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Hyatt Discusses Tabs
Llywelyn writes "Über Geek David Hyatt (who, among other browser projects, works on Safari) has posted an interesting discussion about tabs, what he prefers, what works, and what doesn't."
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I don't do drugs.
With Opera 6, I didn't use them (I used multiple windows). With Opera 7, I've started using tabs. They actually do rock, though it is incredibly hard to resist the urge to accidentally just close the Opera window (this is what I'm used to from before... and now MS office uses a multiple document interface also...), accidentally closing all 30 tabs I have open :). Really, IMO though, they're great, aside from that one problem.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
I have never had the opportunity to run a tab at a Hyatt. Maybe if I used my room key or something lioke that, but otherwise they always want me to pay by the drink :(
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
You could have been a tad more specific in the descrption. Yes, we can follow the link, but it would be just as simple to specifically mention you are referring to 'tabbed browser windows' as opposed to, say, tabbed paragraphs in a document, or tabs in other GUI interfaces.
You just offer the user the option of verifying they want to close the window when they have multiple tabs open. (Of course, you make this feature easy to turn off for users who don't want to be bothered.) If you really want to be creative, you offer the user a way to recover last opened tabs at next program launch.
...Help the flow of a web application.
Many applications involve the user going through a set of steps, and tabs can help the user understand where he is in the process, and allow him to skip forward or jump backwards if necessary. I think tabs are generally accepted in most applications nowadays as way of controlling and guiding program flow.
What is more of a debate where I work is if pagination is better than scrolling.
(I vote scrolling for CTRl+F purposes)
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
When i surf the internet, it would be a nice feature to have subtabs (ie several tab under the main tab). It would be very useful for a power user.
Set your editor to indent 4 spaces as God commanded.
Tabs can be bad.
I've used all sorts of browser interfaces, tabbed and otherwise, and the benefits of tabbed browsing to me basically boiled down to one thing: it hides the complexity of your browsing from the OS. As I'm forced into Window$ systems at work, I have to deal with the Explorer task bar, and it's a real pain to have 30 web browser sessions show up in the task bar. (Yes, I know there are replacements, but they tend to conflict with other things on the system - generally more trouble than they're worth.) This is much less of a problem with XP's ability to group window types in the task bar, and I've basically stopped using tabs for that reason. I don't really see a lot of other reason to use tabs, and having different windows can be more useful in some situations.
Skip Franklin
It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black. -- despair.com
I think he really has hit the nail on the head. Tabs aren't for everyone, but its stupid for someone building a browser to not implement them. If I were to hypothetically speaking gotten my hands on v64 build of Safari, I would hypothetically know that tabs are being implemented like Dave describes. I've already adopted Safari as my primary browser, non of its current deficiencies are so glaring that any other browser is better for me overall.
It is nice to see competition in the browser world, cause in the end its the user who wins.
When I surf the internet, it would be a nice feature to have subsubtabs (ie several subtabs under the main subtabs under the main tab). It would be very useful for a mega power user.
It sure wasn't on the end of that link. That article is about as interesting as this http://www.pattiann.com/webcam/paint.html
Worst. Sig. Ever.
from my long experience as tab-user i can give you follwing expert-tip: stay with tabs of well known brands, i tried some noname-tabs, but my clothes didn't get clean and the colors faded as well.
...that this guy is apparently so keen on tabbed browsing, yet there is no sign of this on the horizon for Safari. Personally, I like the clean look of Safari, but I wonder if anyone has any insight as to why it never went the tabbed route.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Other than a few bugs, in my opinion, the only thing Safari needs is autocomplete. Everyone that I do business with fills in internet forms. Personally, I list on eBay; for this, autocomplete is great when listing or when paying for something online.
I deal with 100's of customers a month and not one has wondered why Safari doesn't have tabs. ALL, miss auto complete - some want password/keychain interaction.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I thought this would be a "spaces" vs. "tabs" war or possibly the ever popular "4 columns" vs. "8 columns" battle.
If you have multiple windows open, it's a pain in the but to have to look through a list to find the right one. With tabs, I can justlook at the top of the browsing area, and bam, there they are.
Is it really necessary on /. to qualify anyone as an übergeek?
... or why is there only one word per line on the very right side of the page?
I stopped reading somewhere in the middle because it's just too unreadable this way.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Pretty soon, Internet Explorer will be the only browser without tabs. I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft realises that - yes - tabs are good.
is the best tabbed browser I've ever used. True, it's a wrapper for IE and only works on windoze, but still, it's the best. And I love phoenix, but Crazy Browser keeps me coming back for more.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
I think that phoenix has a wonderful tab interface. Being able to open tabs by clicking on a link with the scroll wheel and closing a tab by clicking on it with the scroll wheel also. I have noticed that mozilla, chimera, safari, and some others seem to be harder to close tabs and that their tabs jump to the front. Pheonix's tabs open in the background. This is useful for news sites especially. When I look at slashdot, i just go down all the stories wheel clicking on all the ones that interest me, then i can just go through my tabs and do my reading. Anyone one else use tabs that way? -hampton "switcher" catlin.
"I don't want to start a holy war here..."
Everyone knows that Tabs give you lung-cancer, I'm suprised that in the US people are pushing Tabs onto everyone, even kids, saying they should be the "default". I for one think its dreadful that Mr Hyatt is pushing Tabs and saying "when they are useful", Tabs KILL, simple as that.
