Jay Goldman

I really love the return of the browser wars. It looked for a while like Firefox was going to slowly eat away at InternetExplorer’s dominance until it became The One True Browser, but the burst of activity around WebKit and its Safari/Chrome offspring has really shaken things up. We’re seeing some pretty innovative stuff going on for developers, opening up a whole new can of “Browser as Operating System” sauce and pouring it all over HTML 5, CSS 3, WebM video, etc. That’s pretty exciting stuff if you like writing code, but what about the vast majority who prefer using it?

I covered some Firefox 4’s user experience sweetness in the previous Tabs position: the toilet paper roll of UI design, which digs into Mozilla’s decision to switch from tabs-on-top to tabs-on-bottom. That’s not all that innovative in and of itself — Chrome does tabs on top too — but some of the details in there are pretty tasty sounding (like mini tabs on the left for web apps). Good thing they’ve got some other tricks up their open source sleeves!

A new video came out a few days ago, this time from Firefox’s Creative Director Aza Raskin, talking about The Thing that Will Change Browsing Forever (Again). Seems hard to believe now, but there was a time when Firefox was the first real browser to support tabs at all. Remember when your browsing session was a mess of open windows, each showing a single page? Ah… the good old days. Now I’d be totally lost without tabs. Problem is, I’m frequently totally lost within tabs, so we’ve really traded one form of information overload for another. Tab Candy is the solution.

It’s like the best parts of Apple’s Exposé (Mac OS X) and App Folders (iOS) were mashed together with a Zooming User Interface (ZUI, pronounced zoo-ey) and then deliciously layered on top of Firefox’s tasty tabs. I’m practically drooling with anticipation.

Aza’s been talking about and researching ZUIs for a long time. Here’s a talk he did at CHI2007 (and again as a Google TechTalk) on the Death of the Desktop:

It’s great to see some of this work making it into a product with such an awe-inspiring large install base. I don’t know that I’d want everything I do to be done through a ZUI (visions of computer-induced-motion-sickness), but they’re awesomely effective in the right application. And this is definitely one of those applications.

Even better news: you can try Tab Candy today! Grab a super early Firefox 4 build with Tab Candy enabled and provide feedback.

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• Tabs position: the toilet paper roll of UI design There’s an age-old debate about which way the toilet paper...