Tab Candy for Firefox

As you’ll probably know, even if you’re imprisoned within your firm’s IT compound, the browser wars are back again, and the competition has been heating up. The latest major entrant into the lists is Google’s Chrome, which, now that it permits extensions, has moved from near zero to 7% of the market, pillaging mostly from IE’s share. Safari is holding its own, not gaining much of any ground outside the Mac OS world, while Firefox, once the white knight challenger, has begun to falter, weighed down perhaps by over use of extensions.

Now there comes what looks to be the first good reason I’ve seen in a long while for going back to, or sticking with, Firefox. Tab Candy is the creation of Aza Raskin, and though it’s still in early alpha it’s got the internet buzzing with excitement. In a nutshell, it’s a sensible, easy-to-use way to rationalize that picket fence of open tabs you’ve got stretching off the edge of your browser: in a popup “staging area” — my term — your tabs appear as thumbnails; you drag them into any order you please, or you assemble them into groups, which the browser remembers; you can then select one group, for example, to work with, secure in the knowledge that your other tabs in other groups, are safely waiting for you.

As with so many IT matters, it’s easier seen than said. Aza’s got a video that shows it all:

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

For someone like me, who works with many open tabs and who can’t seem to work on just one thing at a time, this might be one of the more useful tools to come along in the last year or so.

Tab Candy is very much alpha. So alpha in fact that the only way you can get it at the moment is by downloading an earlier version of Firefox, called, dispritingly, Minefield, that has Tab Candy built in. You won’t be doing this sub rosa at the office, I suspect. But I do recommend you download the build that’s right for your OS and try this at home, kids.