Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Preparing To Scrap Tabbed Browsing?
Barence writes "Mozilla Labs has launched a design competition that aims to find an alternative to tabbed browsing. 'Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin internet, where ten browser sessions were "many browser sessions,"' Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website. '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. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless.' Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces)."
We need a ribbon!
Sounds more like they're looking for intelligent incremental improvement to me. And why not? Tabbing has taken over the browsing world entirely! Even the Redmondites can't throw an ad campaign accusing tabs of being evil after being the final adopter of the technology. . . .
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
20+ tabs? Damn, when i have 10 tabs i'm already lost, even with addons to view thumbnails of those tabs...
I'm rather intrigued what will come out of this design contest...
Personally i don't think the sidebar is that good of an idea. Eats away too much space of my screen.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
Sounds less like ditching tabs, and more like adding grouping. Make it optional, and I don't see a problem.
And here we see the next step in FireFox going down the drain. I want a browser not an OS. FireFox is bloated and crash prone, even more so that IE7. If Opera had the plug-in capability of Firefox, I'd move back to it.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces).
Insanely stupid IMO! I personally because I want browser space, totally remove every toolbar - including the tab bar (scroll through them with Ctrl-Tab in Opera) - and now some idiots want to waste more space.
I don't want a 'Safari look' on my browser, I just want it to be functional and work the way I want. What turns me on is the fact that I can open more than 10 tabs freely on a PC with 512 megs of RAM and not be hogged.
Sadly, more and more people turn on to other browsers because of their pimped looks (IE) only later to find out that they're peace of crap in the features included.
[insert lame sig here]
Traditionally when competition exists it pushes the technology (or industry) forward but unfortunately that hasn't been the case with browsers.
While browsers improve they also remain very much the same. If you pull up a copy of Netscape Navigator 4.0 you'll find that most things are still identical to today's browsers.
Just to give one example, look at bookmarks, they rarely have even basic search capabilities (e.g. title) and never have more sophisticated searches (e.g. content). Organisation is horribly difficult and finding anything often takes longer than googling it.
To give another example, history, it is a basic list of websites you've visited but often containing random javascript pages and giving no visual representation of what you visited (visual memory is useful). Search is bad here too.
I could list more and more examples but I think you get my point.
I routinely deal with more than 20 open tabs, and upwards of 60-80 open tabs at times. It isn't a problem, from a performance perspective.
What is an issue is managing all those open tabs, and being able to find the one I want. I use a number of extensions which help with this, but it can still get burdensome at times. Still, I don't think it's a huge problem, and it doesn't really bother me.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
would be indeed a good idea, IMHO.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Obvious solution, group them together by site. Instead of a dozen separate tabs which say 'Slashdot Co...' have one tab saying 'slashdot.org' and when I click on that it can show me everything I have open. In fact this is too obvious to be a new idea: surely someone's already programmed an extension that makes this happen?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Tabkit anyone? Granted it's not exactly the same as their idea, but it can easily manage 20+ tabs in a readable fashion....
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
I always find myself ending up with loads and loads of tabs after a few hours of fascinated clicking or slacking off (which is good... right?). Tabs are not really helping when you start off reading manuals for some API you're trying to tame, get distracted by a really interesting concept mentioned in there, and finally end up with nine tabs of Wikipedia, a few eBay tabs, thirty webcomics and two blog posts about cabbage. I really can't "find" the three tabs with documentation if I want to go back to work.
So the idea of grouping tabs sounds appealing to me. Maybe the groups of tabs could even get a different kind of behaviour, e.g. the anonymous browsing feature. Or a merge with the 'profiles' feature.
oh god what fresh bloat is this
Sounds strange but it would actually be a good idea. People who know what they are doing will just turn the functionality back on.
However I've seen far too many non-technical people end up with a browser full of tabs. Everytime they click a link in an email program it opens another tab. They generally don't realise what they are or how to close them.
"the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application"
Err no, it isn't. Its not even close to being an OS. A data display application with some built in interpreters is ALL it is and hopefully is all it will be since most browsers are bloated enough already.
"we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive"
Speak for yourself pal - not all of us want to manage our private files or even lives online. Just because you do doesn't make it so for everyone.
it was never designed to be so, and probably should never be. If there are elements of the web that you are using as if they were part of your operating system, e.g webstorage, google docs... then those services should develop applications to integrate themselves into your OS (c.f web/netowrk disks).
First, the browser isn't an OS. (It's a browser, stupid!)
Second, someone's pissed about chrome's separate processes per tab. (now, just close the process on that tab and no more crashes.)
Third, to make firefox useful, you must bloat it up with addons. (evidenced by the 12+ addons I have loaded right now)
Fourth, someone's also pissed about chrome being so fast. (let's not argue, it's just way faster.)
Fifth, If I could load addons into chrome, I'd be a fanboy. (specifically adblock)
Sixth, make firefox able to use different javascript engines and perhaps different rendering engines, then we'll talk about tabs. (which, if you think about it is the main appeal of firefox. It's why people started switching in the first place.)
They're using their grammar skills there.
That's what bothers me more, that my browsing experiences hangs with one page. Perhaps every tabs should be it's own thread/process/whatever.
I don't know about alternatives to tabs, but whatever they come up with (like Google's Chromium), I'm pretty sure it will be still tabs but just an alternative presentation adding up to the same thing - even if becomes like the mulitple desktops Linuxes have. I don't think anyone wants to go to the pre-tab days of having 20 browser apps crowding out the other apps.
I wish they would concentrate on making the browser better at sorting information, an update to the dated bookmark concept, maybe with a profile that automatically transfers (if you want it too) to your other computers, making your experience more seamless. Or just being able to save a webpage as a PDF (take a hint from OS X) without using add-ons.
Let's get a poll up for this. # of tabs used regularly. I hope there's a Cowboy Neal option! ;)
The browser is not an OS.
Web 2.0 is slow, clunky, feature-lacking, rough-edged substitute for the native UI.
If I wanted a dumb terminal I'd fire up one of my VTx20s. You know what that had? Multiple screens. So, there's your fucking innovation. DEC VT screens. Perhaps give familiarity to Linux console users by mapping to keypresses Alt-F1..F8. Each browser "window" just occupies the whole screen, of course, since apparently it's the whole OS.
Then people can migrate from Office to the super-functional, super-stable, super-available Google Docs, run Final Cut over an ADSL line, make do with Wolfram Alpha instead of a local copy of Mathematica, and generally make the Mozilla "Foundation" richer than.. oh, that's right, it's not a charity at all...
but Software covering basic cultural techniques like
calculating/spreadsheet
Document writing
Pixel Graphics/ photo processing
Vector/Line Graphics
CAD
will be forced into Public Domain - simply because the TCO of proprieatry software in this field is too high to allow propretary solutions to continue - with their vendor lock ins and un-maintainable document retention
1 sound system - true - is a mess now
2 X-system - can not say - have not experienced unstable GUI
3 Linux Distros: variety is good
maybe the big Desktop Distro's should agree on some standrads - if needed by a public polll to select the favorites
3.4 Applications for Windows suffer the same problem -
at least in the field of scientific software .
Whereas if I have the source I can compile for the new OS version myself, in case of proprietary SW I have to pay both the OS vendor as well as the scientific SW vendor for the new thing.
Most often in the scientific world there is no one who can and/or wants to write a new version! Then I am on my own and better off with OSS ( if not FOSS )
4 GUI for everything is not a must - but consistency within a distribution and maybe between distros would be nice.
5 I can not see so many basic SW tools missing! Only one I reckon is Visio.
AutoCAD will not publish for Linux - they have a closed philosophy.
On the other side there is Blender which is ahead of the proprietary solutions.
Same true for R, the statistics package. ( True there is no integrated GUI yet )
5.3.1 if you leave out the CPU to do the work?
5.3.2 WebCams - true - WebCam manufacturers - why not release some drivers for Linux?
5.4 can not answer - ask Hollywood and Sony
5.5 US is interested in getting revenue for plastic ( SW see:
http://www.worldmapper.orgdisplay.php?selected=99
6 can no answer that except: happens to Windows applications too
7 that is a point - suggest some Universities adopt certain aspects of a FOSS OS
8 good interoperability depends on good data and interface specifications and a rigorous compliance to standards
9 slowness - the OO example is true, not true for other thingssuch as inkscape versus CorelDraw
13 can not agree - see point 3.4
14 big distro's like RedHat and Novell/SuSE as well as Ubuntu could do something about it
"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. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless."
