Chromatabs

Chromatabs is a free extension for Firefox, an open-source web browser by software developer, Mozilla. As of December 2008, Chromatabs was an experiment by Mozilla staff member, Justin Dolske, to test whether applying a range of colours to tabs would make tabbed browsing simpler.
Justin Dolske proposed the hypothesis in October 2008, shortly after the third version of the Firefox web browser was released. To support his point that applying colours to tabbed browsing would make using Firefox easier, he posted an image on the Mozilla website of multicolored letters against a black background. The idea was to first, count how many letters were red, and second, to count how many K's there were. Mozilla employees found that the human brain naturally identified colors faster than text, and their findings were reflected by a flood of posts by inquisitive Firefox users wanting to know how Chromatabs would affect the way they used the Internet daily.
Justin Dolske explained further at a recent Mozilla business conference where his idea could lead. He said that "tabs use the same two visual variables (color and shape) to differentiate themselves from each other". The Mozilla website also mentions how Chromatabs is like taking the concept of favicons even further; "Favicons provide a small amount of color, and the title text of the page consists of a series of shapes. Unfortunately some sites don’t have a favicon, or the favicon they do have isn’t sufficiently unique. Without favicons, you have to do a visual scan to find the correct tab — you can’t spot it with your peripheral vision".
Alternatives and Similarities
Firefox users have complained that Chromatabs is akin to a free add-on called ColorfulTabs, which has been available for download on the Mozilla website for several months. However, Firefox developers insist that Chromatabs works in an entirely different style to ColorfulTabs.
ColorfulTabs lets the user apply a fixed color to each open tab. Once they have applied a color to a tab, the tab will remain this color until the user changes it or the tab is closed, no matter what website the user navigates to. This, according to Mozilla, improves tab identification significantly.
However, Chromatabs uses a different method completely. Instead of assigning a fixed color to a tab, Chromatabs applies a changeable color to each website you visit automatically, and saves the required data locally so that when you next load that website, the tab will change to the fixed color.
Although the changed method of coloring tabs is evident, Firefox developers have yet to make a major breakthrough in terms of Chromatabs being a big thing. However, Justin Dolske believes that Chromatabs will be downloaded by many more people as time goes on.
Potential Improvements
Mozilla have listed on the Labs section of their website a number of possible improvements to Chromatabs.
The first idea was for Chromatabs to scan each page for what color is used most, excluding white, red and gray. Justin Dolske stated recently that "this would not only make identifying tabs easier, but extend the pure look and feel of the various tabs". However, the concept has come under fire from critics for having to "store too much unwanted data on a user's computer".
Mozilla have also considered that not all users will be happy with their tab space turning into a bit of an eyesore. So, a pair of Firefox developers came up with the concept of applying a fixed range of colors to tabs, perhaps bringing in preset themes that would use only several shades of a user's choice of color, for example.
Justin Dolske, the creator of Chromatabs, also talked of "a new era of favicons at a recent Mozilla conference. He said that, in place of just having tiny favicons to make a site stand out from others, the site designed could instead design what the tabs look like.

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