Brought to you by the peoples republic of Barnsley
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I use netscape 7 at work, and have multiple instances running with multiple tabs open for each for my api references. I usually have one instance for all my opened Oracle doc pages, and another for Java. I just keep them open and tab between document. Very handy.
SCO to Hell
I've been wondering how I could get Mozilla to open a tab in the background. From reading the article, now I know, you use Shift button 2. Great.
Now if I could figure out how to rearrange the tabs.
Safari desparately needs tabs because moving between open, maximized windows is so clunky in OSX.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Does anybody know if Galeon style on-tab close buttons are going to come to Mozilla or Phoenix?
Having the close buttons on the tabs themselves is the main reason I use Galeon for my browsing.
Mozilla and Phoenix put the tab close button all the way at the end of the tab bar, so I usually end up right-clicking on a tab to close it, which is a PITA.
with a three (or more) button mouse, tabbed links opened in the background, and a fairly slow connection (115k2 here).
When I do my daily slashdot (and other sites), I skim through the headlines, middle-click links that seem interesting (so they open in the background in a new tab), read on, click on the next interesting link, until the end of the page, and by the time I've read the frontpage, the first article is completely loaded.
At the moment, I just can't work with a browser without tabs (rightclick -> open in new window -> click new window away -> read on)
Come on, you're holding the rest of the web back. NS 4.7 is dead.
when he says novice users don't need or like tabs. everytime a friend is over my place and watching me surf with mozilla, i always get a 'cool' when i show and explain tabs to them. so i think users like tabs. i also think they need them - i think internet savvy has increased to the point where having multiple browsing tabs would be useful to all.
i wouldn't be surprised if the next version of IE has tabbed browsing.
"if you build it, they will come...."
smd4985
Tabs are suxx in Mozilla, becouse I can't untab tabbed page
A whole story devoted to a minor (trivial?) user-interface feature! Well done Slashdot. Just think, those subscribers got to see this first.
All of this computer hacking is making me thirsty. I think I'll have a tab.
-1 redundant
On Most browsers I have seen tabs are not defaultly turned on untill you do a ^T or select it in the menu option. I say put the feature in because it is not going to hurt the experence of using the product because it is not like the tabs keep on apearing all over the place. If you want it its there if you dont then dont select the option. Of course I think the X should be placed inside the tab picture and they should have the option to drag the tab out of the desktop to allow for a new window with that tab and the ability to change the order. But still Tabs are nice but they are not the next big thing sience sliced bread.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When I surf the internet, it would be a nice feature to have supertabs (ie one tab over the main tabs). It would be very useful for a mega power user.
The percentage of Safari Users that would use tabs is low at best ... it seems that the only people that are wanting this feature which causes interface clutter (eventhough minimal, it is is evasive) are the only ones posting, maybe several thousand. It also bloats code.
You may be right about the percentage, but it's one of those things where those who want it, REALLY want it. I disagree about ui clutter though, since the way I look at it, it reduces ui clutter by reducing the number of open windows. I know I may be a bit unique in how I interact with my ui, but I tend to have MANY windows open at once (several browser sessions, several msdev sessions, excel, word, powerpoint, explorer (win not ie) and I make extensive use of virtual desktops. Tabs allow me to open a grouping of webpages and then "manage them" (i.e. minimize, move, etc) as a single unit. I watch others and they inevitably spend what seems like an eternity minimizing their 9 IE browser windows. I know it's not for everybody, but just like keyboard shortcuts, those who use it tend to take a lot of advantage of it.
You should check out the tab system in Gecko 1.4. They're all hyperthreaded in realtime so the system performance hit is hardly noticable. They utilize ram unilaterally which means you get double the tabs that anyone else has manged to achieve as of yet. It's amazing the progress they're making. IE's days as a superior browser are surely limited
That gui icon is the lamest one I've seen yet. It is entirely impossible to figure out what it is supposed to mean merely by looking at it, and all my guesses were completely unrelated to the topic it represents.
The right way IMO to do this is to have a close box for closing up the tab strip itself in the same place Phoenix and Mozilla have it, but to also have close boxes on the tabs themselves (the way Galeon does it). With this model, it's clear what the different close metaphors are, and you don't end up with user (even power user) confusion.
I know Phoenix tabs now have the option to have closebosex in tabs (In fact i've never used the button at the end) an IIRC the last time i installed tabs Closeboxes in tabs was the default.
"Über Geek David Hyatt (who, among other browser projects, works on Safari) has posted an interesting discussion about tabs, what he prefers, what works, and what doesn't."
Well, I don't know about Mr. Hyatt's techniques, but I have found that giving the bartender my card and saying "I'd like to open a tab and start off with a Woodchuck Amber, please." does the job nicely. YMMV. Sometimes I have to employ the Arm Wave or the On-fire Napkin tactics to get the tab started, but these are advanced practices best avoided by beginners. (If you're in austin and are looking for a good place to start a tab, I can heartily recommend the Dog and Duck pub as well as the Crown and Anchor, both close to the UT campus.)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
When I surf the internet, it would be a nice feature to have mega-tabs (ie several subtabs under the subtabs under the main subtabs under the main tab). It would be very useful for an uber-power user.
i think the current crop of tabbed browsers will adopt this in their second generation of tabs, and i cant wait, it makes the future that much brighter (and yes, i do wear shades).