Sure, maybe the Mozilla folks like their browser so much they use it as an OS and open up 20+ tabs at once with it, but I'm pretty confident the average user just browses the web with it, and doesn't open more than 3 or 4 tabs at once. At least I don't (or anyone I know, for that matter) and I even consider myself a power user, I spend about 2 hours a day in my browser.
Maybe the Mozilla devs should consider gathering some statistics to back up their assumptions about browser use because this really sounds like they don't really get the difference between the 1% power users and the 99% casual users that just visit the same few websites they visit everyday.
Until that, just keep the tabs please.
Tabs and new windows are not mutually exclusive. I group my tabs just fine by having a separate window for each set of tabs. To me it makes a lot of sense since I can ALT-tab between subjects and CTRL-tab between tabs in that subject. I don't see their sidebar solution as being any better.
As others have said, the first thing I do in Windows is turn off window grouping, and in firefox is turn off all the extraneous, real estate-sucking bars they haven enabled.
I suggest that they implement whichever solution(s) they like as an extension, and let people vote with their downloads which one they like best before drastically changing the browser. Let the users decide.
Grouping tabs wouldn't work. All those hundreds of tabs would still end up in the same group: porn. And I'd be just as lost.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I often have about 50 tabs open in Opera, and I can handle them just fine. Right now I have about 25 tabs open. Most of them are documentation (eg. mysql, posix threads) or work-related (lua binding tutorial, stackoverflow threads) or news (Slashdot!).
In Notepad++ I also have lots of tabs open. I need lots of tabs in order to do my work; I always have lots of things on the go. I like to have as much information layed out as possible, with everything I have worked on recently open and "stacked" much like papers or books would be on a real desktop. I guess I'm a very spacial thinker.
A few times I lost my Opera or Notepad++ sessions, and then I felt very lost.
I think the correct metaphor for organizing a large number of (Web) pages is a book. A book can have hundreds or even thousands of pages, referenced by page number at least. The pages can be organized into sections, chapters, and subsections, all of which are listed in a hierarchical table of contents. The pages can also be indexed according to key words and topics. And there's a level of abstraction above a book if needed: a bookshelf. In terms of user interface design, all of these bookish elements have been implemented pretty well in other contexts. Coverflow-style page flipping would probably be one navigation option, for example.
What?? 20 tabs are common? I have 463 open tabs right now. I use an extension on Epiphany (Gnome's browser) to place the tab bar as a vertical bar on the left of the screen (it's widescreen so I have to save vertical space by removing all horizontal bars, I have also done the same with the menu, bookmark bar, and Gnome's panels: everything is on the left). My htop (like top but with more colours) says that Epiphany right now uses about 1.3GB of memory (out of 3GB).
I've always made it a point to add favicons to any sites I develop because when I'm using my browser, it helps me find the tab I'm looking for quicker. If more websites took advantage of favicons that would sort of take care of the problem. If the site didn't have one, perhaps the browser could use a small thumbnail of a screenshot of the site?
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Just to be clear, I do use tabs, but I only use them for one reason; I can middle mouse click to generate a tab.
Before tabs were vogue, I constantly used Multiple browsing sessions by right clicking a link and opening the link as a new window. If IE5 or IE6 had the middle click functionality it would have functioned just like tabs except the taskbar itself would be the tab instead of a redundant tab bar in the browser itself.
In the Mac and Unix worlds, tabs make sense since OSX and many Unix window managers do not have a tab like taskbar like windows. In the Windows world, it's a redundant taskbar to group sessions that don't necessarily need to be grouped.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I normally open each web session in a new browser window and use the taskbar. It works for me because I really cannot see the point of having 20+ parallel sessions, I just close the windows that don't interest me at the moment.
Appendix:
I was wondering why the guy was so caught up in this bullshit about fonts as if it was the alpha and omega of an OS, then I noticed the URL. One clearly sees what the guy knows about, too bad fonts is about the least of our concerns.
I am the lawn!
Removing tabs would be a big deal, and if you do it. You had damn well better be right.
Coke thought the people wanted something new with "New Coke". That didn't go over well and the backlash damaged Coke as many Coke drinkers, went with other products and some didn't come back with Coke Classic came out.
> the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application
It's not an operating system. It's an "execution environment". And if people got in the habit of recognising and securing all the execution environments (including word-processors and media players) we'd probably be getting less spam.
Tabbed browsing has become a familiarity for millions of users now. I am not sure what getting rid of it means. Is Mozilla expecting people to get used to a different interface? I am not sure thats the right way to go about it. Nor does forcing people to use an extension to add tabbed browsing. I think Opera had the option of tabs or no tabs very early on. Perhaps doing the same won't hurt for Mozilla?
Besides, should mobile browsers be treated in the same way as desktop browsers in the need for tabs? A mobile device is a completely different environment. People use it in ways that are quite different from the way they would use a desktop. Do you need tabs there? Maybe, or maybe not. Perhaps this depends more on the device? Would customizing the browser better for the type of device involved not be an option here? Opera seems to do it.
In summary there are two short-sighted points of view in this commentary:
1) "I don't use many tabs, so there is no need to change tabs"
2) "I have hundreds of tabs open and don't have a problem, so there is no need to change tabs"
Guess what, no one gives a crap if tabs are fine for you. The reason why this is being explored is for those people who tabs do *not* work for.
I know, it is obvious now I have explained it, but don't feel embarrassed or anything.
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Firefox has gotten away from lean & mean and turned into bloatware. So long Firefox.
I like my tabs!
I organize my daily comics in to groups of tabs and folders, then open the ones that are updated that day with one click. A dozen tab open on certain day, then I close them out as I read them.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Ehe, hehehe, ehe wrong article. :)
I am the lawn!
This sounds brilliant to me.
If the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd had their way we would all be using carrier pigeons..
Seriously, Netscape stopped innovating and died. IE stopped improving and lost an amazing amount of market share. Firefox HAS to keep awake and on top of the game if they want to stay relevant.
And improving the web using experience at home is an excellent idea. Just test lots of cool ideas until we find one that works well. Then try to figure out something better.
Now I usually don't have more than 5-20 broswer tabs max, often split across 2 or three workspaces. That still doesn't mean that the system can't be improved!
Honestly guys, let's try and let the users decide. Why not implement add-ons, skins, and multiple alternative Firefoxen? Like Firefox blueflame or something? See which UI is the most popular. Let people swap out UI on demand. Then after a round of beta testing make the most popular the defaults.
The key is to allow change on every level feasible.
[signature]
...not having 500 tabs open, just because you want to read them in the next 3 years or something? ^^
You know, there is a feature called "bookmarks" for this.
Basically, the only point where I can imagine that it makes sense to open enough tabs to fill the whole bar, is when you open many images, or search results. They could be displayed in a gallery-like manner.
But I have a problem with sidebars: They take away too much space. And still you got no overview.
You basically either create one line per tab, which would usually cut off the most important part of the page title (Making 10 tabs say "Slashdot Comments | Mo..."). And below, you still got 80% of the tab empty.
Or you add line-breaks, and more, and got some huge rows that take away most of the place, while still only allowing some 8 tabs to be visible. Again: Lost space. Filled but still lost.
But the concept of grouping tasks/tabs is not bad. Just please do not implement it in that incredibly disturbing and useless manner that it's implemented in XP.
I would recommend adding a second "level" of tabs. For usability and overview, I would by default (but changable) force the number of tabs per set to 10 max. (average = 7). So you could have one level showing the topics, which would for example contain one topic for each project you are working on, and one for random stuff. And below that, there were the tabs, just like now.
