Upcoming Build of Firefox 4 Getting Tab Candy

By Marcus Yam
published

Mmm... Candy.

If you're an internet power user and you have lots of tabs open in your Firefox, you'll know how arduous it can be to continuously scroll through them to find what you want.

To help manage tabs, developers at Mozilla have developed Tab Candy, a very slick and easy way to sort and switch tabs. The first version was in the special build of Minefield, but the idea has been so well received that it's getting integrated into an upcoming version of Firefox 4 beta.

Mike Beltzner tweeted: "Just approved Tab Candy to land on mozilla-central later today. Great work by the team to get it there. More to do, but this is a big hurdle"

Check out what Tab Candy is all about in the video below:

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
56 Comments Comment from the forums
  • aaron686
    Can be quite useful when you open a page for viewing later etc. and power users like myself with 20+ tabs open will definitely benefit.
    Reply
  • JasonAkkerman
    Tab candy... I think I remember someone trying to sell me something call that once..
    Reply
  • harth13
    Candy... I like
    Reply
  • tokenz
    cant it do it for me automagicaly. Think about it. I have 5 tabs open with cameras in it. Cant they group them for me. I dont want to take time to sort may tabs. Most of the time I am only switching from one to two active tabs at a time. (out of the 50 that are open)
    Reply
  • TunaSoda
    There are magical tabs on your START BAR that group
    Browser tabs are annoying, and I have them completely disabled
    Reply
  • zaixionito
    I still think that most browsers shouldn't have the almost exact same UI...

    I know that Fx and Opera did the theme at the same time, but I like variety.
    Reply
  • Drakoes
    Hey hey, I thought we're getting the first candy!
    Reply
  • cookoy
    personally i don't like the word "Candy". Sounds like something to entice you, without giving anything of substantial value. If all it does is to organize all the open tabs, why not just call it a Tab Organizer?
    Reply
  • hardwarekid9756
    Well, personally, I think this is both superfluous but also awesome. It adds a layer of elegance to something I already do. Instead of managing it in the "Tab candy window", I have it managed in individual instances of firefox along my browser. With the help of Win7, I can just drag and drop based on priority, and with FF's ability to drag out a tab and have it pop open in a window, I just manage my tabgroups as such. However, this would allow for a really elegant way to manage all of that, and, IMO sort of one-up's Google's thought of "The browser as a desktop." Thinks about it...Aren't most of us power-users ALREADY doing tab-candy like me, in the OS? Now, FF has just taken that OS-level power and embedded it into their browser. Just leave FF open, and you can do everything that your start bar and windows space WAS doing originally. Very cool, but, as I said, also somewhat superfluous. It's essentially a very elegant solution for people who don't understand the power of their OS.
    Reply
  • belardo
    Kinda of stupid in a way. Having 20+ tabs? How many people actually do this? Going that far, you may end up with hundreds... which is kind of pointless, why bother having bookmarks. When you're done with tabs, close them out.

    I'll admit that my current OPERA browser has 10 tabs. when I'm done in about 5 mins, it'll be down to 5 and I shut down. Opera has a SPEED DIAL - visual bookmark for your top 9~24 sites of your choice as well as keeping tabs in memory without bugging you about it.

    Tab Candy... looks useless for more people, but a MUST HAVE for those with 25+ tabs. But with typical users... 2~4 tabs is overwhelming... :( and with IE8, its nothing but a horrible mess.
    Reply