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!
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
The 'awesome bar' in firefox automagically searches your bookmarks.
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.
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.
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
...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.
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