We all know that, 2010 has seen lot of changes in web-world. All web browsers released their new versions to support HTML 5 features. Many new browsers came into picture like Epic browser from India. There are lot of happenings in web technology around us in this year.

We saw the shares of IE and Firefox dropped down due to the latest version of Chrome browser by Google. In many places Firefox tried to copy few things from Chrome and started imitating to attract users from Chrome and few they tried their own as well. However, a new Firefox innovation called Tab Candy will make Firefox act more like a operating system, with much-improved multitasking and sharing capabilities.

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Aza Raskin the head of Tab Candy team said, How many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later? We’re all suffering from info guilt. We need a way to organize browsing, to see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand.

Tech Tip: Aza Raskin is the Head of UX at Mozilla Labs and he is the son of Macintosh creator Jef Raskin. He joined Mozilla in 2008.

What is Tab Candy?

Tab Candy is an experimental project to help organize your browsing. With one keystroke Tab Candy shows an overview of all tabs to allow you to quickly locate and switch between them. Tab Candy also lets you group tabs to organize your work flow.

Features of Tab Candy

Tab Candy will be one of the great innovation by Firefox team as they are trying to a OS like interface inside the browser. Following are the features we got about the Tab Candy,

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1. Organize tabs into groups that you can be named and placed on the browser as desktop-like view.
2. Save tab groups to look at later
3. When you switch to a grouped tab only the relevant tabs are shown in the tab bar, which helps you focus on what you want. That means you can focus on the task you are doing. Blogging tabs stay separate from Social media tabs. Clean tab bar, clean mind. 🙂
4. Search through your tabs
5. Tap Option-Space on the Mac or Control-Space on Windows to zoom out and see thumbnails of all open tabs
6. Have multiple profiles so that you can sign into the same site with different logins in two different tab groups
7. Share tabs or tab groups between different computers and devices
8. Share tabs or tab groups with other users
9. Set up a shared tab group where several users can co-browse and see what each other is looking at on the screen
10. Choose colors or image backgrounds to distinguish different tab groups
11. Move groups so that they fit your needs
12. Rearrange tabs and drag them anywhere inside a group or between groups

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Video Demo of Tab Candy by Raskin

When will Tab Candy be a part of Firefox?

Well that is a obvious question which each reader get whenever we try to tell something.

During the announcement of Firefox 4 in May, the Firefox team had Tab Candy listed in light gray at the bottom of its list of new features (giving no indication of its importance).

Raskin said “The reason why Tab Candy was listed in grey in the product plan is that there are still some implementation challenges to be solved and a couple user experience questions to be answered for us to be able to commit to TabCandy being in Firefox 4.”

If the Firefox team can pull off all of the features of Tab Candy that it recently demonstrated, it would leapfrog Chrome in functionality. Make no mistake, this is Firefox’s best shot at competing with Google Chrome, especially since the rest of Firefox 4 feels a lot like a copy of Chrome. Launching Firefox 4 with Tab Candy should be Mozilla’s top priority which at least can make some difference with Chrome.

Lets wait and watch when the Tab Candy will be part of Firefox. Have any thoughts on Tab Candy? 🙂 Please do share with us and let us also know more 🙂