I want 2D games back.
If you look at the alt field, you will see it is the GUI icon. Intuitive huh?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How does tabbed browsing differ from MDI (which I've used in Opera5) or from simply opening multiple browser windows? As best I can tell it's just the same thing as MDI...
As far as MDI vs multiple windows, it's a tradeoff. With MDI you only need to minimize one app to get it out of the way, and don't have to sequence through a ton of browsers to get to something else - neither of which may be an issue for many people. With multiple windows you can see the titles for everything in the task bar, instead of on a tab bar, so it's a more consistent interface - again, may not be an issue depending on how you do things.
Switching between them is a wash - ctrl-tab vs alt-tab. Opening stuff up in another window/tab is also a wash, although being able to open stuff up in the background is a nice addition for tabs (it's just an additional keypress/mouse action with multiple windows).
I guess I just don't see the wonderfulness of tabs, even having used Opera5 previously. What features am I missing here? And no, I'm not trolling.
Opera will remember your exit state for all open tabs. If you accidentally close Opera, just restart and you're back where you were.
I use this all the time. I have a couple tabs open all day to news sites. In the evening I just close Opera and go home. In the morning, I launch Opera and there they are again.
Constitutionally Correct
I posted a trackback in response to Dave's assertation that tabs are scalable. I simply don't believe that they are, in fact prior to his article about tabs, scalability was one of the main weaknesses I would bring up in discussions about tabs -- it's not the main weakness, just one of them.
I wonder if my PowerMac G3 can take a Slashdot beating...
mbbac
Does anyone know if you can easily (without spending tons of time parsing XUL) assign a keybinding to switch between tabs in mozilla or mozilla-based (NS7) browsers? I'd love to be able to do the alt-tab like thing to switch between my tabs (ok, that just looks weird) but there doesn't seem to be a default way to do this.
The tabs are all drag and droppable.
Very nice to start a file transfer, then just drag and drop the tab onto the task-bar and then shut down Opera while your transfer completes.
It's also nice because dragging and dropping a browser tab gives you a browser page taking that can take up less screen real-estate than IE yet still have all your functionality if you've set up your address bar correctly.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
I don't consider myself a newbie, but I use almost exclusively maximized browser windows BECAUSE tabs and multiple desktops allow me that in a comfortable manner.
I don't get it: Why would anybody want to not maximize his browser windows?
Does _anyone_ use the sidebar? I find it's the first thing I shut off as it eats up space and serves no real useful purpose. If a novice user has it open I imagine it's only because they don't know how to turn it off.
All the best,
--Bob
so that it starts up with the windows that were open when you closed it or so that it prompts you and asks what how you want to start. I had it set (before I finally gave up on its bugs and uninstalled 2 days ago) to automatically open with the pages that were open when I last closed. Sometimes it helped me recover from accidentally closing the whole program, sometimes it recovered my windows from an Opera crash, sometimes I closed it on purpose knowing that I would be able to start where I left off later.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
My 75 year old father is far from a "Power User". Email, writing few small text documents (notes to self, style) and browsing the Internet are the only uses he has for his computer. He's not even interested in playing any games. When he saw a tabbed browser for the first time (Opera), he was hooked! He loves the way, in his words, "it keep things organized and when I want to compare things on different sites, it lets me switch back and forth easier then having windows all over the place". To say tabbed browsing is just for "Power Users" is to underestimate your audience!
I couldn't agree more. I'll go one step further though, and mention the time tabs confused my girlfriend.
My iBook is setup with multiple users, so that each gets their own set of preferences, etc. One day while we were sitting on the sofa watching TV, my girlfriend asks me "What are these?" For some reason, tabbed browsing was turned on in Chimera/Navigator/Camino. She had opened another page and it opened into a tab. She had no idea what it was, or how it got there. Why? Because it breaks the one window, one document metaphor. So, I had to show her how to close the tab and then I showed her how to go into preferences and turn them off.
Tabbed browsing is a poor solution to a questionable problem. Most importantly, it will confuse the majority of users. It doesn't belond in Safari.
mbbac
But how do you define this "work", that you might want to save? For those of us in the technology sector, reading is part of our work. So if you've opened a bunch of tabs in Opera, then quit without reading them, Opera should bring up the you-haven't-saved-your-work dialog box!
I mean, Opera can already tell when you've opened a tab in the background and haven't switched over to it yet -- it colors the tab text blue, instead of black! The hardest part is already solved.
That way David Hyatt, and many others, won't lose many minutes time having to re-read a web page with many links / news articles to re-select the pages we want to read further.
It's work: you decide you are going to read Slashdot today. What you really mean is, scan the most recent articles on Slashdot, down to the old articles you've seen previously, then stop. From that set of articles (perhaps 10-20), at least 5 of them require further reading. You might desire to follow the source link, or read the comments posted by other slashdotters. Or something in a slashbox like Kuro5hin or Advogato or Old Stuff that caught your eye, and you opened a tab to read that later on too.
You want to be "done" with the main slashdot web page, having skimmed everything on the page, then progress to the individual articles that caught your eye. Then, once you finish reading all those articles separately, you're done "reading" slashdot (for the moment).
I do it this way all the time. And when I close my big Opera window, I am mad, because I lost work - the work of collecting what further information I needed to read to stay up to date with today's technology.
