Firefox 4 Customization: Tabless Browsing Experiment

Firefox 4 Beta 4, which was released this week, introduced a new feature called Firefox Panorama (formerly TabCandy) that is revolutionizing tabbed browsing. Probably inspired by KDE workspace activities, Firefox Panorama allows you to view and organize tabs in groups through a drag-and-drop dashboard.

Before I can show you how I'm using Firefox Panorama in order to have a tabless experience, watch the video below. It explains the concept and shows how Panorama works:

I have been experimenting with Firefox 4 customization in several different ways, in order to achieve the perfect tab browsing experience for my needs. Until today, I was satisfied with Panorma combined with SpeedDial, TabScope and Tree Style Tab.

Although the workflow on that experiment was much better than my previous setup, I wasn't 100% satisfied. Besides, Tree Style Tab extension is not working with Firefox 4.0b4. So I decided to try something really different, like having no tabs. I'm not talking about opening everything in new windows. That wouldn't be good for performance, because of many extensions I have. Additionally,  I would need to rely on KDE for switching between windows, which defeats the purpose of Firefox Panorama. I'm actually talking about hiding the tabs and using only Firefox Panorama. You can see the experiment result in the video below:

It looks great, but there are a few problems with this approach. For instance, having hidden tabs prevents the access to the tab context menu and I wanted to be able to select the desired tab from a group without having to switch to Panorama dashboard.

So I have combined a few extensions in order to achieve what I wanted, without compromising usability. First of all, I used Compact Menu 2 to hide the Menu Bar, without losing access to the menu itself and used the following Stylish script to easily hide the tabs:

Then I used Context Bookmarks to add the Bookmarks drop-down menu to the main context menu and made the Bookmarks toolbar invisible, which can be easily done from the toolbar right-click options. In order to retain the ability to access the options from the tab context menu, I moved them to the main context menu using Menu Editor:

After those modifications and some additional cleanup, my main context menu looks like this:

At this moment, my Firefox 4 interface is already slick and clean:

As you can notice, there is only one toolbar and the status bar. Although I have many extensions and buttons, I'm trying to educate myself in order to avoid the need to use the toolbars. I have recently realized the context menu provides a much easier access to features I use on a daily basis.

You probably also noticed that I don't have Back/Forward and Stop/Reload buttons. This functionality is accessed not from the context menu, but using FireGestures. I don't like to use the keyboard for navigation. Besides, FireGestures allows me to easily open navigate between tabs, go back and forward, create new tabs, access Firefox Panorama and tab previews:

Firefox 4 Beta 4, which was released this week, introduced a new feature called Firefox Panorama (formerly TabCandy) that is revolutionizing tabbed browsing. Probably inspired by KDE workspace activities, Firefox Panorama allows you to view and organize tabs in groups through a drag-and-drop dashboard.

Before I can show you how I'm using Firefox Panorama in order to have a tabless experience, watch the video below. It explains the concept and shows how Panorama works:

I have been experimenting with Firefox 4 customization in several different ways, in order to achieve the perfect tab browsing experience for my needs. Until today, I was satisfied with Panorma combined with SpeedDial, TabScope and Tree Style Tab.

Although the workflow on that experiment was much better than my previous setup, I wasn't 100% satisfied. Besides, Tree Style Tab extension is not working with Firefox 4.0b4. So I decided to try something really different, like having no tabs. I'm not talking about opening everything in new windows. That wouldn't be good for performance, because of many extensions I have. Additionally,  I would need to rely on KDE for switching between windows, which defeats the purpose of Firefox Panorama. I'm actually talking about hiding the tabs and using only Firefox Panorama. You can see the experiment result in the video below:

It looks great, but there are a few problems with this approach. For instance, having hidden tabs prevents the access to the tab context menu and I wanted to be able to select the desired tab from a group without having to switch to Panorama dashboard.

So I have combined a few extensions in order to achieve what I wanted, without compromising usability. First of all, I used Compact Menu 2 to hide the Menu Bar, without losing access to the menu itself and used the following Stylish script to easily hide the tabs:

Then I used Context Bookmarks to add the Bookmarks drop-down menu to the main context menu and made the Bookmarks toolbar invisible, which can be easily done from the toolbar right-click options. In order to retain the ability to access the options from the tab context menu, I moved them to the main context menu using Menu Editor:

After those modifications and some additional cleanup, my main context menu looks like this:

At this moment, my Firefox 4 interface is already slick and clean:

As you can notice, there is only one toolbar and the status bar. Although I have many extensions and buttons, I'm trying to educate myself in order to avoid the need to use the toolbars. I have recently realized the context menu provides a much easier access to features I use on a daily basis.

You probably also noticed that I don't have Back/Forward and Stop/Reload buttons. This functionality is accessed not from the context menu, but using FireGestures. I don't like to use the keyboard for navigation. Besides, FireGestures allows me to easily open navigate between tabs, go back and forward, create new tabs, access Firefox Panorama and tab previews:

Firefox 4 Customization: Tabless Browsing Experiment

Firefox 4 Customization: Tree Style Tabs Experiment

Since I started to test Firefox 4 Beta, I have been trying new extensions, in order to replace those that are not compatible with it yet, and also revisiting some old ones that I didn't pay the deserved attention in the past. As part of my customization experiments, what I try here is to combine tree style tab browsing with Firefox Panorama (formerly TabCandy) in order to change the way I interact with tabs.

During this experiment, which obviously resulted in adding several extensions to my already huge collection, I have "discovered" some real gems and my browser looks completely different from how it looked like a week ago. Most importantly, my workflow has changed completely, thanks to a few extraordinary extensions and new features available in Firefox 4.

You can watch a short demo below, that shows how I'm combining TabCandy, with SpeedDial, TabScope and Tree Style Tab, to completely change how I browse the web.

I must thank SilverWave for recommending Tree Style Tab. This extension screenshots on Mozilla site aren't very appealing to me, so I thought it wasn't a nice extension and never tried it. But after installing it due to SilverWave recommendation, I realized how awesome it is. I guess this is a lesson about judging something by it's cover.

Since I started to test Firefox 4 Beta, I have been trying new extensions, in order to replace those that are not compatible with it yet, and also revisiting some old ones that I didn't pay the deserved attention in the past. As part of my customization experiments, what I try here is to combine tree style tab browsing with Firefox Panorama (formerly TabCandy) in order to change the way I interact with tabs.

During this experiment, which obviously resulted in adding several extensions to my already huge collection, I have "discovered" some real gems and my browser looks completely different from how it looked like a week ago. Most importantly, my workflow has changed completely, thanks to a few extraordinary extensions and new features available in Firefox 4.

You can watch a short demo below, that shows how I'm combining TabCandy, with SpeedDial, TabScope and Tree Style Tab, to completely change how I browse the web.

I must thank SilverWave for recommending Tree Style Tab. This extension screenshots on Mozilla site aren't very appealing to me, so I thought it wasn't a nice extension and never tried it. But after installing it due to SilverWave recommendation, I realized how awesome it is. I guess this is a lesson about judging something by it's cover.

Firefox 4 Customization: Tree Style Tabs Experiment