Firefox 4 gets animated: New videos show slight browser tab changes

We've already seen some photo mockups showing a few of the changes that could appear in Firefox4.0. Now one of the contributors to Firefox has posted a couple of videos showing how browser tabs might work in that version of the popular web browser. The videos highlight something that's a bit tricky to show in pictures: animations.

One video depicts how Firefox might look when you're rearranging browser tabs in the future. The other shows what it will look like when you create a new tab. In a nutshell, it looks like Firefox 4.0's tabs might behave exactly like those in Google Chrome. 

In Firefox 3.6, when you click a tab and drag it you see sort of a shadow of the web page you're currently viewing. You can drag it to the position on the tab bar where you want to drop it, and the tab bar will snap into place. Chrome and Firefox 4 feature smoother transitions.

When you create a new tab it doesn't just pop up out of nowhere, but rather slides from right to left (see the image above for a rough idea of what this looks like). When you drag a tab from one place in the tab bar to another, all the open tabs will slide around to make room for the repositioned tab. 

One area where the Firefox 4 concept has a leg up on Google Chrome is in tab tearing. When you click a tab and drag it out of the tab bar in both programs you can create a new browser window containing just the web page that was open in that tab. In Chrome, this process is a bit jumpy. When you tear off a tab, there's no real animation. You just have a thumbnail of the web page and when you lift your mouse button the browser window snaps into place. 

In the Firefox concept video, when you tear the tab from the first menu, there's a quick animation. And then when you lift your mouse button the windows gradually (but quickly) zooms from thumbnail size to full size.

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