Alternative free web browser producer has launched a competition for people to redesign a major feature of its flagship product.

Mozilla is asking developers, users and small businesses in IT to develop an alternative to the current system of tabbed browsing which is currently being used in its Firefox program to allow people to keep only one window open - something which Microsoft Internet Explorer later adopted.

The team at Mozilla explained that it was due to the evolving nature of the browser.

It was explained: "Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive."

Mozilla added that having seven or eight tabs open makes them useless, in effect relegating them to being a simple way to keep the screen tidy.

Firefox was first released on November 9th 2004 and is now in its third incarnation, with version 3.0.10 being standard across most computers harnessing it.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.