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With Community Help, Chrome Could Support Side Tabs Extension
jones_supa writes The lack of a vertical tab strip (or "Tree Style Tab" as the Firefox extension is called) has been under a lot of discussion under Chrome/Chromium bug tracker. Some years ago, vertical tabs existed as an experimental feature enabled with a "secret" command line parameter, but that feature was eventually removed from the browser. Since then, Google has been rather quiet about whether such feature is still on the roadmap. Now, a Google engineer casts some light on the issue. He says that a tree-style interface for tabs would be overly complex as a native implementation, but Google would back the idea of improving the extensions interface to support a sidebar-like surface to render the tab UI on, if someone from the open source community would step forward to do the work to drive the feature to completion.
Meanwhile, Firefox takes away the choice for users to have tabs on bottom (below the menu bar and bookmark bar) , like many want. Since Mozilla now has SUCH a desire to be EXACTLY like Chrome, it should be no surprise they would remove user choice, and even add an annoying and identical menu button on the right.
Thankfully, for now, you can get sane behavior back with the "Classic Theme Restorer" add-on. Yet again, Add-on's save the day and show off one of Firefox's main strengths. Back to Chrome- who knows, maybe they will start adding user choice?
Considering how important browsers are to a user's computer experience, I fail to understand why Chrome is so hostile to customization and why Mozilla is following that same path now. Let users put things where they want them (at least without artificial limits), and don't take away existing customization options!
My favorite feature of Firefox is load background tabs on demand, its a shame other browsers do not have this. I can start up Firefox with 200 tabs from the previous session and it starts up nice and quick, with other browsers if I did this I could go make a pot of coffee and it browser would still be loading when I came back.
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I see a company stepped up to do it. Google decided it wasn't what they wanted to spend their time on, but they were willing to accept it if someone else found it useful enough to do do it. Benjamin said his company will do it, so it should happen.
https://code.google.com/p/chro...
Seriously, it's better.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Tree-style browser tabs are a neat idea. It's not very often where I'm searching for a piece of information and end up with more browser tabs than I can keep track of, but I could see how this would be a very useful feature.
It is too bad that the Firefox project has been derailed by "developers" more interested in "contributing" UI changes than actual bug fixes to the point where I'm no longer willing to use it, or I'd go fire up Firefox and check out the tree-style tab plugin.
if someone from the open source community would step forward to do the work to drive the feature to completion.
Google/Chromium paid devs can then take all the credit. One sided deal if you ask me.
I have a different idea: how about Schmidt putting slightly more pocket change into his browser team instead?
My biggest gripe with Chromium is that it does not conform to my UI.
That's a good gripe. It's mine too. My gripe isn't so much about appearance (which is increasingly familiar on the Mac) as it is about behavior and interaction expectations. I expect certain behavior of tabs ("move tab to new window"), keyboard (including accessing keyboard shortcuts and the rest of the document even if currently focusing a plugin "frame"), find (Chrome stops highlighting found results after a refresh, unless you cancel and reopen the find panel). I'm fine with the visual differences—in fact, there are good innovations I wish the Mac would adopt, like spoof-proof warnings/notifications. I just can't use Chrome without thinking about how Chrome is different, and that's a sign of a bad UI citizen.
There is no reason it should not appear just as every single other window does.
Now this... of course there is. There are a lot of reasons. Few applications have to serve the needs a browser does, and no pre-mobile/pre-ChromeOS operating systems were built with those needs in mind. That isn't to say a good browser can't fit in, but we're far from a point in time where a browser simply has to implement some library features to do everything it needs to do. No OS/WM (as far as I'm aware) implements a tab system with the features any modern browser provides. Every major browser implements toolbar features not available in the core OS/WM. Some are better at fitting in than others (Chrome/Chromium probably being the best, despite being highly customized). But asking for a completely non-descript UI from a browser, at this point, is asking for something akin to IE 6's UI: plenty familiar and native, but barely able to fill the needs of browser users (and IE 6 had the benefit of a Windows task bar that was basically its "tab manager"... this is basically no longer a possibility for any browser).
I provided a bunch of reasons. Tab behavior, toolbar behavior being the most substantial.
Maybe we're talking past each other. I'm not aware of any Blink or WebKit browser that isn't heavily customized from its native environment (including Safari, which has the fewest excuses). Can you say more about what you expect and what violates those expectations?
Er, I've had this solution (at least as a UI) in extension form: https://chrome.google.com/webs...
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After using Tree Style Tab (combined with Tab Mix Plus) for over three years now I can't imagine going back to tabs-on-top on a widescreen monitor *shudders*.
Never mind the better use of real estate, the hierarchichal nature of the tabs (the "tree" in the name) is just brilliant.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
What does it mean to "conform to my UI"? Why are you listing rendering engines (which, apart from Firefox, are literally not involved in windowing UI at all)? Are you just talking about adopting appearance characteristics of a windowing theme? Because if that's the case, I definitely misunderstood. I was talking about browsers (all of them) adopting UI conventions that are at odds with (every) environment, often for the better but sometimes not so much.