Today we're still in the early days of information browsing, the learning & experimenting stage. You can still quit without saving your work. You can still bookmark a web page, then sit down at someone else's computer and none of your bookmarks are there. You log in to a computer with name and password, and the "scope" of that login is only the local environment, the computer does not know who you are in a global sense. This is wrong, and someday it will be fixed.
Someday all this will be standardized, globalized, and simplified. Yes, we're still in the early days of information browsing.
but, like many others, it can get lost because there are so many new features that users aren't used to. Once they get used to them, it's hard (or impossible) to go back.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
I have to disagree with David Hyatt's opinion about close boxes in tabs. I've used Galeon, and I hate having the close boxes in the individual tabs; a close box in a tab takes up such a large proportion of space that it is very easy to accidentally close a tab just by clicking on it. This happened to me so often that I stopped using Galeon and started using Mozilla.
I suppose having one close box on the right-hand side is conceptually inconsistent, but I find the Mozilla solution to be more usable. It never confused me: Mozilla's "close tab" button on the right balances with the "new tab" button on the left. I hope that Hyatt and Apple, before deciding on a solution for Chimera, do usability research with users and don't rely solely on theories of consistency.
My sister drank a lot of Tabs way back in the 70's. But then the comapny introduced Diet Coke and that was that big "switch campaign." I didn't know theyy were still making the stuff...
It's a joke...just chuckle and move along...
I totally agree with david that the tabs need there own close button, like galeon does. Another feature I love is that in galeon you can drag the individual tabs to another location, so you can group them the way you like.
...)
I'm back to mozilla right now and I really miss these features.
btw: I with mozilla now because the gtk-2 port of galeon is not finished yet. (anxiously waiting for it
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
I don't really use tabs. I'm too used to using multiple windows from the pre-tabs days. I keep a background window open (almost always a page with Google results), and then the foreground window is where I check out the links. I usually drag a link from the background window to the foreground window and the foreground window doesn't lose focus. This way, I always have easy access to the list of links. Safari's snapback feature (almost typed slashback!) hardly ever comes into play while I'm surfing. I suppose having the search results come up in a sidebar works the same way, but I never really liked sidebars.
Speaking of dragging links, I miss the old days where dragging a link to the desktop would download the file to the desktop, rather than creating a shortcut to the link. Could someone please make that an option in Safari and Mozilla?
indeed there is, albeit with dhtml - in this case i refer to the International Herald Tribune's pagination scheme which implements a very cute way of getting past the unavailability of the any <MULTICOL> tag in today's browsers.
:)
it also offers the option to reformat the page in a varity of ways, but the default layout (for applicable browsers) is that of a columned, page by page setup.
newspapers work in columns because they are easier to scan and digest. most people dislike scrolling, as it means the reading material moves - as opposed to one's eyes moving. QED.
<B>note to self:</B> <I>post as html</I>
That's interesting because the MSDN document browser application is basically a web browser using the IE engine and shares IE bookmarks. And it hints that microsoft isn't entirely opposed to tabbed browsing.
Links have an "open in new window" right menu item and an "open in separate window" right-click menu, just as mozilla.
I've been wondering if this is a signal of things to come.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
your girlfriend had to be shown how to use tabs the first time she saw them? How many other things confused her the very first time she ever saw them? Probably a lot. Internet Explorer (or Netscape) required a little instructions for most people I know the very first time they saw them.
Of course, one has the choice to never learn anything new and stay exactly where they are. For now... eventually progress will be forced upon us.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
You've been rated funny, but I wonder how many people actually got the joke. Even someone from the South of England is unlikely to get the reference, never mind an American.
OK. I'll spill. In the North of England, a Tab is a cigarette, so they do indeed cause cancer.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
The percentage of Safari Users that would use autocomplete is low at best ... it seems that the only people that are wanting this feature which causes interface clutter (eventhough minimal, it is is evasive) are the only ones posting, maybe several thousand. It also bloats code.
Other than a few bugs, in my opinion, the only thing Safari needs is tabs. Everyone that I do business with uses tabs. Personally, I list on eBay; for this, tabs is great when listing or when paying for something online.
I deal with 100's of customers a month and not one has wondered why Safari doesn't have autocomplete. ALL, miss tabs - some want password/keychain interaction.
if it ain't broke, break it.
then the user won't have to disable the tabs. The browser will function as normal except when the user wants to use tabs. Every click opens normally unless the user shift+clicks or something similar.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Just when I thought /. was going to post something about guitar tabs...boy was I wrong...
sure you dont want to change name to slash-chord?
is the switching between tabs. It should be (I think) a stack in order of use, not cycling through. Every time I open a new tab and Ctrl-Tab in Phoenix, I want to go back to the previous tab.
I do. I read a newspaper from my hometown every day. I just go thru each section and have all the articles load in the background. Once I'm done with that, I close that tab and read each of the articles in the order I opened them.
This was always a pain in IE because it would open a new window in front of the one I'm getting the links from. Then, after switching back to that window, the newly opened window would grab focus again. Quite a nuisance.
"Light is faster than sound." - "Is that why people tend to look bright until you hear them speak?"
I've always preferred Fanta.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
WindowsKey+M minimizes all windows. Educate them the next time you see them clicking on the minimize buttons.
DrPascal: Not the language, the mathematician.
Keep them coming! Waste those points!