Oh, and I would create a function in the right-click menu of the tabs, that would show a window with the exact details on the memory and CPU usage of that tab. So people could finally see, that most memory eating in Firefox comes from Flash, and huge, html-downscaled pics and animated gifs. Seriously. Flash is the guilty one here.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I would be tempted to have two tab rows, one horizontal and one vertical. The vertical one is a tab of horizontal tabs - effectively a new window, but in the same window. You wouldn't have to need it if you didn't want it, but if you did, it would allow you to group the normal tabs as you want. So for example, I could have a vertical tab with all my webmail accounts on it - each in a different horizontal tab. Provided it was easy to drag and drop tags around so you could group them as you wanted, this would be my choice. I don't know if anything like this exists already though.
Expecting fork in 3...2...1...
.sig: No such file or directory
... window managers were actually managing windows.
I mean, the floating windows paradigm is so flawed nowadays that applications have to manage their own set of windows!
And web browsers are not alone: any application that lets you view/edit several files within the same window is managing something it shouldn't have to manage.
Alternatively, WMs could implement the equivalent of "tab circling", which is really just the ability to circle through a subset of windows.
In that sense, tilled window managers are doing a much better job than traditionnal WM, especially those implementing tabs.
I personally think that the difference between arranging by tabs and arranging by multiple windows is nearly irrelevent. It's just a question of how to position the buttons that bring foucs to that content.
The thing that tabbed browsing gets right that matters is that it fetches and renders the page without immediately bringing focus to it.
-Dave
Ehe, hehehe, ehe wrong article. :)
Yeah, posting in the wrong article. I hate it when that happens.
If only some browser maker would come up with a new way to deal with these pesky browser UI issues. Tabs are so passé....
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I'll venture to say that at that point people very much develop their own browsing habits, habits which to others may seem absurd, impractical, yet work.
Some people can't stand having more than 8 tabs in a window, some people need lots of windows, some people can't stand more than a window, some people need hierarchy in their tabs, some people need 200 tabs opened. I for example commonly have 100+ tabs opened in only one windows, and I love it. It replaces bookmarks for some of the sites I browse most often, for example the lolcats site is always on tab 4, the failblog site is always on tab 5, and my website statistics are always on tab 7.
It may seem crazy, stupid, absurd, brilliant, what matters is that at this point you cannot tell people what to do anymore, you can only offer them options. That's precisely what extensions are made for in Firefox.
As for Raskin and his group working for Mozilla, not to sound too inflammatory but they kind of belong to the kind of designers who surf on a wave of hype and buzz and who live off trying to reinvent things that aren't broken in ways that won't stick around, kind of like your ergonomic futuristic 1970s designer seats.
You just got troll'd!
...this just shows that they don't know what (some) people use tabs for.
Personally, when I tend to browse forums or a website, etc, I use tabs like footnotes.
1) Efficiency: I continue reading the current thread or page, and 'open new tab' on any interesting link. This allows THAT page to load in the background while I continue to read uninterrupted. So while I have "broadband" some pages STILL take a not-irrelevant time to load.
2) Organization: tabs allow me to reduce clutter and keep things organized. Right now, for instance, I have outlook, 2 emails I should be working on instead of reading/posting to /., 4 different excel worksheets (work), outlook reminders, adobe (work) and firefox. At least with the tabs all residing within firefox I can keep neatly separated between what I'm doing and what I SHOULD be doing....
3) resources: ok, this was a far bigger issue with previous hardware and OS's, but it's still my preference not to run/exit/run/exit multiple iterations of any program. To open a new browser for a page I might spend 30 seconds reading seems a waste (and is quite a bit slower than ctrl+t) - on a day of heavy web-browsing, I might open 100+ pages. Perhaps I'm just ignorant and the memory load/memory leakage of multiple tabs is essentially the same for tabs as for multiple iterations, but that's my 'sense' of it - tabs seem less likely to run me out of resources.
And no, having a host of "context" tabs that I could open doesn't sound terribly useful - if I open my "slashdot" tab, I'm after the individual stories, which the browser can't possibly predict which are worth downloading. On the other side of the coin, how could the browser anticipate/understand that (forum post)(4chan)(algore.com)(goatsce.cx) are all contextually tied (but only for as long as I need to make that forum post and insert the image - and then never, ever again).
For my style of tab-heavy browsing, I wouldn't mind perhaps the tabs running down the side of the page. That seems more logically useful given the lateral nature of text, and easier to pack 20-30 tabs on a page. However, then it becomes a WASTE of space for people who only open a small number of tabs. With tabs on top, you're losing only the thickness of a text line in screen real estate; with tabs to the side, you lose the WIDTH of a text line - substantially more - even if you only have two tabs open. For that matter, I'd simply be happy with the ability to increase the height of the CURRENT tabline, like you can with the Windows bar in XP, so with 20-30 tabs, I can read more of their (currently-abbreviated) headers, at a small cost in screen area.
In short, I love tabs and use them intensively. Don't see much of a need to change them.
-Styopa
Tabbed browsing is great, and ther eis nothing stopping you from using both tabs AND windows. I do it all the time. Easy example, small-batch updates to Wikipedia, can open 20-30 tabs of pages to work on at once in one instance, but if I need to do something else I just spawn a new browser instance and typically use tabs there. Folder grouping on taskbars was only useful when using a non-tabed browser!
I use tabbed browsing HEAVILY and I have fast connections. It is about the reasons this guy had. I like having multiple web pages open, but only having ONE browser window. Its an ingrained habit for me. I have a feeling I am not alone. I hope this doesn't come to pass, it would really fuck up my browsing experience with Firefox. There are so many other cool things they could do. I hope they pick something else to futz with.
I know it's trendy to take useful, standard user interface elements and turn them into some horrid experimental new monstrosity (see also, Windows Vista and menu bars), but don't you bloody dare pull a Microsoft on us.
- Split view (2-10 pages on same window)
- Better keyboard handling (make ctrl, alt keys behave the way they are supposed to)
- Make it faster and lighter (opera-speed browsing, optimize code, make it use less resources)
- keyboard shortcut -> Tabs to thumbnails. Similar to the Alt-tab window switching in windows, but with tabs (think of windows-key+tab). After all, they ARE TABS.
- hightlight text, new right-click option: "open as URL in new tab" - sometimes URLs are displayed as plain text.
- shortcut/click combination to open link in new tab (e.g. ctrl-rightclick to open in different tab)
If the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd had their way we would all be using carrier pigeons..
You mean 'If the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd had their way we would all be using steering wheels.'.
I hate this type of mentality. Yes, certainly, improving organization is a direct route to more productivity on the desktop. However, that does not mean the current model is broken. You've had people trying to improve the use of the desktop space ever since it's been invented. They've come up with a huge number of horrible ideas. As several other posters have pointed out - the first thing most people do upon installing xp is turn off "group similar icons"! Likewise, how many people actually use things like 3D browsing, etc? Productivity is directly equal to absolutely minimizing the number of clicks it takes to reach your result. Period. ANYTHING can be measured in this very, very easy to understand and easy to calculate metric. The current tabs system allows you to get to anything you need within a click - sometimes two if you have multiple browsers open. This system has been used in many other locations - spreadsheets, etc - and so far no one has found a solution to make it take fewer clicks. Between alt-tabbing and single clicks, you can get anywhere very, very quickly. You want to improve on it? Make our buttons nameable - so we can get rid of a button on the taskbar that says "Inbox - Microsoft Outlook" and change the fucking thing to "Inbox" so it takes up only 6 characters! Likewise - Why do I have to look at icons that say "Autocad 2007 - [C:/..." that presents NO useful information, instead of just the file name? Or, another nice one, when I've got a folder open, the button says "C:\Documents and Se...". Wunderbar! I certainly know what THAT button means! Get rid of the stupid little icons, and actually put text there that explains what it is. "Inbox". "Autocad - Layout" (the file name without extension). Heck - the button that I've got for this comment session is "Slashdot Commens | Mozilla Preparing to Scrap Tabbed Browsing? - Microsoft Internet Exploer". That's fucking usefull when you can only see the first 15 or so characters.
Draggable tabs.
Grab your tab, drag it to the correct window, or into a new window.
Now your tabs are as easy to organize as your windows.
And they still work as tabs.
(of course now Apple is preparing to fuck up Safari tabs by cramming them into the title bar, see what happens when you have a Googler on the board?)
In what universe are tabs not broken? They're horrible. On the plus side:
On the other hand, we have:
I'm sure there are more points here. Tabs aren't "ain't broke," they are "broke."