But basically, I wasn't talking about appearance convention... and if that's what we're supposed to be talking about, I can single out Firefox\ as far and away the worst offender on the Mac, and pretty much guaranteed never to look or feel native in any way. It probably feels just as foreign as Chromium does on whatever WM you use. The damn thing has never even used native menus EVER, and they're just there, free for the taking!
I just defected to Pale Moon two month ago.
Absolutely brilliant. Firefox as it used to be. Configurable like it was in the good old days, with that Australis interface ripped out. (And even returned to a sane version numbering scheme lately).
TreeStyle Tab works for vertical tabs (in contrast to SeaMonkey, where it doesnt), and with "Firefox 3 Theme for Firefox 4++ Reloaded" it works, looks and behaves exactly as the Firefox did in its best days. I finally feel "at home" again on the Internet without being irked by unexpected UI surprises all the time.
IE 11 you hit up or down arrow keys. Smooth as butter like a phone. Firefox mostly as smooth as its XP hooks limits hardware acceleration.
CHROME? Blip blip blip tear in image when you hit up and down. Slashdoters on Windows reading this try it? Surprised?
First Chrome had it. Then you had to go into about::flags. Now it is not even available? WTF. IE 8 in 2009 had this and Firefox in 2011. I can't even use it anymore as it feels like I am on an old computer. I hope someone from Google is reading this.
Last blink is not standard compliant. Font face, animations, and other things are not done like W3C. I have to write one site for W3C compliant browsers and one conditions for blinks way of doing things. It reminds me of IE of old
http://saveie6.com/
There once was a browser which supported this out-of-the-box several years ago.
RIP, Presto-Opera
I used the side tab in chrome before it was dropped. As soon as it was dropped I deleted chrome from my system. Every PC I setup for anyone has Firefox with side tabs. I can have over 50 tabs open and it's the only sensible way to navigate on a 16:9 screen. There is a forum that discusses this, and the engineer who dropped it says very few used it. Well duh: you had to execute obscure commands to even enable it. Side tabs should be the default mode for any browser.
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How do you folks deal with thousands of bookmarks? You do tag them right? Firefox's tagging facility has been able to do this for awhile, but then how does that reduce the sheer quantity, to something user-friendly? There's a decent but semi-broken extension for this also, called Tag Sieve. There's also been a feature request made to build it into FireFox native, and I hope the original developer gets the job. In the meantime, having read the user-comments, I've made the extension work, and it is wonderful. Highly recommended.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Slashdot hates all screens. Gotta love that horizontal scrolling!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
well the mac app-menu-at-top-of-screen is just stupid if there's multiple apps in view at a time...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
well the mac app-menu-at-top-of-screen is just stupid if there's multiple apps in view at a time...
Why? You cannot physically perform actions on more than one app at a single time. The menu is active for the one you are presently using as indicated by where you have clicked the mouse pointer. It's not the only way to do things (or even necessarily the best) but it's perfectly sensible and logical and consistent.
What annoys me about the mac interface is that choosing the close window button on the window frame doesn't actually close the app if there are no windows left open. I have to either close the app from the pull down menu (two clicks) or use a keyboard shortcut. I have never once wanted to close all the windows of an app and still leave the app running. It' just not an interface choice I truly grok.
How do you folks deal with thousands of bookmarks?
If you "need" to deal with thousands of bookmarks you are Doing It Wrong. Help me out here because I honestly cannot even imagine a (sane) use case or work flow where I would actually need (much less want) to deal with that many bookmarks.
I won't be happy until there are tabs on EVERY side at once. And nested as well. How is Chrome supposed to be CUA compatible on OS/2 otherwise?
No, I'm not doing it wrong. For example, I see tech-notes and answers all the time on stackoverflow.com, so I bookmark and tag them for future reference, so I CAN forget about them. Other forums too, since I am a developer. These add up and can overwhelm quickly otherwise, and become un-useable. Tag Sieve plus the native tools for sorting bookmarks in FireFox make my clippings very manageable and useful.
FWIW, Scrapbook is a FireFox extension that saves selected HTML from a web page to my local disk. These local pages can be re-ordered, or prioritized even. This is very useful when I'm concerned the page's content might disappear in the future. A useful research tool!
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
+1 for "Classic Theme Restorer"
I stopped using Chrome the *second* time it just stopped working correctly, because an extension I depended upon got "updated" and thus no longer worked. I can't stand having to figure out why things aren't working correctly anymore when I haven't changed anything. As long as it's impossible to lock down the software until *I* want to update it, I'll just opt out of Chrome.
