Tab Candy is still in alpha, so the video below is just a preview of what may be coming to the browser some day. The goal is to help solve the problem of having an endless row of disorganized tabs within a browser session. Currently, tabs just appear one right after the other and there is no way to remember which tab has what inside, and certainly no why to organize the tabs in a meaningful way. As I watched the video preview, I couldn’t believe how close they have nailed my own challenges with Internet browsing. Particularly the “save for later” feature, where it allows you to store web pages that you want to read at a later time – but not before Firefox asks you “why will you ever look at this again?” How did they know that was what I was thinking? This is a great way to force us to only keep what we really intend to use. I wish I had that feature in my garage!

The preview does remind me of Apple’s Expose in terms of experience – it’s pretty slick. However, this Tab Candy demo is also a tad overwhelming, and it starts to turn a potentially helpful tool into something too difficult to understand or use – at least that is how I see it at this stage. For example, I’m not sure I’d be ready to invest the amount of time it would take to organize all my tabs for a given browser session. What an interesting challenge: on the one hand my tabs are driving me crazy because they are so random and I can’t keep track of them……but, I’m not sure I want to spend the time to clean them up because, to me, a browser session is more of a onetime, realtime experience; if I want to organize and store items for use at a later time, isn’t that what Favorites is for? If anything, I want my current browser session to be as clean as possible with just a few open tabs at a time (not to mention that too many open websites can often crash my browser!) Don’t I want to use my browser simply as a (relatively unintelligent) content container? All these features will just bloat my simple container and start to turn it into something more like an operating system.

But, perhaps I’m thinking too “old school” here? As the browser continues to become the “New OS,” I can see how these types of features will become more and more important. The ability to save, and then reload a current browser session, is already a common thing – so Tab Candy may be right around the corner. Interesting stuff to think about.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.