If the Firefox guys can come up with an awesome replacement, more power to them.
where if you choose to open in new tab, the original tab and the new one are automatically shaded a new color, color chosen randomly. so if you have 8 open tabs, 3 might be green, 2 might be purple: it shows a relationship. effortless and intuitive
there i said those two words in relation to a windows product. you may now pillory me for my sacriledge
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's not april 1st today is it?
I use Tab Mix Plus and Colorful Tabs.
More than 200 CPU and memory hogging bugs in Firefox
Mozilla Labs seems a little like Microsoft: They want to change things that don't matter, rather than fix the huge, serious bugs, like the CPU and memory hogging bug. There are more than 200 CPU and memory hogging bugs listed in Bugzilla. There are more than 200 CPU hogging bugs, but Mozilla Labs only allows you to see the first 200.
If Mozilla doesn't allow visitors coming from Slashdot to see the bug list directly, put this URL into your browser: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org, simply enter CPU into the "Find a bug" field, and click on "Find".
Yesterday I had a few Windows and tabs open, but my computer seemed very slow. I discovered that Firefox was taking 89% of the CPU, doing nothing! I first reported the CPU hogging bug in version 1.9, perhaps 7 years ago. My experience is that CPU hogging in Firefox has become much worse since version 3.0.5, and worse than that in version 3.0.10.
Firefox, the laptop killer
The first component in a laptop to fail is often the fan. Usually a replacement fan is expensive to buy and install. Firefox's CPU hogging causes laptop fans to run much more often, and thus reach their end of life sooner.
In my experience with hundreds of programs, Firefox is the only one that consistently hogs the CPU.
Wasn't a key "innovation" of Google Chrome to go just the opposite direction and make each browser tab its own OS process?
I mean, there was all this work done by someone to write an OS already, and by golly there are other processes running on the OS that is running the browser, so, I mean, what exactly are you guys talking about?
Seastead this.
I can already do that in Firefox.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Can't use it with more than 10 tabs ? That's an easy fix: open the config page (type "about:config" and enter in the address bar). Then change the value of browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 in order to make them fit without scrolling, then browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3 to move the 'close' button to the upper right. Plenty of space now.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I couldn't agree more! At this moment the only add-ons I have are Flashblock (because of the flash-exacerbated CPU problem) and Ubiquity, with 7 tabs in 1 window and 2 tabs in another window, I'm running between 20-25% of my CPU. Even if they come up with a rockin' solution to the perceived tab real estate, it won't do me any good because I can never have enough tabs open for it to be an issue.
I like the left side of my browser window uncluttered with "navigation" stuff. I suspect that a great many browser users do as well. (Most web sites already include a ton of navigation links on the left of the page anyway. Adding another column of these will be confusing.) Now it seems we need a Windows Explorer-type interface using up screen real estate? It's bad enough already that way too many web sites design their pages to make almost necessary that you run the browser in full-screen mode; eating up the left side of the this idea will most likely make that mandatory in order to avoid horizontal scrolling. Tab groups? Unless they're going to manage themselves, this seems like a useless feture for the vast majority of browser users. Tell ya what guys... why not throw in a ribbon-style menu as well since you're hell bent on making everything look like a Windows application. Those pundits that criticize Linux developers as doing nothing more than copying Windows ideas may not be that wrong after all. Instead of mucking around with the user interface, why not make the browser work faster by taking advantage of the multi-core chips that are the norm these days. (And make the damned Javascript interpretter work better so we can dump plug-ins like NoScript.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Remember Mac OS 9? Anyone? They had this great window selector applet that was usually in the upper right corner of the screen. Click on it and you would get a list of applications. Select the one you want and it comes to the forefront.
I liked that style. On my (Fedora) Linux desktop, the first thing I do is destroy the bar on the bottom and start filling out the bar on the top with everything I find useful. And on that bar, on the far right, I place a Window selector applet that does pretty much what MacOS9 did with theirs. If I want to see the windows that are available, I click the applet. If I want to change to it, I select the one I want. Afterward, I just focus on the windows and apps I am using at the moment.
Interestingly enough, Firefox ALREADY has this functionality. If they did away with the tab bar but kept the little drop-down thingy, they would have what I like the most. Simple, effective and isn't in your face all the time. I think it is an important focus to keep things you don't need out of your face and the means of access to things simple.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6535
Sounds like what they are looking for. I use it to manage my large list of tabs. All they need to do is add optional grouping.
To me it is so silly with all the netbooks and widescreen monitors that everyone still uses the old ideas from when 4:3 ruled the day.
Instead of everything at the top and bottom (which is a problem on MAC/PC/Linux) let's start utilizing the sides more efficiently.
My personal suggestion would be to have each instance be it's own window and have a mechanism for grouping those windows by the user for related windows, something like a "sticky" interface where you can stick a couple together in some configuration. Then on the left or right side of the screen hidden until moused over could be the "tabs" for each window easily accessed by either clicking the tab or scrolling the mousewheel and giving focus.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I hate tabbed browsing
Seriously I just don't get on with the damn things. I find them very restrictive on how I manage my desktop real estate and they can make it quite awkward for me to find a specific page view that I'm looking for. Fortunately both IE and FF let me turn it off!
Anyway I know I'm a very small minority on this but it has given me a perspective on this question, and what I would say to the Mozilla devs is do what ever you want but make sure you still give the user the power to choose. As long as users can choose the work flow that suits them then I think its all good for them to be offering new solutions for organising things.
So what the frack are they complaining about?
Tabbed Browsing is the single greatest invention of man kind.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
I right-click on the left-panel, and use the "Customise..." option
The Appearance dialogue box opens with 4 tabs, defaulting to the "Panel" tab. I click once in the "Windows" checkbox" and "OK".
All up, 4 clicks to install the functionality, already built into Opera.
And now with a SINGLE CLICK on the newly installed icon on my left hand side bar, I get an easily readable list of all my open tabs.
And until this article, I didn't even know it was there - I went looking and found it under 5 seconds. Just why are you people using Firefox again? I don't get it at all, and I don't get popups or invasive javascript or loads of adverts either.
About time they decided to ditch the useless tabs!
Anyone who uses the browser for anything useful has 10+ web pages opened at the same time.
I personally open most of them as separate windows, as it is much easier to switch between them.
I do use tabs occasionally to group a few web sites together, but it is rarely any help (alas, more often than not that backfires and I cannot find the sites after a few hours of working on something else).
I hope they also completely decouple various pages;
I really hate it when a cookie from one window interferes with what I am doing in another.
I know I can use multiple profiles, but that is a real pain to handle!
Igor
subtabs? tablets?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Try the Firefox "Showcase" plugin. (I did a quick search here, and didn't see it listed yet). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1810
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
I'm sorry -- people need a reason to complain on the internet?
Are you new here? :P
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
When I used to work in a computer workshop, someone rang me about a problem opening some Word documents, so I told her she'd have to bring it in. She said, "do I need to bring in the whole computer?" and I said "no - we have all the peripherals here in the lab - just bring in the computer itself". She drove the 15 miles to our workshop and turned up with just the *monitor* (a 17" CRT she was struggling to carry). When questionned, it seemed that she thought the important bit was the screen because that where she could see all the icons and files. She geniunely didn't seems to realise that all her stuff was in the "box" and thought that was just another perhiperal (I think she called it the "CD drive").
A few months later, the woman brought back her boss's computer (the right bit this time) with a different problem. This time, her boss had said, "I'm out of space on my hard drive, can you please free up some disk space so the error message goes away". What she'd done (by her own admission) is to "delete everything off the C drive". The machine obviously didn't boot, and apart from a few files which would have been locked, the hard disk was completely empty and it took me hours to recover their data and rebuild the machine from scratch. They lost a lot of important stuff! It was around that time I decided I didn't want a customer-facing support role and left the job... I don't have the patience!
Are you referring to the application limit in the Starter Edition? The one designed for the most basic of netbooks? The one where IE or Firefox can have as many tabs as they want as they're still a single application?
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Firefox is a mature product which technically reached and even surpassed similar products. Innovation and change for the sake of themselves isn't as good as real change. I would regard adding tabs to a browser as a true innovation which resolved the taskbar bloated windows (and it wasn't Mozilla, it was Opera who first did it), but reconfiguring the way they work isn't really that workflow changing.
