Although I use up to 50+ tabs, I   *would*    use a lot more if:

 

-I could find stuff easier

 

-If Firefox didn't slow down so much about that number - gets really slow closing tabs for instance. Minefield also uses a lot of memory about that number too...

 

I remember the first days of DOS when I found I had to restrict a directory to have less than 300 files as the directory search times got too big and killed performance...

 

this is the beginning days of handling pages of information as single objects, and in future I would be wanting to have thousands of pages either open or easy to open in a flash from bookmarks without worrying about overloading the poor browser...

 

So how can we open thousands of pages?

A good question for Firefox V3! If you make it easy to handle thousands of pages, then for the average user handling 3 or 4 will also be easy...

 

Tabs as a hierarchical structure/tree structure is maybe the long term way to have hundreds or thousands of web pages organised....but that no doubt is a fundamental change to whole browser architecture.

 

 No doubt MS had to rewrite IE totally to allow that second tab and more....

 

But there is more than one way to organise thousands of pages....

 

Drop down Tab list:

 

This was added I think at the last minute for Firefox V2, and could be a terrific way to add functionality. Although it does not show thumbnails of windows like IE7, it could be added to to do things more useful in a different way - it could be turned from a simple afterthought to a real killer feature. While still keeping the current flat tab structure, imagine if each tab opened stored just a few details such as

 

  • Date/time tab opened
  • ID of parent tab (if opened from another)
  • Date/Time last looked at
  • Title

 

The drop down list could show all of these in columns - and here is the killer idea - as a page or window you can use for navigation around the rest of the tabs.

 

It could be sort of explorer type window, with columns like explorer, Or it could be a generated tab anytime more than one is present called "Tab Index", with columns

 

However done, you could add functionality to the list easily:

 

Here is a mocked up example, from a google search on "Firefox V3 Tabs", plus some unrelated tabs opened before and after.  The column headings become buttons for sorting....

 

Mockup:

 

 

you could sort by any of the columns.

 

You could filter....

 

Scroll bars when the list is bigger than a screen...

 

Sort by ID and all the tabs opened from one page appear together on the list.

 

sort by Date/Time last viewed and all the last active tabs are together - neat for jumping around them, and unread tabs will be at the bottom of the list, also handy.

 

Sort by title - and the tabs are listed in alphabetic order.

 

Note the original tabs don't get re-ordered, just the drop down list.

 

And when you select a tab from the list, that becomes the current tab and focus shifts there, and the drop down list of tabs closes. When it opens again, it opens with the same sorted order as last seen.

 

On the drop down list, there also could be check boxes maybe, so you could check a few, (or select them using CTRL+Click or Shift+Click as all Windows users are used to with Explorer) and have a few options such as "Close selected tabs" "Bookmark selected tabs" "Group selected tabs" "hide selected tabs.."

 

This is a tiny snapshot of the browsing I will do - in practice I will leave a groups of related tabs open for several days as I don't want a permanent bookmark, but I want to refer back to them. I am not kidding, I would like a standard browser that could manage a session of several hundred or thousands of pages like this.