Oh yes, this is news for nerds allright. ;)
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
Tabbed browsing is useful. But it shouldn't be necessary; tabs should be implemented by the *window manager*, then they would be available with the same interface for all applications.
Imagine how crazy it would be if each app implemented its own title bar and close button on every window. Now think about the current situation with tabs in Mozilla, tabs in terminal emulators, tabs in XEmacs...
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'm a big fan of tabs. I wish the folks at Mozilla could get their act together and define some way that Javascript can be used to open a new tab. They seem to be bogged down in an endless discussion on what is really the right thing to do.
For example, I would like to be able to make Jon Udell's Library Lookup bookmarklet create a new tab.
WindowsKey+M minimizes all windows
That's great when you want to minimize ALL windows, not if you want to minimize all IE windows, which is usually what the people I've observed want (btw, most users know how to do this, though they usually just click the show desktop icon in the toolbar). Typically their hunting through windows to find the one their interested in, minimizing windows as they go. Being able to group your browser windows allows you to eliminate an entire category of windows in one fell swoop.
MDI is just tabs BAD designed, then it was removed, but there is always the need to have multiple doc windows within an app window. Taskbar button grouping is just another bad design, it's easy to see less buttons, but far more problematic to use.
And tabs are way better when you're used to open 20+ pages at a time. Manage 30 opened browser windows with your taskbar and then complain about tabs.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Disclaimer: this isn't my idea, I got this idea off the January'03 MSDN document browser behavior. Also, although I didn't find the option in mozilla, other tabbed browsers may have this.
When I tab is closed mozilla gives focus to the next tab "physically" in the stack. That is, if you have 5 tabs open, and you open then close a sixth, you'll *always* find yourself staring at the 5th tab.
Mozilla could store a "logical" tab order, or stack. So when I open and close a new tab, the last tab I viewed before that gets focus.
What this means is that if you open a article link from your slashdot tab eg. tab 2 of say 5, and the article opens as the 6th tab; after closing the 6th tab, the 2nd tabs regains focus.
This is simple but very useful. It's almost like the tab focus order acts like the "back" button.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Tabs are for indenting.
Spaces for for lining up
When I surf slashdot, it would be a nice feature to have mega-self-referential-jokes (ie several subjokes under the main joke). It would be very useful for an uber-troll.
Am I the only person who thought this was a post about dropping tabs of acid?
I mean, who is Hyatt anyway?
This would be a great convenience - every time I opened Mozilla, I would get 5 or 6 tabs created - one loadig slashdot, one loading my source forge project, one loading my web-mail site, etc.
Does this functionality exist, and I'm just unaware of it?
What you elitist anti-MS types will never understand is that YOUR PERSONAL PREFERENCES DO NOT CONSTITUTE THE LAW OF THE LAND. I use Mozilla, BTW, and I hate tabs. Of course, even though I tried them, I'm just WRONG.
I have gotten used to using CTRL-TAB to tab between open Opera sessions. I like this better because I don't have to tab through my other, non-Opera sessions to find the window I am looking for.
Like leaves in the fall
Browser tabs fade away, and
you close the window.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
At first, I was annoyed that Safari opened a new window every time I clicked on a link in Mail. After a while, however, I started to realize that this was much more in line with the Macintosh Way.
.ICO file from the site.
How many times have you done this? You want to follow a link in an email, but you know that this will replace whatever is currently in your browser window, so you:
1. Switch back to the browser.
2. Open a new window.
3. Switch back to the email client.
4. Click the link.
I personally do that all the time, and ignored how annoying it is because I got used to it. With Safari, it works like this:
1. Click the link.
Since a new window opens, I don't lose whatever other window I had open.
Now, about tabbed browsers. In general, I hate tabbed interfaces for the following reasons:
1. Too much screen real estate. I have a 17" wide-screen, but I STILL don't want to waste it.
2. Tabs don't scale well. Beyond the discussion in the article, regarding where new tabs should appear, what happens when there are too many tabs for one row? Multiple row tabs take up even more screen real estate, and present a perplexing interface, since the rows must rearrange themselves as tabs are added and deleted. (The only alternative is horizontal scrolling of the tabs -- hideous!)Imagine twenty tabs called "Slashdot..." Which one did you want to pick? Your only choice will be to click at random, and so it's no better than Apple-~ to cycle through all open windows.
All my other Mac applications open a window for every document, so why wouldn't Safari?
Ideally, someone should think of a better way to do this. How about a history view which resembles iPhoto's gallery? Page snapshots could be scaled up or down, sorted by date visited and categorized by url. At smaller sizes, the snapshots could turn into generic icons, or use the
Tabs are a UI workaround for Microsoft's horrible windows within windows design. They don't need to be applied to Mac OS X.
Of course, for the people who like Tabs, I don't see any reason why it couldn't be an option -- as long as it's turned off by default. However, this is also not the Macintosh Way of doing things. It's much better to figure out the right/best way to do it, and stick to it.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
If you see everything on your screen that's not part of a document as clutter, then tabs add (marginally) to clutter.
But using tabs takes the list of active web documents out of the Taskbar/Dock/etc., where other documents and programs are listed. So your interface becomes easier to understand at a glance and less cluttered.
