Sackl and the Firefox Design Team. Check out the results of all groups in the presentation.