Bookmarks, Tabs and Sessions

Update: This idea wouldn’t work well for now because I realised that at startup, Firefox still tries to load all tabs, and even those hidden in Panorama.

I’ve been using Firefox 4 for the past week, and the experience has been great so far.

One thing I realised about the tabs is that it seems firefox now no longer loads all opened tabs on load – I’m not too sure about this yet but it seems that way. It seems at Firefox startup, it now loads only the active tab, and subsequently only the tab which I click on. This is really useful for me since at any one time, I have more than 40 tabs. In the past, all 40 tabs will try to load at the same time and it really slows down my system.

One feature I’ve been exploring is Panorama, which allows me to sort tabs into groups. In the past, I did so by using the Session Manager add-on. With Panorama, sorting my tabs has become easier since I simply right click and ‘Move to Group’. But somehow this is still pretty limited since the ‘window’-type view takes up screen estate and there’s a limit to how many groups I can have at any one time.

This brings me to another thought. It seems to me that with Panorama and the likes of Session Manager, the line between tabs and bookmarks are blurring. So why don’t we merge tabs and bookmarks into one, where

  • Panorama tabs = bookmarks
  • Make the Panorama main window scrollable, with an alternative text view like protopage
  • And since tabs = bookmarks, of course tabs will be accessible through the library like how bookmarks are listed now.

In this way, users no longer have to manage bookmarks and tabs, just one type – maybe we can call it bookmark-tabs, or tabmarks in short. I’m sure someone can come up with a better name. And I am thinking about tabmarks like the gmail or ymail philosophy where there is never a need to delete your tabs ever again – never will we ever have to close a tab ever again. Or at least we don’t have to think twice about leaving a tab open.

And if this idea ever comes to fruition, the line between browsing history and tabmarks will then be blurred.

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