I don't buy into the assumption that you MUST browse the web with the biggest percentage of your screen possible devoted to rendering HTML (although you are in good company, as even Jakob Nielsen has complained about this recently - "it's amazing how much space is spent on browser chrome, scrollbars, and other system overhead"). Tabs, history panes, toolbars and the like, take up a relatively small amount of the screen but offer serious improvements in navigation. At today's typical screen resolutions, few sites look better if they're filling the whole screen.
In cases where it is important to see only the document, browsers should allow one-button "full screen" modes. Opera and Phoenix do this, for example.
Why is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) quiet about all this. A quick search on their website (through google) shows no mention of tabs, not the ones we are thinking of anyway.
If the W3C really wants people to stick to their specifications, they need to be ahead of the curve. I can just see IE 7 with javascript commands like window.tab.new() and Netscape with window.tab.open() etc.
Doesn't mean they don't want them. Tabs are one of the improvements in web browsers which someone has to tell you about for you to appreciate or know that they're available. If Apple made it a point to "hype" tabs like they do whatever other features their products have, you can be dam sure people would be using and crowing about them.
Why would any of the 100's of customers you deal with a month ask why Safari doesn't have tabs if they don't even know tabs exist? The vast majority of Safari users like everyone else just used to use IE. Now that the "God that is Apple" has come out with a new product all the Apple fans/weenies will drool all over it because "it's an Apple product". These aren't techies who used to use Chimera or Mozilla and are looking for an alternative, these are normal Apple users who see Safari as just another Apple product. Hence they would have NO idea what they're missing.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
While the "open source" retards are debating which hack of Mozilla does tabs better, Windows users can already use the greatest browser ever: MyIE2. A free, "alternate" interface for Internet Explorer. Does everything you could possibly want, is totally configurable, and works better and faster than any version of Mozilla I've seen. And, oh my God, it lets you configure the tabs to work how YOU want them!
i want to be able to drag and drop my tabs either to arrange them within one window, or to move them between windows. i think they should worry less about the order of opened tabs and allow users to move them.
Galeon handles this very well. Drag a tab outside of the browser window, and it detaches into a new browser. Drag a browser window into the tab-bar of another window, and it "docks" and becomes a tab. Going along with this, galeon also lets you re-order tabs within a window easily and intuitively.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
--And now for something completely different--
I saw the "Hyatt discusses Tabs" subject and thought, "What the hell does my kid sister know about tabs?" She's named after a maternal great-great-great (g3) grandmother and "hyatt" as a first name is rare.
The next thought was that she should hook up with this guy, marry, and her name would be Hyatt Hyatt, thus making her acent to popstardom a given.
minimizing the browser quickly when the boss is coming your way.
I don't believe IE is integrated into the kernel. MS got called on this on in court. What's more the rendering engine is a separate component that many Windows apps can use, the help system for instance. IE is not so much an application as it is a bunch of COM objects strung together under a UI we can call a browser. Adding tabs to IE means rearranging some the UI aspects with no need to rewrite the rendering engine proper.
Check out Crazybrowser sometime. It uses the IE rendering engine but supports tabs and popup killing. I don't use it myself (Linux user primarily) but I found it helpful when some of my users had popup complaints at the office. They liked the tabs once I showed them.
If a third party browser can support these features in Windows while being just as compatible as IE then IE can as well. Crazybrowser like IE is a little bit of new code wrapped around OS provided objects.
I would not consider myself a "power user" or "expert" and would say that as far as web browsing goes, I would be a novice. I surf for entertainment and to locate some information now and then. The internet is not inherently necessary in my line of work, and I rarely feel the need to do more than surf for leisure. However, I LOVE tabs and can't imagine life without them now. Mostly, it's to compare information that I find at multiple web sites.
The novice user gets as much use from tabs as the power user, in my opinion. Simplicity is simplicity.
windowskey+M, then go to the taskbar and click on what you want?
Or is this audience not sophisticated enough to identify their desired window by icon and caption, and then need to see the whole thing?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Wrong!
Use tabs of the width 8 spaces (still use a \t).
Code using 4 spaces, or God forbid 2 spaces, is simpley wrong. 1, Determining logical blocks of code becomes more difficult since you are unable to at a glance determine the level the code is at.
2, Determing if you really screwed the pooch on a function. If you are finding that you cannot see enough on the screen with an 80 column screen because it 80% of the code is on the right side of the page you are nested too deep. A function should only be at most two pages long, less is better.
3, Variable names. If you have pszSomeStoopidVariableName variables, its time to learn how to document. Documentation is meant to be describing the functional inputs and outputs. If your function is so long you can't document it as such, no pszSomeStoopidVariableName is going to save you.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
In Galeon, there is an option to turn off [close boxes on each individual tab].
After that, the tabs are clean with no buttons, and you close each tab with ctrl-w or file:close tab.
Wonders of configurability :)
what about implementing tabs as part of a broader interface scheme? What I'm trying to say is... TABS IN THE FINDER! no more messy windows floating around
That's "if you build it, Microsoft will copy it."
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
From the article:
I absolutely second that. I like the way Galeon handles closing tabs -- Mozilla's way is just disturbing and not very practical. The close button on the tab makes a clear statement as to what will be closed by pressing this button. Mozilla's button is in an awkward location and suggests the wrong action.
White blotters. Nice mellow trip. In high school I had some Felix the Cats that almost made me chew my f*cking ears off...
To avoid clutter, I "shade" windows to show only the title bar.
I consider shaded windows as having all the benefits of tabbed browsing with none of its drawbacks.
