Tabgrabber
First allow me to preface by noting that I believe that Firefox's default tab behaviour is not well suited when it comes to heavy usage and the handling of many tabs. That's why I use and recommend the extension Tabs Mix Plus. So in thinking of an entry for the design challenge I had to muster something that makes the user experience even more rich than what an extension like Tabs Mix Plus provides (which has features that really should just come with Firefox).
The idea that came to mind ultimately is an inspiration from Emacs's Ido (Interactively Do Things) buffer selection. Emacs is a text editor that's often compared to an operating system due to its flexibility. Instead of conventional tabs as you see in Firefox as well as text editors, it has "buffers" that are normally hidden. Ido is is a modal way to find a buffer you want, allowing you to type a few characters to jump quickly to an open file.
Tabgrabber is a modal way to manage tabs. The idea is to keep it fast, to instantly jump to the tab area and back to the main window. The features also scale upward with the demands of having multiple tabs open. Tabgrabber focuses on augmenting the existing tab experience, letting the user keep a familiar default setting, with the possibility of more advanced defaults that better integrate with the tabgrabber feature.
Demo
You can find an animated demo HERE
Other Thoughts
The demo is to just flesh out the ideas, some notes on what needs to be done and considered:
- Could freezing the mouse cursor be too disjointing, perhaps just change the cursor and let it move freely? The argument against just using the standard mouse interface is that it's too slow, the idea is to limit cursor movement.
- A flexible and efficient key-shortcut mapping needs to be designed. Also a good default mouse shortcut (perhaps leftclick + rightclick?).
- Highlighting of the tabs when selecting them probably needs to be shifted, perhaps only highlighting the area around the favicon to indicate a selected status instead?
- A "notification" group for tabs that hold pages that include somekind of chat system, such as Facebook. Have an alert icon on the bottom bar, and when entering tabgrabbing mode this group is auto selected.