It’s definitely possible that some of these are left as addons. And that’s the beauty of Firefox – if you want an interaction that isn’t widely popular, you can write it yourself. However, I do think the very best interactions in addons are the kind of features that may belong in the browser itself. Some of Firefox’s best features began as popular addons, in fact – the addon community is a great way to gauge what features users want.

monk.e.boy –

I was going to say I addressed these in a previous post, but you posted there too. I guess you liked the idea?

Gordon P. Hemsley -

Though an important difference between tabs and your filesystem is that unless your files are images, a thumbnail of the document would not always be useful. My thought here is that knowing what a page looks like without knowing its title may be very common in browsing more than in an OS. This is because in browsing, tabs are often opened to be read later, so they have not been read yet but may only have been glanced at. Bryan goes more into detail about this.

Ganeshram Iyer -

Which prototype are you referring to as being potentially confusing? Maybe the OS filesystem one? I imagined this as being a separate window from tabs rather than taking their place on screen, so that the original tabbed system would still be visible.

You click on a button, then all the tabs sort of float into the middle of the screen, then organise them selves into a mindmap. Grouped by tag, domain, stuff like that.

Or get rid of the tabs and just use a timeline of the pages. Let the user re-order them as they like. Drag a box round them to group them etc.

monk.e.boy