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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Opera, when I have more than a few tabs open I already ignore the tab bar. You can hold the right mouse button and roll the scroll wheel to bring up a list of all the open tabs. I don't think its the solution Mozilla is looking for, but when I have 25-30 tabs open it certainly is an easier way for me to browse through them than trying to flip through the tabs.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
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.
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
...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
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.
Also, the All-In-One Gestures and FireGestures addons will do this for Firefox.
Default behavior for these is that an initial down-roll opens the tab's history, and up-roll opens the tab list.
Personally, I'm just the opposite. As I'm browsing through something, I tend to open up new tabs for stuff that's interesting, because I don't want to interupt my reading of the current page. Then I go through the tabs, closing them when I'm finished.
Then there's the slashdot thing - where I use a new tab to post a comment without losing my place on the thread.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
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.
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.