I think the idea behind this is great and I'm happy Mozilla is doing it. I just wish someone would put a little more thought into how this could be done in a collabrative way and not as a contest. Anyone who has designed anything with a team knows that a single idea from someone else can have a huge impact on what you're thinking.<p>I'm man enough to admit I've had whole trains of thought de-railed by someone pointing out a flaw in my logic that I just couldn't see without their help. This contest is like everyone showing up with their "first day of design" ideas and then leaving with no discussion. Still a cool idea but limited.
Rather than reinvent tabs in the browser what we really need is a better way to think about multiple tasks on our computer. There is no significant difference any more (and the write up sort of hints in that direction).<p>From the 80s and 90s, we have things like dialog boxes (task flow), multiple document windows, and application switchers. Mac OS X brought us the dock, which marries launcher and switcher in a pretty bad way if you ask me.<p>The browser has subsumed all of the above into tabs or multiple windows. ("Launcher" is our start page / bookmarks / google "navigational" queries.)<p>And it adds some more complications: queueing up tangential things to read, view, or listen to, and special versions of the document, for things like printing.<p>When I open up a bunch of tabs from Hacker News, it is more like a queue of unrelated topics, and it might even survive between sessions. Other times I am doing an exhaustive research of some topic, from links on Google, and I might even want to keep a complete history of how I navigated. But "here's your e-ticket for the movie tonight, now print it" is very different; it's only good for right now and it needs attention immediately.<p>Maybe we have to start annotating these tabs and windows differently, either the page authors do so in HTML or JS or we the readers somehow indicate our intention as we open them. That way the browser-tab-operating-system-thingy can start grouping them more sensibly.
Good. Tabs still suck. I remember when content from one would bleed into the other and all the other misc problems caused by re-inventing windowing within apps.<p>It's gotten better, bit by bit. But I still lose web pages in tabs and while Safari has a Window menu that lists each window, it only lists the frontmost tab of each.
A queue would be cool, a la instapaper.com, but supported by the browser. I notice most of my tabs are "waiting to be read" things opened from Hacker News.