Introducing… an entry to the design challenge “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser” by Giorgos Sarigiannidis & Christina Dalla …tab clouds

How many tabs does the average person open in one session? A search engine and many result tabs Webmail inbox and several messages Social networking sites Forums and favorite blogs Work related pages Almost a meter (about 80 cm) of opened tabs!

Users open new tabs even for pages that come from the same domain, whether that is: forum threads, multiple emails, blog entries, friends’ profiles, …

What happens once tabs reach the full width of the browser? Tabclouds automatically group together all tabs from the same domain, under a single tab cloud

A tabcloud is like a dropdown that groups all tabs from the same domain On roll-over, the drop down opens, providing direct access to all tabs The user can choose to expand the group again, close a single tab or the whole tabcloud

…is that all tabclouds do? …NO!

…tabclouds can reside in the sidebar, and help expert users to manage their tabs better…

The user can activate the sidebar view from the tabcloud options A tabcloud on the sidebar consists of a group of semi-transparent webpage thumbnails It can be about a topic of interest (e.g. music), a functional group (e.g. webmail), a project, or anything else The user can create a tabcloud just for a session, or save it for later Bookmark folders, tags and history can all be imported as tabclouds, according to user preferences A tabcloud is a bit like a tag: it shows what the tab is about. As a result a tab can belong to more than one tabclouds Quick find a page… options

to assign a tab to a cloud simply drag-and-drop to view contents simply hover Quick find a page… Tab cloud 5(8) Tab cloud 4(15) Title onmouseover options

Quick find a page… Tab cloud 1 (18) Tab cloud 3(8) Tab cloud 6 (12) Tab cloud 8 (18) Tab cloud 5(8) Tab cloud 6 (12) Tab cloud 7(15) Tab cloud 2(8) Tab cloud 4(15) options to assign a tab to a cloud simply drag-and-drop to view contents simply hover

…and what about people who use the browser for their work, like developers, content managers and others?

…they can use workclouds!

Workclouds are groups of tabs created manually by the user, just like tabclouds Workclouds can be temporary, but users can also save them and auto-load them in the future The tabs inside a workcloud are arranged by domain, and, instead of thumbnails, favicons are displayed to accommodate a large number of pages On mouse-over a floating window lists all thumbnails In full integration mode, Users could also drag-and-drop any file from the file manager to a workcloud For example, a content manager uploading content to a web CMS could add to that workcloud images, word files and any other content source! Quick find tabs… workcloud 1 (18) workcloud 2 (8) New workcloud workcloud 4 (8) [S] [X] [S] [X] [S] [X] workcloud 3 (12) [S] [X]

…what does the future have in store for tabclouds?

Complete integration of the tabcloud sidebar to the file manager Floating sidebar on the desktop, visible even when Firefox is minimized Sidebar alerts for web content updates Sharing on social sidebars with private and public tabclouds

CREDITS concept & execution by Giorgos Sarigiannidis & Christina Dalla based on an idea by Giorgos Sarigiannidis hand-drawn visio stencils courtesy of Niklas Wolkert mail to: contact@gsarigannidis.gr, christina.dalla@gmail.com