Changing structure of tabs would please about 5% people who probably already resolved their problems with extensions and piss off the 95% who actually didn't benefit much from it. Just try to hack the existing interface with some neat things. Although many might disagree but I think the 'awesome bar' was a nice example of how the mature products can still innovate.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
What if we just put all these tabs on the Internet with their own id (we could call it a uniform resource locator) and just serve them up when you look at them?
The first thing I do in the morning is open 95 bookmarks simultaneously. Can't do that without tabs.
I find it really painful that after the EU made a stand at browser monoculture, and we start to get corporate customers asking "which browser should be using?" - Mozilla foundations common sense evades them and all sense flies out of the window.
We don't need to have the browser using "multiple cpu's more effectively". We don't need a "microsoft ribbon effort wasting my valuable viewport".
We need more basic things. Like tabbing to actually work and not, like now if I have 30 tabs open and I press "move right / left within all tabs in quick succession" for it to jump to the leftmost or rightmost tab.
We don't need fake efficiency via obscurity - so where are my preferences settings again? Why on earth did they decide to hide them in about:config? Why couldn't we have the old style Tools->settings->cache dialog back? How on earth do I explain changing cache settings to a regular enterprise user?
What about real functional things? For example, the five plus year old bug - with cached form selectboxes - whereby to circumvent an initial value being used (even when the correct item is specified with [option selected]) - you must add [autocomplete=false] - else all it all goes a bit internet explorer - and shows a selected value of pure fiction.
Mozilla foundation please for the love of god put the crack pipe down!
P.S. Slashdot guys - please fix the annoying "anonymous coward preview", and that damn irritating "firehose paused due to inactivity" repeating stacked error if you leave your browser open with slashdot open for a few hours in the background. The whole ajax thing here is a bit flaky.
Extension lovers have already noted that what's being suggested is a dumbed up verison of "Tree Style Tab".
The things is, I don't need even that at all.
Part of it is that I don't have a 16:10 display so a vertical tab bar would only end up eating more screen space.
Another part of the problem is that we ALREADY have a vertical tab bar of sorts, one neat tab menu at the right of the tab bar that only eats screen space while you are using it and then it disappears.
Another reason I don't use "Tree Style Tab" is that, when I wan't to separate my tabs by context, I use a different window.
I have always used multiple windows + multiple tabs, I look at extensions that offer single window mode with horror. If any, I use extensions to split my tabs into multiple windows.
And you know what? It works better than "Tree Style Tab" for an unexpected reason. All these tab ideas are based around the idea of having an "eagle view" of you tabs where you can see everything at once. No wonder you need grouping.
I prefer an "out of my sight out of my mind" approach to tabs (and GUI in general), I have multiple desktops for one reason. I may have 20 tabs open but only 5 of them in my current window.
Whenever I have more than 10 tabs open however, it often happens that I go though them quickly, they might be dead end google searches of the like, it doesn't take much to close all those tabs again.
In short this isn't broken, not in 4:3 displays, don't fix it.
But... the future refused to change.
Try read it later. I thought I wanted it as a means to manage what I was doing with tabs, but instead I found myself using it as intended. It's a middle ground between tabs and bookmarks: not quite so quick as tabs, but quicker than bookmarks and more easily managed than either.
It's a useful tool to managing time: the short and must-read articles go in tabs, longer stuff suitable for later goes on the reading list (bookmarks are for repeat reference). I get through my news site roundup much more quickly and have a pool of interesting articles to read whenever I feel like it.
"Firefox, the laptop killer"
Easy. Install NoScript and no JavaScript and Flash will drain your battery unnecessarily.
Bravo!!!
That just one program can nearly eat up all my CPU and ram is a shame considering the relative simplicity of what a browser really does, and relatively few tabs or windows I have open.
Please don't try to turn my browser in to an OS. I already have one of them, and by the way it uses much less resources than Firefox.
Living in Chile
I would rather have multiple tab bars than have a side bar. I would also hate tab grouping, because that means I have to click twice to switch back and forth between different pages on my site. As a webmaster running a forum, I often have up to 30 or so tabs open at once - active topics, my wiki, gmail, and then dozens and dozens of threads and pages that have recently been posted that I need to moderate.
Star Army Space Roleplay
This makes me glad I'm moving to chrome when that's available for linux (and is stable -.-).
"moving tabs down the side of the browser"
OmniWeb introduced this back in 2004. Those who grokked the feature swore by it religiously, especially as displays became increasingly widescreen, leaving more and more real-estate at the side of the browser window. Despite a die-hard fan following, it met with a lot of opposition and never really caught on.
>> the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application;
Its this kind of stupid thinking that leads to the whole problem in the first place.
Why do some developers always see their product encompassing every other component in a system regardless of how unrelated and inappropriate it is? Look at Vista for the perfect bad example of where that approach leads to.
When the mouse is over the sidebar, the sidebar expands and presents all the tabs. When the mouse gets away from the sidebar, the sidebar is minimized and the web page is shown in all its glory.
Firefox has over 10,000 open bugs. Stop using it.
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but at least rephrase what you said so that it sounds like some general Microsoft fud. How many of those are untriaged? How many will turn out to be dups? How many bugs were fixed for firefox 3?
Here are some tips to make Firefox use less memory. And for the love of god and all that is holy, I hope Tab Mix Plus isn't the memory leak it used to be.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
>the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application ..
That one statement alone should send the fear of something very nasty up the spine of anyone reading it the Browser is for Reading Web pages , The tabs work very well . who on earth can read that many web pages at the same time this stinks of oneupmanship to me my browser can open more tabs than yours well big didley squat deal cus that is what it amounts to didley squat . If someone wants something to do fix the problems first ,64 bit plugins are still a PITA java the same ,memory hogging , various crashes when opening things like PDF documents ,
Plenty to be fixed before playing around with the bits that DO work start fixing you may not get such a hostile reception then.
(not anon just think the Mods are a bunch of plonkers)
I also tend to have around 80 tabs open on average (4 windows, about 20 each). It works fine for me the way it is, and I really don't like sidebars of any sort. Two things I would like to see though:
* being able to drag a tab from one browser window to another to move it
* drag select a group of tabs, then select "Open tabs in new window" (which then removes them from the original)
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I don't see how changing tabs is going to improve the UI. There is already a natural way to group tabs: I group related tabs for different tasks in different windows. If I have too many windows open for unrelated tasks, I distribute them on different desktops. These three different aspects of separate GUIs work together quite simply and seamlessly. I get to manage the way my browsing session and work are organized, and I don't have to fight with the software to adapt its organization to the way I work. It seems to me that's exactly the way it should be.
xkcd agrees. At least, in its more lucid moments.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
...make the OS act like Mozilla. As others have pointed out, nothing forces you to use tabbed browsing. You have the choice of opening several tabs or opening things in new windows. You can also have multipe windows with tabs in each.
I wish my operating system worked more like this. I wish I had containers in which I could doc a few different applications in a tabbed fashion. Would help clean up the clutter a bit. Kind of like virtual desktops, except I never really liked them very much. I might doc my source control windows in with my IDE window and the command prompt I was using to test the app. Along with maybe a folder window that was open to the apps directory to easily delete files or edit the config file.
Once docked in these containers, any new windows spawned by those processes would stay in the container. Yeah, it's sounding more like virtual desktops, but with the ability to overlap them rather than them being in their own little completely isolated spaces.
I think the previous talk about Mozilla making each tab a process is more the way to go, as long as efficiency doesn't take a big hit. That way people can decide to use the browser the way that works best for them.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
The relatively new "tree tabs" add-on will put your tabs on the side and open children beneath their parent. So you can have e.g. a tab for the Slashdot main page and sub-tabs for the stories and related links. You can still drag the tabs around, if you want re-parenting.
As for the suggestion of tabs on the side, I've had that for about a decade with Galeon. Also supports moving tabs between windows. Too bad it's on life support. Firefox only started catching up on functionality now that add-ons have become popular.
This is exactly why i have moved away from Firefox, and Mozilla in general.
