Launches a competition
Mozilla Labs has launched a competition that aims to find an
alternative to tabbed browsing.
After popularising the idea of tabbed
browsing it now seems that the Open Source browser maker thinks the idea is old
hat. Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website that tabs worked well on
slow machines on a thin internet, where ten browser sessions were 'many browser
sessions.
However with more than 20 parallel sessions are 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, the site said.
"However, if you
have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And
tabs don't work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They're a
good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment," it claims.
The
challenge has the catchy title, "Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we
create, navigate and manage multiple websites within the same browser
instance?"
Part of the reason for the change might be the move to mobile
computers. Mobile browsers, such as Mozilla's own Fennec, have problems
switching between different tabs.