Separate Thumb Strips for Each Tab

I suggest storing separate thumb strips for each active tab. Many people browse the web in a parallel fashion: browsing for restaurants in a review forum, comparing several restaurants in multiple tabs, viewing menus in other tabs and locating those restaurants in a tab with an interactive map. Moreover, each of these tabs will likely have a history of pages relating to the page currently in view.

When a web browser presents the histories of all of these tabs as a single merged strip of pages, the pages of the multiple tabs can become intermingled. For example, a page viewed 30 minutes ago in a first tab will be separated from the page currently in the first tab by a host of pages from other tabs. Accordingly, a user is faced with the extra burden of discerning which pages in the merged strip correspond to the site in the tab focus and then choosing from those pages the actual page of interest. Including separate tab histories for each tab allows a person to move back and forth between pages related to a single tab without having to first discern which pages in a merged strip correspond to the site in the tab focus.

Since I have never programmed for Firefox I am unfamiliar with the API and cannot offer specific advice, but the general idea is 1) detect all new tabs (whether opened singly or together, such as when a previous browser history with multiple tabs is loaded at startup); 2) uniquely identify all new tabs; 3) determine which active tab has the focus; 4) detect and store newly loaded pages in a strip dedicated to the active tab; 5) detect a tab closure; 6) identify the closed tab and 7) flush that tab's strip. All the while, ThumbStrips can also maintain a single merged strip as it currently does. In that case, instead of storing a duplicate image of each page, each page can be tagged with a tab ID and a tab-specific strip can be presented as a filtered strip based on the tab ID. This latter option may be preferably considering ThumbStrips already includes a strip filtering mechanism.

This suggestion was made once before (Peter, ThumbStrips 1.5 Comment Archive at comment 53, 23 February 2008), but I am very interested in seeing it realized. Currently, the lack of tab-sensitive strips prevents the practical use of this otherwise outstanding extension.

Sincerely,
Walter