Development:Summer of Code 2006

The Mozilla Foundation accepted Desmond Elliott to work on Improvements to the tabbed-browsing experience as part of the 2006 Google Summer of Code. Mike Pinkteron will be mentoring this project. Desmond's original proposal can be found here.

Consultation with the community

The community were polled here and here for any thoughts that they had in addition to what Desmond Elliott originally proposed. The results of this period of consulation have been condensed here and are not really in any order. These results will be discussed between the developers of Camino on Thursday 8th June 2006 and hopefuilly some of them will be chosen to be appended to the original proposal.

This list has been split into 2 different sections:

Things that users of Camino should be able to do are ideas that could be easily condensed into a single sentence.

Features that people would like to see in Camino are ideas that are a little bit juicier.

Items in italics indicate implementation guidelines, rather than features/bugfixes.

Things that users of Camino should be able to do

1. A user should be able to see a drop down menu with the history relating to that tab. WONTFIX
2. A user should be able to preview opened tabs. (Possibly as an impl. detail for tab expose)
3. A user should be able to undo close tabs or a user should be able to re-open a closed window. Out of Scope
4. A user should be able to bookmark all open tabs. We already do this
5. A user should be able to set how many tabs can be displayed in a window before overflow control kicks in WONTFIX
6. A user should be able to set the minimum width of a tab. Bug 268213
7. A user should be able to select a tab on mouse-over delay. WONTFIX
8. A user should be able to turn off any overflow interface. WONTFIX
9. All tabs should have the same control-click functionality, whether that's through tab repositioning or by some other method. (was "user should be able to access the same control-click functionality in overflown tabs as they can on tabs in the tab-bar.")
10. A user should be able to close all tabs to the left or to the right of the current tab. WONTFIX
11. All new implementations should be as accessable as possible.
12. A user should be able to choose whether the start or middle or end of a page title is shown in a tab title. WONTFIX
13. A user should be presented with a tooltip associated with a tab when they hover over the tab that displays the page title and url of the page (as long as perf is OK). Bug 183279
14. A user should be able to hover between 2 adjacent tabs and be able to resize a tab at their own discretion. Possibly as impl detail for "minimum tab width", otherwise WONTFIX
15. A user should be able to copy the current url at which this tab is opened (this would be useful for people who blog) WONTFIX

Features that people would like to see in Camino

1. Somebody would like sheets should be tab-modal and not window-modal. Out of Scope
2. Somebody would like the default behaviour to change to append rather than replace with respect to dragging a bookmark folder from the bookmark toolbar to the viewport. Out of Scope
3. Somebody would like to see a similar feature set to that provided by the Firefox TabMixPlus extension. WONTFIX
4. Somebody would like to see a Tab sidebar similar to what you might use in OmniWeb. WONTFIX
5. Somebody would like to see overflow implemented in a similar way to how Finder deals with overflow (with scrollbars). WONTFIX
6. Somebody would like us to remove the close button and instead make it hover over where the favicon is on the tab. WONTFIX
7. Somebody would like to see Camino offer Tab Expose for switching between tabs. Bug 312007
8. Somebody would like to see tab-overflow control implemented with 2 scroll buttons at either side of the tab bar. Bug 319777
9. Somebody would like users to be able to focus on tabs using the keyboard. Bug 280963 --> hwaara
10. Somebody has suggested that particular attention should be paid to accesibilty features. DUPE
11. Somebody has suggested that we take a look at PSMTabBarControl.
12. Somebody would like Camino to have session saving so that when it crashes they can reload it exactly as it was before. Out of Scope
13. Somebody would like to the Camino tabs to be bigger:
    1. Should respect UI scaling (loosely covered in Bug 258553
    2. Should grow 1-2px. Bug 326872
14. Somebody would like to see something similar to the ColourTabs extension to Firefox, for accessibility purposes. WONTFIX
15. Somebody would like to be able to prevent tabs from jumping to the foreground to grab the user's attention. Out of Scope
16. Somebody would like to see a better Single Window mode. Out of Scope
17. Somebody would like to be able to save all open tabs. Out of Scope
18. Somebody would like to be able to force-quit a tab that is causing Camino to not respond. WONTFIX