Blogging Tips

There is little doubt that tabbed browsing has made Web surfing more efficient. However, when researching a blog post or even just visiting social news sites, the tab bar can become very cluttered and almost useless.

However, Shimoda Hiroshi has created a new Firefox plugin that overhauls the way tabs are used and displayed. Entitled Tree Style Tabs (TST) converts the tab bar into a horizontal pane that displays tabs in a tree format.

TST lets you keep your tabs organized, have more tabs open on the screen at once and, best of all, keep your post research together in one easy-to-locate group. It can help you blog, not by changing the way write, but by changing the way you organize your information.

What Tree Style Tabs Does

The basic premise is of TST is that tabs need to have a relationship to one another. In a regular Firefox tab bar without any add-ons, all of the tabs are essentially equal and visually there is no way to determine what topic the tabs are for or what other tabs they are “related” to.

TST fixes this by converting your tab bar into something that resembles a directory tree, similar to a file directory on a computer. You have “top level” tabs and then multiple layers of tabs underneath them.

For example, if you visit Digg and open up a few links in new tabs, they will appear in a tree under the under the Digg tab. You can then collapse the tree, hiding all but the original tab, drag more tabs to it or close out all of the tabs in the tree at once.

This can be very useful when doing research for a blog post or article. In the image to the right, I opened up this blog post editor in a top level tab, the main BloggingTips site and the Extension page in child tabs to it and a Twitter account from a commenter as a child to the blog home page tab.

Above that tree, at the top, is a collapsed tree (Digg) and it has two child tabs underneath it, as indicated by the parenthesis.

As I continue working, I can drag new tabs into the tree to keep them grouped together. When I leave the tree, for example to read the Digg stories, the previous tree automatically collapses to keep the tab bar clear of sites that I am not looking at (this behavior can be changed in the options). To open it back up, I just click the top level tab again.

Though this means more clicks of the mouse for some tasks, it also keeps your information better organized, limiting the time spent search for a particular tab or scrolling through a mammoth tab bar.

But as useful and novel as this system is, it does come with a few drawbacks and hiccups that need to be considered before hitting “install”.

Minor Issues

Sadly, TST is not for every Firefox user. Those that don’t use tabs heavily probably won’t see much benefit from it and there are several issues, however, minor that those who are interested need to weigh.

1. Screen Real Estate: The vertical tab bar does take up significantly more screen space than the default horizontal one. For users with wide screen monitors, this likely will not be a major problem but for those who are already hurting for space, it can be a major loss. The TST bar can be set to horizontal, but that limits the functionality of the extension and actually makes the tab bar longer (though better organized).
2. Can’t Open Child Tab: There is no way that I’ve been able to find to open a new tab as a child without clicking a link. Opening a new tab, either by clicking on the tab bar or using a keyboard shortcut, always opens a new top-level tab that then has to be dragged back into the tree.
3. Can’t Reuse Tabs: If you decide you’re done with a site but don’t want to close the tab and, instead, type in a new URL, the new site opens in a new tab. You have to close a tab every time you reach a dead end. I could not find an option to change this behavior.

The result is that the extension does mess with some of Firefox’s default behavior and not all of the changes are for the better. However, the good does outweigh the bad and most of the hiccups are outweighed by the better organization.

All in all, Tree Style Tabs is a solid and stable extension. My browser on my office computer has not been slowed down by it and Firefox has not crashed any more or less since I started using it.

Perhaps the best example of how stable TST is is that, every time Firefox has crashed, my tabs have been restored, all within their proper trees.

Bottom Line

There are very few extensions that I install on my Firefox and instantly wonder how I got along without them. This is one of those extensions. I’ve already installed in on every computer I use regularly and plan to make sure any new copies of Firefox I plan on using have this installed.

The good news is that there are indications that the Mozilla Corporation is rethinking the nature of tabs and may produce something radically different from the current system, or any existing tab system, in the near future.

It’s obvious that the traditional tab bar is no longer the model of efficiency it was just a few years ago. As high speed connections and tab-happy users have pushed the tab model to the extreme, its flaws have begun to show.

Until these new models come along, Tree Style Tabs is a huge leap forward for me and, I suspect, many others out there.