Abstract
Tabs have changed the way people surf the net. Users can open many more pages than they could previously. With this freedom some new browsing problems have arisen, like organization. When a user is not limited as much by space they tend to open and leave open 'just in case' pages. A user will open a link that piques their interest or they might leave a page open that might come in use in the future. Eventually the page is so crammed with tabs that they don't fit on the screen and are so small they can't be read. The only recourse is to open a new window and try to organize your tabs by dragging and dropping them. This is far too time consuming and generally users suffer through the mess instead.
So what can we do? I think we need a system which will do a lot of the organizing automatically but will also allow a user to change it on the fly. I'm no programmer but I assume this could be implemented as a firefox plugin.
Requirements
- Automatic organization
- User assisted organization
- Use as little screen real estate as possible
- Should reflect parent/child relationships between pages
- Distinguish pages that have not been accessed in a while
- User should be able to easily locate an open tab
Organization
There are many plugins for firefox (see Modding Tabs) that try to help us organize the mess. Many of them put tabs from the same domain next to each other. This doesn't help much when a user is doing research, drawing from many sources. There is also a plugin called Tab Kit which has many different tab enhancements including grouping and condensing by parent/child. This system works great for a google search with many 'child' pages but is broken if a user branches out to a different category from one of these pages. Firefox already supports reordering tabs and dragging to different windows but accurately organizing in this manner is tedious and time consuming.
So what we really need is a way to organize by content. This could be done by a keyword search and/or public tagging. There are many social bookmarking sites which are categorized by user supplied tags. Why not use the preexisting tags to help automate tab organization?
Tagging
For a good overview on tags and metadata please check Wikipedia
Instead of searching for a site atDel.icio.us let's do the opposite and find the most popular tags for a site. Then use these tags to help organize open tabs. We could even go a step further and have it suggest other sites based on open ones. If the tags aren't accurate for the individual then they could amend them and save them to their Del.icio.us account. If a site has not been tagged then we would have to resort to keyword searches or maybe ask Google.
To see a sampling of pages I looked up and my discoveries click 'Tagging Test'. Obviously some more rigorous testing will be required.
Here are some great links on tagging and taxonomy for your exploration:
The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging - A great rundown of both the pros and cons to a taxonomy.
The Long Tail Focuses on the importance of the less popular, niche tags which form a long tail in a power graph.
Order Out of Chaos Bruce Sterling, tagging and taxonomy, what more could you want?
Ontology is Overrated A great lecture by Clay Shirky about ontology and tagging.
A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging by Rashmi Sinha
Design Prototype
I've explored several different design possibilities, some quite abstract. (here are scans of some of my early sketches. please don't judge) Some of the outlandish designs might even work better than the tabbed one but in the end people are comfortable with tabs. So this design builds off of the familiar tabbed interface. See some snapshots with design notes.
Wrap Up
Tags seem like a very sensible way to automate tab organization. The main problem right now is the scarcity of tag clouds for obscure web pages. This will only get better with time and meanwhile we can use keywords and related tag clouds to help fill in the holes. The success of this relies heavily on a clever algorithm.
