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)."
Sounds less like ditching tabs, and more like adding grouping. Make it optional, and I don't see a problem.
Even the Redmondites can't throw an ad campaign accusing tabs of being evil after being the final adopter of the technology. . . .
This is funny as the first place I remember seeing a tabbed interface was MS Office, back before I knew of Linux. For example, the different sheets in a spreadsheet program are exactly like tabs, both in look and feel, and function. It's funny how much hype and 'innovation' it has taken to bring such a common UI element into web browsers.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
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.
What they really need to do is making "tabs" VS "bookmarks" seamless.
The concept of a live bookmark comes to mind.
Bookmarks that when you click, act just like tabs, the site should just pop open, in the exact same state as it was when the bookmark was saved, scroll position, etc.
Then comes the possibility of "archiving" tabs.
i.e. tabs that haven't been accessed in a few days get transformed into "Live bookmarks" that you can call up by using your location bar to "Search for tabs"
So what about a graph of sites you visited, instead of a list?
You mean like IBM Web Explorer did in 1994?
It arranged the session history into a tree according to the path you traversed. It did not arbitrarily truncate the tree into a linear sequence the way almost all browsers do now.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
What drives me batty is when people open windows explorer windows to get to certain folders, then close them instead of minimize only to have to open them up again a minute later. I have to sit on my hands to keep from ripping the mouse away from them.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Thirded. I get to see far more tabs than I would across the top, and they're arranged in a hierarchy. Opening a new tab by, say, middle-clicking a link opens it as a child of the current tab. For me, this style works much better than the across-the-top non-hierarchical tabs.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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.
A similar poll was already run:
How many browser tabs do you have open right now?
Surprisingly, the most popular answer was "2 to 5". I would have thought "power users" like Slashdotters would have more tabs open on average...
But of course that poll may have a systematic bias (e.g. maybe lots of people tend to read Slashdot in the morning, and answered the poll before having opened tons of tabs for the day's work...).
Have you seen the "Tree Style Tab" addon? I just found it the other day, and I'm not sure how I lived without it.
This provides tree-style tab bar, like a folder tree of Windows Explorer. You can collapse/expand sub trees, etc.. Very nice.
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.