The latest Firefox 3.1 development release features the announced option for tab tearing: drag a tab out of its current window, and it is removed and opened on a new one, providing a more intuitive way to organize your web browsing. Alternatively, you can right-click on a tab and select Open in New Window. The feature, that mimics Google Chrome's behavior, had been requested and planned several times in the past.
Tab tearing is the latest in a long list of tabbed browsing improvements that already included a new tab button, a tab preview panel, tab reparenting for true tab moving across windows, tab cloning, and visual tab switching. Some of the changes follow a design shift to make the tab bar visible at all times, which has also got the throbber out of the menu bar, as it is now redundant with each tab's activity indicator.
Animations for moving, opening and closing tabs was also mentioned for Firefox 3.1 but it's still unclear if will make it.
As usual with new features, tab tearing has introduced a few new bugs, but, hopefully, they will all be ironed for Firefox 3.1's next development release, Beta 2, due within the next couple of weeks.
News source: Mozilla Links
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