Until they decide to stop being IDIOTS and fix the terrible CPU problems and memory leaks, i will continue to steer clear of them, even if they DO make the "browser of the future"
Haha, not likely, their time is over, Firefox is slowly being finished off by their own stupid additions to the already bloated application.
They have went away from what the original reason for the browser was.
I don't care about half the features in Firefox 2, not even going to mention 3.
As for this problem with tabs.
Bookmarks > Get Bookmarks Add-ons > Find one.
Stop screwing with things that aren't broken, let those who want to browse different ways do so.
Or even better idea, make THAT the first step when installing the browser, select the way you want to browse (or default to tabs)
Make the interface more modular. Don't like tabs? Why have the code there? Bai. Hi there New-Future-Idea-Of Browsing.
And for the love of god, get rid of the "Please restart browser" crap for plugins, we had enough of that crap with OSes.
In KDE the icon for each site is shown on the taskbar.
which lead to Microsoft wanting to crush Netscape at all costs (successfully).
Of course back then Google wasn't Google as we now know it...
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
Side tabs SUCK!!!! They consume WAY TOO MUCH SPACE!
Google did it with iGoogle, and was FLOODED with complaints! I stopped using iGoogle because of the side tabs! Maybe side tabs makes sense if you have 20+ tabs, but when you only have 3 or 4 that whole side is a HUGE waste of space!
I am not a huge FireFox user, but I do use it sometimes. If they totally eliminate normal tabs for side tabs, I will uninstall FireFox.
Hopefully they will consider the ribbon idea, or give users the OPTION to have side or top tabs.
As for grouping, that is the DUMBEST THING EVER!!!! That is the FIRST thing I turn off in Windows, the second being "Hide file extensions for known file types".
Tabs provide a REALLY fast way to open links I'm interested in (just middle-click) and they don't clutter my windows task bar on my (mandated) windows machine at work.
Before tabbed browsing, I'd routinely have 25+ browser windows open... which always just felt stupid. With tabbed browsing, I can group different types of tasks in different browser windows (entertainment/work related/etc...). This works remarkably well and already provides the "grouping" some of the other folks have spoken about.
I'm not against hunting for new and better UI paradigms, but it'd be a shame to sacrifice the current functionality just to be new and different. Unless something other than tabs works better and more efficiently for the user than tabs... tabs will continue to reign supreme.
To be honest, if tabs go away entirely from Mozilla's products, I'd probably switch to a different browser entirely. Chrome and Opera are both nice and I honestly can't think of any way with the current hardware user interface we have to build a software interface more easily navigable than tabs.
Install the Tree Style Tab add then switch your tabs to vertical orientation. With that in place on a wide screen monitor (or even not), plus being able to hide tabs by collapsing parts of the tree, my only complaint is the 300+ MBs of RAM Firefox 3 tab takes when I have 50+ tabs open. ;+) (Oh, and Session Restore has to be very solid for this to work well - which is normally is).
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Why not cross tabbed browsing with the KDE panel paradigm ? With KDE you can have multiple panels, and / or have the panel(s) on the top or sides of the screen. That way you could for instance, have the tab-panel on the left side of the screen with the tabs reading horizontally and stacked vertically. Add a dash of transparency and voila, more tabs which only cover the side(s) of the browser where most sites only place adds anyway :-)
Let the user choose
The one where IE or Firefox can have as many tabs as they want as they're still a single application?
or for that matter as many windows as they want, as long as they're still the same application? Of all the things to flog about Microsoft, how did this become such a popular meme?
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I'm tired of new fangled ways of interacting with my data. The "new" ways are usually just sloppier, more confusing and inefficient. Tabs work and if Mozilla loses tabs, they lose me.
The only reason I use tabbed browsing is because the BACK button is slow/unreliable/unpredictable. As far as I am concerned, the BACK button should instantaneously take me to the rendering of the most recent web page unless the page has some kind of meta tag which indicates that BACK requires either a refresh or is totally prohibited (e-commerce, banking, etc). But for ordinary surfing, the links on the previous BACK buffer are still valid and if only the browser remembered the previous page's contents we could have instant BACK functionality.
I've been using Adsweep for Opera, but it can also work with Chrome. Works pretty well, but I've ran across a couple pages that it's been too zealous on.
Prove it.
I agree that Firefox is getting more bloated, it obviously has flaws, and (most worryingly) the mozilla foundation seems more and more interested in what features they can force down our throats, less interested in what we want.
However... all this is simply reducing the lead Firefox has over its competition. Despite the recent bloat, and the force-feeding of the damn awesomebar, it's still more productive than IE, more versatile than Chrome, and it is always the 1st install I do after putting windows on any machine. (Then... I visit oldversion.com to get pre-bloat versions of all the other necessary utilities.)
How about a hotkey combination, say ALT+TAB, that brings up a screen similar in appearance and function to Operas' speed dial, but instead of holding 9 special bookmarks, it displays previews of all open "tabs/screens".
The preview screen would arrange previews in a grid where each preview would take up an equal portion of the available space. Two previews would give each half of the available screen, three a third, and so on.
While the preview screen is up, the individual previews could be dragged and dropped into different positions, newer screens/tabs would start in the bottom-right most corner, which could be configurable.
So basically, I guess it would pretty much look and function like another desktop but with previews of webpages instead of icons.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Tabs are just annoying when you have a decent window manager.
I open new pages in new windows (browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick = false) and use my window manager to present them all side-by-side.
I find a site's full branding (and content) in miniature more recognisable than a 16-px icon. The body text is often (just about) readable and videos keep playing. What I see is actually what I get.
Yes, I like how my favorite developers [KDE, Ubuntu, Mozilla] are wasting their time adding new, high-priority bugs instead of making their product actually usable.
For instance, I've switched from Firefox to Konqueror because, over the last year or two of using Linux, NOBODY has managed to fix the fucking scrolling bug!
Firefox's scroll wheel scrolling is slow as shit, and there's no excuse for it.
I don't want more features. I want them to fix the bugs and make the fucking thing WORK.
If Mozilla is an OS now, does that mean Windows is no longer the most bloated and crash-prone OS out there?
I have started to realize that Firefox, on Linux at least, is jumping the shark. There are now several persistent known bugs that have existed for far too long (some since version 2). The worst offenders are major: Firefox frequently leaves a ghost process without an open window that has to be manually killed. Right mouse clicks frequently perform a random action from the context menu. The latest release (a point!) will kill the sound on my system if left running too long. The latest release (a point!) will quickly blog down and become so slow that it can't be used and forces a (machine!) restart to fix. Yes. Firefox's days are numbered. I blame it all on the Mozilla Foundation and there increasing focas on pandering to the masses Window's addiction and the "must have new features for new features sake" attitude that comes with paid positions.
I'm tired of companies trying to blur the line between local and remote data by making an "OS Web Browser." If companies want to push an OS Web Browser, then they should pick up the Linux Kernel and make a nice Desktop to go with it. Instead, companies are basically moving towards an AOL browser (bloated with a bunch of windows floating inside of it...)
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
It is not me, it is you.
Pick up your files and you add-ons and leave you tabless freak.
Some people use tabs for keep related pages into one window, while another set of related pages (but not related to the ones in the first set) sits in another window. There is probably some other UI concept that covers this case, although only time will tell if it works better than tabs.
I, on the other hand, mostly use tabs as a task list. If there are N links on a page that need processing (i.e. search results), I will quicly go over them with a ctrl-click, and get N tabs. Then I will start prcessing each, pressing ctrl-W when I'm done. This way I do not have to click back and forward, and I do not have to remember were I were if I decide to pause.
I can't see anything replacing tabs for the latter, short of some convoluted craziness that will only exist to "have something different". Anyone want to prove me wrong?
Or instead of tabs one could have the idea of a URL wall
It's a good idea alright.
The ghost process problem is almost always a result of Adobe's piss-poor Flash implementation. Flashblock ftw.
Firefox should be a little better at sandboxing plugins, but they can't be blamed for Adobe's crap.
They just guaranteed that I won't touch their products ever again. Tabbed browsing is the answer to the stupidity of Windows' "Group similar taskbar buttons" and other applications like Pidgin are implementing tabbed windows.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
To scrap them. If they do add 'another way' they should all the retention of tabs. Tabbing, with forcing new tabs on inline clicks to open in the background, is intuitive, simple, and easy. I--and I'm sure others--can't even imagine reading lots of content another way now.
