0) this is the new default, but it's configurable
1) visually separates controls that affect the current tab (back, forward) from controls that affect the whole browser (close, minimize)
2) saves space and reduces clutter in tabs that don't need certain controls
3) FF is moving certain sidebars (like the bookmarks sidebar) inside of tabs, and tabs on top will look/feel more consistent with this
4) allows notification pop-ups to be attached directly to the address bar without covering up the tab area
Another point I found important is the "App tabs" feature. They'll be letting you designate certain tabs as Apps, which will keep them permanently on the left of all the tabs, turn them into small icons (instead of normal sized tabs), and make them permanent (can't close or navigate away from them).
I love this, since I already do this with a lot of applications (I have Gmail, Google Calendar, Wave and Facebook always open).
Google Chrome already allows you to do this by right-clicking a tab and clicking "pin tab". It's kind of pointless in its current form, like a awkward hybrid of bookmarks and tabs.
I'd like to see some sort of notification system added to the icons of pinned tabs (like icon badges in Mac OS X) so you could see how many unread items you have in Gmail, Google Reader, etc.
No idea how you'd go about implementing such an idea though.
Chrome took the pin tab from opera.. (like everything else)
However the dev of chrome (not sure if its in stable yet) allows you to have these custom apps already. When you install them they also give the app extra permissions such as display tray notices and geo location. This way the app does not have to ask for them every time.
Fluid ( http://fluidapp.com/ ), a site specific browser, has a system in place for icon badges showing unread numbers, etc., so it must be possible. I’d guess this is Greasemonkey-style site-specific JS code though.
Chrome lets you throw such pages out into their own window with no browser navigation controls, and it helpfully puts a shortcut to that experience in your choice of locations. ("Create application shortcuts...")
I think I recall some talk that this might be going away in future versions. But I certainly hope not, as it helps cloudify the desktop rather nicely when you stop seeing such web applications as only existing in browser-like windows.
Thanks for the summary, tl;dw is right. It's preposterous and sad that the Principal Designer on Firefox values the time of his users so little that he thinks a 7 minute unskimmable, unlinkable, unindexable, unexcerptable, bandwidth-heavy video (best viewed full-screen, lest you miss a pixel of detail or are tempted to look at some thing of lesser import) is a better way to communicate this change than some text and a few screenshots.
- How will will show how App Tabs work and how they will look?
- How can we explain to the user that the tab display preferences are not locked?
- Show users how App Tabs will work and look with UI overloading.
- Why we choose to use internal UI over platform.
All of these can be displayed with some JPGs/PNGs and a bit of sultry text, but it probably made more sense to compile a video since some of these elements are best shown, rather than described.
Watching videos feels a lot more comfortable to me than reading text. If I have the time I would always prefer it to reading. As such I think it’s quite over the top of you to use words like “preposterous” and “sad”.
There are downsides to it, sure, you described them quite well. It would certainly be best to have both but detesting videos on principle seems a bit preposterous and sad to me.
Well, you have more time and patience than I do and that's fair enough. Video is wonderful so the notion that I 'detest it on principle' is silly. As I said, I can't paste from a video, no search engine can do anything useful with a video, there's no way for me to skip you earnestly telling me things I don't care about in a video. Using video for something that could just as well be conveyed in text and images is a sort of worst of both worlds. More than that, it actually breaks the web. Without linking, excerpting, indexing, there is no web. So I still think the Main Designer Kahuna of Firefox (a web browser) demanding 7 undivided, full-screen minutes of my attention is preposterous and sad, for anything short of 7 minutes of intricate interpretive dance or other information otherwise unsuitable for text and images.
0) this is the new default, but it's configurable 1) visually separates controls that affect the current tab (back, forward) from controls that affect the whole browser (close, minimize) 2) saves space and reduces clutter in tabs that don't need certain controls 3) FF is moving certain sidebars (like the bookmarks sidebar) inside of tabs, and tabs on top will look/feel more consistent with this 4) allows notification pop-ups to be attached directly to the address bar without covering up the tab area
downsides: 1) mouse distance increases