I love Firefox. I was an early adopter because I loved tabs and I have stayed really because I have the ability in Firefox to switch tabs with the Command-1 (through 9) functionality. Safari is nice and chrome is pretty good too, but I don’t want to go to bookmarks when I use that key combination I want to switch among my tabs!
But there is 1 issue that I know I am not alone with. My tabs get SO unruly! I usually have about 20 million tabs open in like 15 different windows. (Seriously, I have 42 tabs in one window alone right now.)
This leads to 2 different issues.
#1 I usually end up having the same websites open in multiple tabs in different pages (or the same page). I could have facebook open in 5 tabs, gmail open in 4 others and a whole bunch of news articles strewn across my desktop.
#2 I usually crash Firefox every 2-3 days.
Now I know, if I just managed my tabs a little better I would get much better performance and my browser wouldn’t regularly crash. But I don’t wanna have to prune through my tabs and windows all the time. I love Command clicking a link and opening a tab (or 15 in a row on a news site or Digg or something).
So what I’m looking for is a way Firefox could help me out and I think I have a decent solution. (I just came up with this idea so it could def use some refinement but…) Why doesn’t Firefox have a “Browser Manager” window. If Firefox let me call up a window that would list all of the windows and tabs I currently have open with just the title’s of the pages I could do a much better job of seeing what tabs I have open in which windows. (As well as a total count feature of both…)
This would not be a very difficult thing to develop and really there is already a version of this out there. When Firefox unexpectedly quits (way too often as I mentioned above), the first thing that shows up when you restart is a list of all the windows and tabs that were open when the program froze! This is exactly what I wish I could call up anytime!! I have even been known to force-quit Firefox just to open this window up.
The saddest part of my personal browsing habits leaves me with the first tab one window in the list showing a previous list of windows that were open from the last force quit. This nesting frees up some processor speed but really stuff ends up getting buried in multiple layers (similar to my desktop organization system of a folder marked “stuff on desktop DATE” which has older stuff on desktop folders nested inside). Now I know that I am just a dumb user who should take the time to close the tabs I don’t need, but if Firefox would provide the option to take a top down view of all the open windows and tabs my life sure would be a lot easier!
And while I am thinking about it this concept could go a couple steps further. If I was able to drag tabs around on this manager window then I could combine similar tabs to the same location. If I was able to able windows for quick reference (e.g. jobs, news, IxD resources/readings, and FB-twitter-gmail) then this whole concept would be even better.
I still love you firefox, but I’m just saying you could be even better.