Dude, where's my packet?
What the problem with opening multiple windows and using multiple tabs inside each window? Hm, I just found the (little) pb, and the solution: pb: you can't drag and drop a tab from one window to another (this has a stupid effect) solution: add a feature so you can - detach a tab - drag and drop a tab to move it from one window to another.
It's fast enough for me on a 630Mhz CPU. Konqueror's is still faster, but Fx3 DID improve it. Stop whining.
Idiots. Just install the 'Tab Mix Plus' extension if you want Firefox tabs to work properly.
In fact, make that the default functionality of Firefox so I don't have to install it all the time. Firefox is useless without it.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity. -Isaac Asimov
I run three monitors, allowing access to three unmodified pages simultaneously and spread the "tab-load" across them.
Screenshot
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
easier: install Opera.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
> Firefox should be a little better at sandboxing plugins, but they can't be blamed for Adobe's crap.
Yes they can. They should do whatever is necessary to avoid leaving a ghost process that have to be manually killed. I had to explain to my 9 year old why he couldn't launch a browser on his ubuntu eeepc. It seems clear to him that the windows machine he uses for games is less buggy than his linux machine.
And I can't blame him.
No.....just no..... :|
"...Sleep comes like a drug in God's country Sad eyes, crooked crosses in God's country..."
In OS X, it's pretty easy since you can Apple+~ to switch between an application's windows, and then Apple+Tab to other applications.
Note to Ubuntu Jaunty users with Firefox 3.0.10:
To get tabkit working on the side, you need to disable the "Ubuntu Firefox Modification 0.7" extension.
Then you can get beautifully colored, grouped, treed tabs along the side. 30+ tabs are trivial to manage, especially if you middle-click often.
It would be nice if you could drag one tab onto another to reduce tab clutter.
They can start by honoring the "open in new window" setting. I hate tabs (with rare exceptions), but each successive release of Firefox seems to try harder to force me to use them...
I tend to browse, finding interesting links, always opening them in the background, and getting to them when I finish the current article.
I'm known as a bit of a tab hog, in general.
Now and then, I'll split things into two windows, to organize my browsing. This is effectively trying to put a bit of "hierarchy" the browsing experience.
I believe a "power browser user" basically does do a bit of a hierarchical thing when browsing, expanding topics of interest as they see fit. To have a single tab bar be able to handle a bit more structure to my browsing experience would really be killer, to me.
Opera (I think) does have the option of opening new tabs *next* to the current tab, rather than at the end, which kind of groups things together a bit better, but not well enough for my tastes.
To have the browser be able to open new tabs, but optionally in "sub-trees" where I choose, and maybe expand/collapse those subtrees might be pretty compelling (although possibly too confusing for the casual user?)
In any case, I think we need *some* tree-like tab behaviour.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
You're right, that's crazy talk. I don't know what I was thinking.
Most browser tab implementations are lame beyond belief. For a non-lame implementation, see OmniWeb at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/. This puts thumbnails in a moveable drawer at the side of the browser. If the vertical space is filled up, a scroll bar appears. There is a plugin for Firefox that emulates parts of this behavior but is less integrated with the browser and the rest of the OS (in this case OS X). Of course, I'm leaving out many features due to lack of space and will.
Any browser that uses precious vertical space for anything but displaying page content and minimal controls and URL display is poorly designed in the first place.
OmniWeb has many, many other features (workspaces, site-specific preferences, and world-class ad blocking come readily to mind) that makes it the finest browser I have ever used.
Seriously.
Anyone who does any research online will come and strangle the dev team if they get rid of this super handy feature.
It allows me to keep separate windows open on separate subjects, each with multiple tabs open.
It allows me to open up 50 links on a subject, bookmark them all and allow me to put them away and pull them back out so handily.
Leave the tabs please.
Imagine that the tabs are there all the same. Now but a button beside them called tab manager. If clicked, you get a new windows showing *only* tabs in some structured way (trees, maps, wathever). If the user rovers the mouse on one of them, he get a prevew. If he click with the right button, it closes this new windows AND selects the clicked tab. If he clicks with the left button he gets a couple of extra operations (color change, move inside de grapth, duplicate, throw it in a new window, etc).
-- dnl
You've already got an operating system. If it's a GUI, it's got some kind of window manager.
Why are we off on this trend of creating window managers *inside* of our applications? The OS should handle this all for you.
I use tabbed browsing in Firefox on Windows, but that's because Windows is a horribly broken OS. On the Mac, which allows you a hotkey to both switch apps, AND to switch windows inside of the app, I let the OS deal with it all for me.
Please don't remove the tabs.
I really don't want another sidebar forced next to my wonderful scrapbook extension.
It seems to me bookmark organization, and scrapbook organization type of applications are well suited to the sidebar as they are generally searched or worked on, then closed.
Where tabs keep multiple websites and documents open to work, cut, paste all without screwing with the width formatting of a website.
I run dual 22" lcd's because video, and webpages were getting wider. And my head / brain ? hurt from my giant dual sun 21" frequency humming via radios and the RF ack! That and deskspace..
To play devils advocate though: some myspace pages are completely out of control where width is concerned (hello tom), mostly cause folks don't keep the comments contained. Why you have to have a band flyer that's wider than 450 I dunno...bah..)
Anyway, leave the tabs alone. Fix the font or the tabbar's height or something, if it's really that much of a problem.
Seems to me the whole problem with the current tabs we use is overkill in the context menus on them.
Example: why do we need an X on the tab, when you can doubleclick to close it, And right click to close it. Would it not be more simple to doubleclick the tabbar for a new tab and doubleclick the tab to close it. putting a single small pop-down menu for "open in new window" (for those javascript() problems) or undo close tab, when you get over zealous. While Bookmark the tab, Reload, etc are all redundant. Favicon should always replace the SITE
For example: a tab on slashdot, should be
favicon | thread description
Shifting gear.
I don't see very many non scroll mice anymore which don't have middle click / open in tab, which I would have to say 99% of the time is the way I go.
If you really want to take out tabs, attack Mozilla, not firefox. To be honest, even though I probably should care about Mozilla, I don't. I honestly only care about firefox. It may be bad for me to think like this, but I won't lie about it either. Really, when I couldn't be bothered to panzer netscape anymore is about the time I dumped the older mozilla.
Finally, I hate Grouping, it's an extra level of nonsense to drill down through. And.. Anything that behaves like a ribbon is to be avoided as well. -IMO
For MacOSX from the Omni Group.
See http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/
Found at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593323
The whole desktop metaphor as a finite, confined space the size of a clipboard is irrational. Why does a dynamic space have to be confined within physical limits?
You should be able to have as many tabs, bookmarks, markers, dits, buttons or whatever you want to call them, placed where it's convenient.
The whole Windows/Mac/Linux paradigm is off.
Tab Mix Plus and multiple rows.
Works for me.
I don't understand where we're going here ... If we group tabs, that lets us have MORE of them. The biggest problem with web browsing is that we have too many tabs, not that we lack space for them (that's the next problem!).
Like many people, I tend to leave tabs open for months on-end, as a sort of bookmark with slightly more immediacy. This doesn't need to consume resources:
I'd like to see a second level of caching; tabs ignored for long periods of time (default=12h?) just cache a PNG screenshot of each old tab and reload it (from disk cache or a deeper level of disk cache) when the user clicks on that screenshot. This would be especially useful for restoring sessions (no more password prompt!).
With this second level of caching, extra tabs can be afforded, and things like tab grouping, tab trees, and multi-row tabs become feasible.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Firefox's plugins are what make it unstable. Flash is by far the worst. If you install flashblock or simply remove flash entirely, it will crash a lot less.
Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved
You mean like the Tree Style Tab firefox addon? For those of us with widescreen monitors (most /.ers I'd suspect), having hierarchical tabs down the side is a major benefit. I love how opening a link as a new tab spawns a new child tab so you automatically get context.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I find that when using KDE4, I open multiple mozilla/konqueror windows and switch web sites with alt-tab. The fancy snapshot view of the window being switched to eliminates the need or benefit of tabs IMO.
B.