Here's why:
I use Opera, which (like Netscape) remembers my chosen window size and does not try to impose a "default" window size on me, like some browsers do. The only problem is sites that assume a larger window size than the one you are using. I also wish Opera would let the child window inherit the parent window's history, just in case I would have closed it.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
"which causes interface clutter"
Umm... as opposed to having multiple WINDOWS open? Ok, you just jumped off the friggin sanity waggon.
"It also bloats code."
Umm... yeah right. Tabbed browsing functionality will probably end up being less than 1/10 of 1 percent of the total code for safari, probably even less. The rendering engine itself is already 45,000+ lines of code, and that's probably the slimmest html 4.0+ graphical html renderer on the planet. I don't think adding tabbed browsing should be considered based on code bloat... Puh` leese!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Active windows don't occupy space in the Dock. That is a Windows failure, not a Mac one. Only minimizes windows reside in the Dock. Mac users also get a nice Command+` key binding that switch between open windows for the current application while Command+Tab switching between applications.
mbbac
And exactly this attitude will render them into obscurity eventually; even though some time will pass and Mr. Balmer will certainly never miss out on a meal.
That's not necessarily wishful thinking (in fact, I couldn't care less, since I hardly use their products), but this is what happens to companies, which get fat, lazy and arrogant towards their customers.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
In theory, you're correct;
Are tabs absolutely required? Nope.
Are tabs for everyone? Nope.
Can you perform the basic tasks you mentioned above or in my examples without tabs? Yep.
Should tabs be in every application -- even ones that aren't browsers? Nope.
Since I didn't argue these points at all, there's no debate with me.
Tabs, as they are used in most of the current crop of browsers, improve browsing substantially.
With them it is simple to do the things I described above and much much more. Using seperate windows to perform these tasks quickly becomes awkward -- unless you focus on a limited number of web pages and links or read them like a book. Web browsing, while it can be linear, is rarely linear.
Perform all of the 4 tasks I've listed above with a tabbed browser...then go and do the same thing without them in the browser of your choice.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Can you tell me where Opera is better than Moz and khtml, I'd be interested to know.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The problem with that is that you have to take your hand off the mouse ('scuse the right-handed bias). And that's why they introduced Ctrl+Tab to do the same thing.
informative, interesting, and funny, mod accordingly ;)
The right way IMO to do this is to have a close box for closing up the tab strip itself in the same place Phoenix and Mozilla have it, but to also have close boxes on the tabs themselves (the way Galeon does it).
No!!!!!
This may have some intuitive value the first time you have to figure it out, but I value being able to click that same "x" any number of times to close the tabs with which I'm finished. Hunting for each tab's close box would defeat some of the utility of tabs.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Tabs are in the domain of the window manager, not the application.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The child windows and container window are all shown as a tree view in the Windows. The tree has the functionality of a standard list box (with CTRL and SHIFT selection modifiers).
A window is closed by hitting DEL with it selected. You can close multiple selected windows and closing a container will close all the MDI children in it.
To make things even easier, you can add: to the menu.ini in your Opera directory.
This will allow you to close the windows by using a context menu.
I temporarily stopped using this because there is no blue highlighting of the unviewed windows that is present in the Pagebar, but I am switching back as soon as it is added.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
It is as powerful as when I first used the mouse wheel. I now can't imagine computing without it in a GUI.
when a browser does not support tabbed browsing but is lightning fast .. I don't care about tabs.
( referring to dillo )
My system (travelmate 529TXV 1Ghz 128 ram) has difficulty's with loading mozilla. Therefore, if I don't need flash or java etc , I use dillo. Starting dillo 15 times won't slow my system down. Starting mozilla once , even with the tabb support , slows my system down.
http://dillo.auriga.wearlab.de/ -- dillo
-beer
Although slightly offtopic, tabs should really be a feature of the window manager, not any one program. Check out this paper for some cool ideas. Why cant I glue together a web browser, by terminal and a text editor into one tabbed bundle? Why shouldnt I be able to tear off tabs and turn them into real windows? etc. If tabs were part of the window manager and not the application this type of thing would be easy.
http://www.macmerc.com/images/articles/safari62_2. jpg
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
It should be:
http://www.macmerc.com/images/articles/safari62_2. jpg
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Browsers like mozilla can display these links in a toolbar above the tab bar, to allow easier navigation around a site. These are the pages that can also be preloaded by some browsers, so when you click on the "Up", "Next" or whatever button, you go instantly to that page (for sufficiently slow values of instantly).
The effect is elegant, but too large to fit within the margins of this input box!
The code looks something like:
Was that what you were thinking of?
--
P.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
all my tabs vanished
- I'd closed the window!
It was a real pain, when I accidently clicked the wrong [X].
Bah humbug :)
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Miaria, Richard J., et al. 1983. "Program Indentation and Comprehensibility." Communications of the ACM 26, no. 11 (November): 861-67 disagrees with you. 2-4 spaces is the best for comprehension.
I think it depends on the media. 8 spaces works well on paper, but not so well on the screen.
Who else thought this was going to be a discussion on the various benifits to 2 vs 3 vs 4 vs 5 vs 8 vs hard tabs? Boy was I dissapointed when I actually took the time to read the link.
That's right, the current typewriter model suckas and is old and is intentionally shitty to keep the typewriters made in 1900 from jamming. We all know that, please move along. We don't need this post EVERY TIME somebody mentions a problem with some key being near some other key, particularly since such problems are pretty random.
