Mozilla's Post-Tab Era Cometh

VIP LOUNGE

CLOUD LOGIN

You are here: News > News > Mozilla's Post-Tab Era Cometh

» IT Security NEWS

» 16 May 2009

Mozilla's Post-Tab Era Cometh

It took quite a while before Microsoft finally caught up with tabbed browsing technology, adopting the feature in the latest versions of Internet Explorer (IE). However, even as Microsoft has started to transform its browser into an application that could viably win back the market shares taken by its ever-growing and ever-improving competitor Mozilla, the tides are turning once again.

According to Mozilla—the creator of Firefox, a web-browser that has been slowly nibbling away at IE's market share for quite sometime now—tabs have become a mess nowadays because users are investing a greater amount of time to surf in browsers, opening up more and more tabs that become either too hard to track or tax your system so bad that Firefox has no choice but to automatically shut down.

As such, Mozilla Labs launched the Labs Design Challenge Summer '09 to help people supervise, traverse, and peruse multiple websites within the same browser without leaving a tab-filled mess. Mozilla will announce the winners of the contest on July 8, 2009.

Mozilla Labs is doing the right thing by not letting Microsoft get a firm foothold on the very feature that made Firefox such a multiplatform browser phenomenon in the first place. Therefore, the company launched a developer competition to reinvent the concept of tabbed browsing and help Firefox return to its main objective of being an organized and serviceable interface.

Tabs emerged as a browser feature in the late nineties, and they were initially implemented in the Mozilla Application Suite, Opera, and Apple's Safari during the early parts of the twenty-first century.

Tabs served as a revolutionary new concept for many Internet users used to the crash-inducing yet widespread IE browser platform because they allowed you to view multiple sites in one browser instead of opening new versions of your browser for each site you wanted to visit. This enabled surfers to multitask Internet surfing with just one browser without taxing their machine's performance and memory resources.

However, regardless of how innovative and well-accepted tabs have become to Internet surfers everywhere, Mozilla is aware of the feature's many shortcomings and pitfalls. Mozilla labs state: "If you have more than seven or eight tabs open, they become pretty much useless. And tabs don't work well if you use them with heterogeneous information." Firefox enthusiasts can rest assured that Mozilla will find a way to again revolutionize Internet browsing care of its developer contest, much to Microsoft's chagrin.