A bit of bling

[Did I just use the word “bling”? I’m so, so, sorry.]

The Mozilla offices have been humming with activity this week, with the influx of folks arriving for the Firefox Summit. We’ve been having some fascinating discussions on a variety of topics and ideas for the future. On that note, a few weeks ago I wrote up some thoughts I had for an evolution of Firefox 2’s Live Titles (aka “microsummaries”), in the form of adding graphics to a traditionally text-based feature. [Wonder Twin powers activate.]

Here’s a mockup of what Graphical Microsummaries might look like:

Chromatabs followup

I’ve received quite a few useful comments from last week’s posting of Chromatabs, and I thought it might be nice to summarize some of it. Personally, I’m satisfied — though not thrilled — with the extension. The idea has merit, but the implementation exposed some issues… Which is exactly what it was supposed to do, as a labs.mozilla.org prototype! Here’s some of the common comments:

You are in a maze of twisty little tabs, all alike.

I had this idea for tweaking tabs floating around my head for a while, and last week I finally decided to implement it. The result is Chromatabs, and the UI aspects of it are discussed on today’s labs.mozilla.org posting.

I thought I’d write a bit more here about how it’s implemented, because it’s doing a few interesting things under the hood…

Testing…