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)."
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
From the article:
Oh man. The very, very first thing I ever do on a fresh Windows XP installation is turn off folder grouping. And now Firefox wants to implement this stupidity? NOT a good idea.
Note to the Mozilla devs: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
Tabbing has taken over the browsing world entirely!
Except for the fact that only people who are technical seem to use them. All my non technical friends when I watch them browse the Internet it is quite painful. They keep on clicking a new application to open the browser for every page they want open at the same time. Google the URL (which I won't correct them as it is probably safer that way as they don't go to a mistyped URL and get a bunch of junk). When they have a lot of browsers open they Minimize and maximize or move windows around until the find the right one.
I would say more effort would be to making tab browing easier for the non tech person (Yes it is really easy for the tech person a click of the mouse or a Alt/Ctrl/Command - T) but the non-technical people will not experiment with their computer. When we see a funny little Icon we click on it and see what it does, a non technical person will just leave it alone. And don't even bother trying to get them to go threw the menu.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"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.
Note to the Mozilla devs: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
More directly: if it ain't broke, don't break it!
With all the 16:9 and 16:10 wide format screens now, moving the tabs to the side would make more sense. A lot more can be usefully fit in that way (about 30-60, depending on font preference & screen size), even with the current tabbing metaphor. In fact, it would work for me on a regular 4:3 screen as well, since I usually keep the web page displayed in a sort of "portrait" aspect ratio, leaving a lot of spare room beside the browser - enough for tabs to fit easily.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
and then we get into hissy fits as more and more designers design pages based on their shiny new 16:9 display...
designs that break on screens that are 4:3 or in any other way width "challenged".
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Ever heard of opening a new window?
I concede that Sidebars, as mentioned by someone else further on down, would be OK if they are optional. But for most people, the solution to the problem is not really a solution at all. Tabs are popular because (gasp!) they work extremely well in a browser. Why do you think that Microsoft eventually capitulated and included them in IE7?
I guess what surprises me the most is that I'd have thought the biggest problem with having 20 tabs open is... you have 20 tabs open. Are you seriously reading all those websites at the one time? If so, then you must have the worst case of ADHD I've ever come across! Please, get some help :-)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Simple fix: Adopt video-only policy for porn.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
but it is broke. I have 4 firefox windows each with over 20 tabs, and I have 2 IE8 windows also with 0ver 20 tabs each. Last, I have 5 bookmark folders of tab windows so I did not have to keep more windows open. I need to find a new way to deal with this.
Close something.
I'm not being sarcastic. You're telling us your productivity flow involves 120+ simultaneous web views. Your workflow is what's broken, not the browser.
"Oh no... he found the
Except that when I have that grouping by site makes little sense.
There's a slashdot article, the link from the article (no, seriously), maybe some additional links open, maybe a wikipedia page if something was interesting enough, a google search page and maybe a couple of result pages open if it was *really* interesting.
Then there's a google maps page, a google search page, some real estate lising pages.
Then a bugzilla page, a calendar, some task pages, a google search page, some search result pages, maybe some mailing list archive pages, and the damn documentation for the obscure library function I actually was looking for.
The groupings are not by site, they're by activity with multiple overlapping sites in each activity. Of course at some point multiple browser *windows* makes sense...
Problem with your idea is that current tabs have a width to height ratio of about 5:1. Without implementing tricks that a lot of users won't like (popping out the tab on a mouseover for example, or worse, having the tabs read down sideways), you can't really make the tabs that much more narrow.
So yes, there is more physical screen real estate from side to side, but from a percentage of the total dimension standpoint, it makes sense to keep the horizontal rather than vertical. Or more simply, 100 pixels shaved off the side of my screen is a bigger negative to me than 20 shaved off the top.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
A browser is becoming similar, what with browser plugins (PDF, Flash) and Javascript. It does limited storage management (mostly cookies, cache and bookmarks), performs internal scheduling, handles some I/O (display, mouse, etc) in a standard way for "browser applications", maintains separate sessions (tabs), provides (limited) isolation between tabs (could be better though), and provides programming APIs that expose much of this functionality in a unified way (especially for javascript).
It's not completely there as an OS, but it's certainly got many of the properties of an OS.
There are times I have 50+ tabs open, but I certainly don't find them "useless" as the summary states. For example, when browsing a web site with thumbnails I just middle click all the interesting ones and then go through them choosing the ones I want with ctrl-w.
Right now I'm shopping for electronic components and it helps to have about 20 tabs with different suppliers and different sections of each suppliers web site open. It saves a lot of clicking on the back button.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
...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
A ribbon is a dynamic horizontal menu. It is contextual to what you are doing in your workspace. There is nothing dynamic about a set of urls that the user has selected.. it is very static. There is nothing contextual about browser features for each url selected.
A ribbon does not fit the UI needs of a browser.
A ribbon could be used if you were to integrate a browser within a productivity application... at which point the user would be switching to the 'browser' workspace wherein the options for 'browsing' would be presented within the ribbon menu, replacing whatever options were present in the other tools.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
"If Mozilla really hates the way the default tabs function, they need to start looking at Tree Style Tabs for a replacement."
I wish they could just *let users choose* which way *they wish to work*.
For example, I use tabs a lot. I don't want tree tabs on by default, its as bad as grouping on the task bar (which is off on any machine I have to use). I want a minimalist user interface, I don't want any more levels of indirection added. (e.g. Each tree click etc.. forces more interactions). But even if I do want grouping, I can do that now. I hit CTRL-N and I've got a new group of tabs, which I do sometimes already use.
Keeping it minimalist makes it easier to use, a smaller download and faster to learn. We want more people to move onto Firefox. Adding ever more complexity risks alienating ever more non-technical users. If people want additional extra complex functionality, then let them have the ability to choose to add it in a modular way. (Again that idea of user choice).
If they want to improve peoples work flow, they would do far better to fix these kinds of bugs:
(1) drag and drop into sub folders can sometimes fail due to boundaries of sub-folders being outside folders and so windows close and sub folders get lost, before drop operation can complete.
(2) Creating new bookmark folders sometimes fails to allow drag and drop into them, as if they are not there (work around is CTRL-N and then drag and drop into new version of bookmark folder lists).
(3) Creating new bookmark folders some times gets duplicated.
(4) Sometimes fails to hold open selected currently opened main bookmark folder. This has the effect of again droping windows when cursor moves left/right even within opened list window.
I could go on, but these bugs have been there for a long time and each slow up work flow.
If they want to improve peoples work flow, they would do better to fix these kinds of bugs rather than find new ways to complicate the design, but then almost all programmers know its so much more fun to writing new functionality than it is to fix existing bugs.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Me, too.
I rarely get up to "20" open tabs, but I really very much prefer 20 tabs than a task bar with 20 Firefox buttons on it, all of them squished so much that you just see the little Firefox logo with no meaningful text.
At least on the tabs you can see the icons for each website.
No matter... if they remove built in tabs, someone will add it as an add-on.
Stupid sexy Flanders.