Multizilla for Mozilla implements all of the different behaviors discussed in the article. The end user can choose exactly how tabs should behave, when they are opened, if they are replaced, if a favicon is displayed on the tab, if a close button is displayed on the tab, where the tab bar should be placed, and if the tab session should be restored on startup.
Funny idea that, letting the end user decide how they want to work...
Also, Mozilla's tabs were iniated because the developers liked Multizilla, but not nearly all the features of Multizilla were implemented in Mozilla's implementation.
Linus disagrees with you. /usr/src/linux/Documentation/CodingStyle
Search for: "Chapter 1: Indentation"
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
Try Tabbrowser Extensions. It's a XUL add-on for Moz. DL it here http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions .html.en
It adds drag and drop functionality along with a million other features. Too many to list here.
wow
Tabs are one of those things that you don't realize that you need until you have experienced it. And since the "default" browser, IE, has no tabs, most people don't know what they are missing. So of course they aren't asking for tabs.
But for anybody who keeps more than about three windows open at once, tabs are indispensible, and greatly reduce screen clutter. I used Mozilla for quite some time before even realizing that it had tabs--I didn't see them, so they didn't confuse me. Novices are unlikely to create tabs to be confused by. And the confusion potential of a tab is much less than that of accidentally clicking on the wrong scroll bar of a set of layered windows and wondering what happened to the page, which I have seen novices do frequently.
Load the picture: here!
It even has a feature to open multible tabs at once, but see yourself.
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
If you look at the picture I supplied in another post, I actually find the tab implementation confusing.
Since, personally, I am used to multiple windows I can actually navigate through, in and around them VERY quickly.
I also don't like to see any code bloat, even if it is a few lines like another post pointed out.
I think Apple should leave features like this to OTHER browsers so they can seperate themselves not only with requested features but by being more robust. Anything added is something more to support.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
A programming god like Linus probably wouldn't have a problem with comprehension even if you removed all of the whitespace from a C program, so I'm really not sure we should be using his preferences as a yardstick.
Science never deals in absolutes anyway- the study found that for most people 2-4 spaces was optimum, no indents were the worst, follower by 6 or more spaces. Clearly a minority of people are going to be happier with more indentation (there's probably even a couple people out there who are happiest with none)...
Argh! My garbage collector is broken!
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
alt-f-d, my friend. alt-f-d.
I think the whole discussion misses the point.
I've used _tabs_. I've done it under Mozilla. And under Galleon. And they suck. They're too limited to be worth babbling about. Sure, they're better than having to open a new window for every damn web page, but that's where the pros end.
The only browser I know that makes the thing right is Opera. Web page is a _document_. Office suites can show several documents at once in their workspace. Image editors can too. And I see no frigging reason to have three instances of browser opened when I want to look at three documents at the same time.
About Hyatt, he discusses mostly things that can and _should_ be easily customizable. And are, in my humble opinion, of little importance.
"Why prolong the agony, all men must die..."
Please take a moment to vote for that bug in Bugzilla. ie, Moz has no confirmation on CTRL-Q for 'close browser', and it's right next to CTRL-W for 'close tab'. The bug's here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821
2 1 is about removing "Quit" or removing the keyboard shortcut for "Quit". I agree that "Quit" should be removed from Mozilla on non-Mac platforms.
3 .
Mozilla has three close-stuff commands:
Quit (Ctrl+Q)
Close Window (Ctrl+Shift+W)
Close Tab (Ctrl+W)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528
What your parent is looking for is a confirmation dialog for "Close Window" when you have multiple tabs open. That's http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10897
The shareholder is always right.
The internet is so pervasive that hardly anybody remains a novice browser user for long.
If you look at the picture I supplied in another post, I actually find the tab implementation confusing.
Since, personally, I am used to multiple windows I can actually navigate through, in and around them VERY quickly.
I don't find it at all confusing. It doesn't take much sophistication to get accustomed to the concept of multiple toolbars. And frankly, I doubt if you are actually confused. Anybody who can easily manage a large number of open windows is pretty far from a novice. And even if tabs were more confusing to a novice than multiple windows (which I doubt) the fact that you have to actually request a tab tends to filter out the less experienced users. The only case where I do think tabs can be confusing is in a tabbed website, where one is confronted with a double row of tabs. But even there, it is pretty benign, since both sets of tabs work pretty similarly. And as tabbed browsers take over, I expect that web sites will design their menus to be less readily confused with browser tabs.
The choice between tabs and multiple windows is really pretty much a matter of taste. An experienced user can navigate either with little difficulty. And it also depends on your style of browsing. When I am dealing with "related" pages, I like to have them in tabs. When I am dealing with unrelated pages, I like to have them is separate windows.
Galeon will ask you before you close the whole window with all of it's tabs, and if you do by accident or on purpous, it will save the session. Next time you start up galeon, it will reload all of those websites again and keep the tabs in place. A very nice system indeed, but it could be even better, like having it remember where you were scrolled to, what certain buttons and such were set to, maybe stuff typed in in a field... I like your idea of the restoring a closed tab though.
The CrazyBrowser and IE combo is awesome. On WinXP it's rock solid and fast. If you prefer IE, then I highly recommend trying it out.
Not employed by CB, just really appreciate it.