For months – beginning long before I posted under Could PANORAMA feature be brought back to Firefox? – I have struggled to imagine, to visualise, how I might use the more restrictive future Firefox 57+ with my workflows with things such as Firefox containers.
This morning, whilst enjoying Tab Centre (Tab Center) with Quicksaver Tab Groups with Firefox 53.0 on KDE Plasma 4, the struggle ended. Now I have a more holistic understanding of why I can not imagine the future Firefox suiting my workflows. I imagine being forced to change some of my flows, and if that will be forced then I will probably continue to use Firefox 56.x until a more suitable browser becomes available.
At first glance, the screenshots below may appear to represent an extraordinary use case. In particular:
- the KDE panel to the left of all windows is my at-a-glance panorama of all window titles.
Whilst that positioning and use of a panel may appear extraordinary, visually, my gut tells me that the rationale is deeply rooted in the essence of popular desktop environments:
- windowing.
The window is the container
Users whose primary operating systems are not window-oriented might argue against that, but I reckon that the statement is:
- true for a massive number of users
– and a significant proportion of those users have become accustomed to the concept over years or decades.
The user groups things within a container
We all do it, in reality and online.
Not with all things, but with some of the things that matter to us.
Those things are tabs
In the window of a web browser: if there’s an inclination to group things, those things are likely to be tabs.
Structure and flow
I have:
- a window (container) for most Mozilla stuff
- within that window, groups – Bugzilla@Mozilla, MozDev, Thunderbird and so on
- a separate window (container) for open stuff
- within that window, groups – Mozilla Open Design, Open Source Design, OpenNews and so on
- a separate window (container) for community, forum and Discourse stuff
- within that window, groups – Discourse Meta, FeverBee and so on.
Screenshots
In this first screenshot:
- the window in front is my Mozilla stuff, the group in front is containers, the tab in front is a set of search results from the Containers category of this forum and the Tabs Group menu is pulled down to highlight the Mozilla support and Discourse group
- to the left of the front window, I point at the panel listing for the window to my open stuff (it’s not visibly titled ‘open’, but I know the nature of the window from the title at which I point)
More
There’s more, but what’s above might be a lot to take in so I’ll await a response here before going into depth.
Folks, please share your thoughts. Thanks!
Related
2017-03-04:
2017-05-01:
Michael Westbom’s Context Plus
Side notes
This topic was:
- originally categorised under Containers
- expected to touch upon multiple aspects of the design of Firefox
- moved by me to the Tab Center category, after it became clear that Containers will not allow movement of tabs in the way that I require.
as expansion of the sidebar
