Dipankar Sarkar http://dipankar.name me@dipankar.name Mozilla design challenge 2009

Current design Design cannot cope up with too many tabs Tab grouping is not that natural or inbuilt Too many distant mouse movement across the screen to switch tabs Saving state works, but when we re-open browser a brute force opening of the tabs is not a good idea

Envisioned design Keep existing setup Replace rectangular tabs with favicon only circles. Only active tab can be rounded edge rectangular. Fluid circle movements and on hover display of URL and other information You can have upto 2 rows of circles in the UI Simple algorithm to auto arrange windows

Cool features The algorithm to arrange the tab by default using a ranking formula based on time elapsed since opening(telapsed) and active open time(tactive). Time in seconds. Rank = - (300 - telapsed)*10 - tactive*100 Plug in any other ranking and have fun. Plugins around tabs and their classification using colors and positioning in the tab area.

Advantages Easy grouping based on colors Small mouse movements for changing tabs Lots of tabs can be handled Clever loading of tabs based on how much time the user had spent on them on last browser state Fun and playful, in addition to utility with animated circles and transitions

Screenshot – Old UI

Screenshot – New design We can see the color classification, with favicon On hover they will show more details about the site

About author Dipankar Sarkar Loves to code, and compute Free time is spent reading books of all kinds Favorite book character is Roark, from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” Founded Kwippy (http://kwippy.com) Blogs at http://desinerd.com Lives online at http://dipankar.name Can be contacted at me@dipankar.name