Galeon has had left-side tabbed browsing for at least 6 years (perhaps many more?). I routinely have 25 tabs open and it is not the least bit awkward. More than that becomes problematic...
Of course, due to the developers' dearth of coherent thought when they tried to find a target market, Galeon is broken in some ways, awkward in other ways, essentially unmaintained, and almost unknown. Awwww...
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
the back button.
I'm not kidding. They're even putting out money for an extension that makes browser history behave like opening and closing tabs: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/05/13/broken-browsers-part-one/
My 20+ tabs are not useless especially with the change tab mouse gesture, oh well I guess I am still in the minority who realizes that Opera is already a great browser... /Me goes back to using a functional browser that is CRAZY fast...
Where's that cap to the Decanter of Endless water???
for example I open a tab for each of the many new users we get applying to our forum - and then go through all of them, closing the ones that I've done, while I click the "accept" box on another browser window on a different screen. Much faster than going back and forth on a single screen And all of a sudden - blink - they're all gone.
Wish Chrome ran on Linux :(
Maybe some form of "virtual desktop" visual 2D matrix would work better. Not a tree - could be too deep.
My desktop icon shows 3x12 matrix and it keeps me sane - similar thing instead of tabs would take up far less room on the browser bar - don't need labels because the visual clue is easier to remember in matrix form:
Top left is e-mail, next on line is Slashdot, followed by Groklaw and Linkedin
Next line has projects
Third line has other crap
People who can't think in 2D and need labels can continue using IE ;)
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
I've always turned off grouping on the windows taskbar, because that annoys the hell out of me.
Tabs I've always liked, but they're just an application's internal taskbar.
Funnily enough those two together is still grouping. You have to click firefox in the taskbar then the tab you want. That's the same as click firefox in the taskbar and then the window you want.
It will be way more annoying though when I have to start scrolling webpages horizontally. My mouse doesn't come with a horizontal scroll wheel unfortunately.
What he's talking about - grouped tabs, auto-hiding sidebar - is already implemented in extensions. I use Tabmixplus, Multiple Tab Handler and All-in-one Sidebar, I've tried Tree Style Tab. Nice, but all those don't cut it.
What I would really appreciate is a way to "minimize" a group of tabs. Similar to bookmark folders, ReadItLater or SessionSaver, only better. Some way to say "Take this tab and that tab and every tab that was spawned by them, save them as 'browser tabs discussion', and when I click on that, reopen them just the way I'm seeing them now, and make it apparent that they belong together.
The paradigm of object oriented programming was born out of necessity. JavaScript is a horrible language to lay the foundation of a new generation of web apps.
Since when is JavaScript not object-oriented? The class-based style of C++ or Java or C# isn't the only way to build an object-oriented language; there's also the prototype-based model used by Self and JavaScript.
Just don't take away the existing implementation to do it. You can have my tabs when you pry them from my cold dead hands.
Yay me!
The whole idea of multiple document interfaces embedded in applications seems wrong to me, whether it is tabs or whatever you want to call it.
It bloats the application. You end up with this dumb MDI code in every application (and they all work differently).
And the main reason for doing it is to make up for deficiencies in the windows manager. Name your manager, nearly all have appalling control over window placement and switching between windows. They have a 'taskbar' which itself is just a clumsy tab bar. The ribbon is a step in the right direction, but not a radical one.
About the only thing that half works is the keyboard short cuts to switch back and forth between two application windows. But may the flying spaghetti monster help you if you have three application windows open.
Part of the problem is that screen sizes are way too small. If we really want to follow a desk metaphor, we need to be able to have a dozen documents/windows visible and readable at once (or at least, in a spatial relationship that remains relatively consistent).
A notable exception to the tab style is gimp. I would suggest that the usability issues with the detached gimp controls and windows are not the fault of gimp, but of the desktop.
So instead of discussing how firefox should implement tabs, we should be discussing how the desktop implements them (or improves on them as a way of organizing viewable content).
Just use Google Chrome
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
An equipment buyer for a corporation, for example, will open a window and some tabs for a product, and then open another window and some tabs about another product because no decision has been made yet about the first.
I use on the order of 100+ tabs daily in Firefox. If they remove the tabs from the user interface I'll switch to google chrome instantly forever.
What they need to do is give me the option to sort my tabs in different ways, and to provide better ways to organize the tabs. It'd be cool to have a "open in new tab" immediately to the right of the existing tab as well as at the end of the list of tabs. It would be good to have a list box of tabs open up in a window so that I can organize them and group them and close them by group or bookmark a sub set (group).
How about getting rid of that annoying "history bar" or whatever it's called that sits between the tabs and the book mark buttons in he tool bars above the tabs. That drop down list is extremely annoying to the max.
Oh, also when you have tons of tabs some of them take too much CPU power. How about an option to stop ALL scripts and processes on tabs that I choose to (again via groups of tabs or individually). At least I need to know which tabs are taking up the cpu power with there relentless javascript goo. It's MY browser so let me control what the tabs are doing. Give us more information about the tabs and the pages that they are viewing.
There is lots of innovation possible for the tabs if they'd only put their thinking caps on.
The bottom line is empower your users with better tab functionality and better management of huge numbers of tabs to make the user experience better.
Save the Tabs!
I think we need a little animated paperclip to pop up and say "it looks like you've got a shitload of tabs open - would you like some help with that?"
Ask Me About... The 80's!
I make extensive use of tabbing. True there are some problems related to software implementation (memory management), but that is technical. Ergonomic considerations taken, do not replace with ribbon or column based selector, or give me the option for any three methods.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I would like to see tab number reduced (not scrapped) by implementing a system that groups tabs that come from the same source (like when you middle-click "Read More" on slashdot main page). That way the tab would turn into a drop-down menu enumerating such related webpages. It would improve the use of desktop real estate, and would avoid your boss seeing you with 12 open, non-work related tabs. What do you /.ers think?
When my Karma level reaches 0 I feel in piece with the Universe
Personally, I love tabs and don't have a problem with them. When I open FF I usually open on of my bookmark folders in new tabs (about 20 tabs). These are my daily read sites. I also have all my WoW addons in a similar folder. All get opened at once (about 50 tabs). When I "surf" if I see a link I want to follow I almost always open it in a new tab so I can go to it when I'm done on the page I'm on.
What I would like to see is a better keyboard command for switching between tabs. Something simple that can be done quickly with one hand.
I recently got a Logitech MX Revolution mouse, which has made it much easier to open and close a large number of webpages. It has a total of 11 buttons, and the SetPoint software lets you add customized keystrokes for different applications. My current setup is:
=Middle Click (Scroll Wheel) - force opening links in a new window in IE or Chrome
=Scroll Wheel Sweep Left - switch tabs (move left one tab)
=Scroll Wheel Sweep Right - switch tabs (move right one tab)
=Jog Dial Back - go back (same as browser back button)
=Jog Dial Forward - go forward (same as browser forward button)
=Jog Dial Click - close the current tab or active window (ctrl+w or alt+F4 depending on active program)
=Touch to Search button - re-open the last closed tab in Chrome using Ctrl+Shift+T (I LOVE THIS FEATURE!!!)
This makes it a breeze to open a bunch of new tabs and then flip through and close the ones you don't care about.
I couldn't agree with you more. I've had problems with CPU and memory hogging issues numerous times over the years. If it happened to me more frequently or if firefox weren't so customizable I would have ditched the browser a long time ago.
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
On Linux? I'm not adding an additional layer by using Wine, and it lacks some of my very important extensions.
No ascii art.
What's really sad about this is the origin of Firefox. It used to be called "Phoenix", and its claim to fame was its speed. Compared to the Mozilla suite, Phoenix was blindingly fast, and I have been using it ever since.
Recently, I've found myself opening a few tabs in Safari or Opera when I know that I'll be running on battery. There's really not that much keeping me with Firefox, aside from ABP.
As laptops (and netbooks) become a higher and higher proportion of browsing platforms, this problem will get bigger. I really hope the Firefox team devotes some serious resources to this issue.
People WILL whine when they can find a reason to, and I think it's perfectly understandable. Firefox is unnecessarily slow on my 630Mhz PC after a while of usage, too, after all.
I am not devoid of humor.