Although I agree with a lot of what you said, the issue is that the code was already there to put the tabs on bottom. They removed it for no good reason except to enforce their vision of looking exactly like Chrome. First the changes to the URL bar, then the style, then the addition of the menu button, and now removal of tab location choice. It is a sucky thing to do. If we wanted Chrome, we would use Chrome.
If they want to remove crap and bloat and simplify the base browser (like it is SUPPOSED to be, that was the GOAL of Firefox), then made the damn "developer tools" an add-on. 99.9% of Firefox users have absolutely no need for them, so why is all that long and extremely complex code part of the native browser- making it complicated, and taking up lots of space?
UI stands for "user interface", which are the visualizations you see when interacting with a graphical shell. If something does not conform to the UI, that means it has its own UI that doesn't fit in.
I beg your pardon. UI stands for user interface, which is the way a user interfaces with an application. Yes, that includes appearance, but it is far from only that. The behaviors of menus, cursor interactions, focus, stacking, direction of elements, language, are all factors in a UI. Even vague things like "feel" which includes such nit picks as which elements of an interface respond to interaction while in the background, how a caret moves through a text field, what portions of a window are draggable. All of this and more is user interface.
Because that is what the browser is. The UI portion is peanuts, as proven by the fact that ONLY Google has screwed this up. Nobody else has.
And you listed other browsers using the same rendering engine as Chrome, so clearly the rendering engine has fuck all to do with the UI.
In Windows I don't have this problem. Every browser works pretty much like any other application, menus are where they should be, shortcuts are corrects, etc. The UI itself is an eyesore though and it's annoying to have just the one application that doesn't look right. It also makes it pretty much impossible to read some text in the UI due to conflicting colour schemes.
I'm pleased you see this much UI conformity in Windows. My experience on Windows is not the same, but I am also considering a much broader set of expectations (as listed above).
To clarify this entire conversation: we had a misunderstanding about what you meant by "UI", and diverged from there. Obviously Chrome looks out of place in some environments, because it has a fairly distinctive appearance of its own. Yes, I agree it can be annoying. But my point was that every current browser does unconventional things in their UI, because the UI toolkits available to them are too limited for the needs of a good browser interface. I hope we can agree that is the case as ell?
That isn't what I meant by native menus, and Firefox does actually use *those*. What I meant is that menus rendered for selects/dropdowns/context are fakes that neither look nor behave as a Mac user expects.
As far as where a menu bar in an OS belongs... More often than not, it doesn't belong anywhere. If your application needs to provide so many operations that it needs to hide many of them in a multi-dimensional listing, your application either does too much or is poorly designed for user interaction. There are some (few) exceptions to this, but for most purposes menu bars should be considered legacy UI elements providing redundancy for users who expect every operation to be catalogued in a single place. Their primary function at this point is to provide a visual listing of all of the (also hopefully few) keyboard combinations available. If this approach is taken, it does not matter where the menu is positioned.
Tired of updating every few days for guaranteed regressions.
Don't need the SJW crap.
Fuck Firefox.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Oh please. Unless you want a world full of foolish "apps" instead of honest to goodness software that can actually do more than three things, getting rid of menus is woefully stupid. It's not "hiding" commands to put things in menus. The menu system is an extremely efficient triggering and referencing system, as efficient to use with a mouse as a keyboard. It makes everything easy to find, not hard.
That is not to say that every program needs a menu, but they are the exceptions. Serious software with anaemic menus is not even worth the download bandwidth and are deleted from my computer promptly. That includes crappy consumer oriented browsers like Chrome.
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Funny, when I download software with lots of stuff in menus, I usually view it as stuff like this: http://www.uxdesignedge.com/wp...
I'd much prefer many small programs that do very few things, very easily and very well; versus large programs that try to be everything to everyone. Incidentally, that is also the unix philosophy.
And all of those things are invisible elements that you require zero feedback from? Read what you said and get back to me when you figure out what is wrong with it.
Not all, but they're all expressing more than just a pixel configuration on a screen.
The only browser I have installed that looks unconventional is Chromium. Neither version of Opera, Firefox Nightly, Midori or QupZilla have this problem.
Yeah, okay. Glad we've reached the endless repetition portion of this conversation. Cheers!
Yeah okay, "UI" just means how a thing looks and Chrome is uniquely terrible. Goodness forbid I try to expand the conversation a little without it being an all-or-nothing debate.
Look. I won't even appeal to my own authority, as a software developer with over a decade of UI experience. I'm sure you're also an experienced developer with UI chops, and I don't want to have a bigger dick contest. Instead, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... - it's actually a pretty decent article for Wikipedia, and may be helpful in understanding what I was talking about (if you have any interest in understanding what others are talking about, instead of just trying to be "right" on the Internet).
Have a nice day.
Yes, but as you know, that philosophy of a thing doing one thing well, is a statement on the scope of any particular piece of software, not its depth or capabilities. A program can, and likely should, go to whatever depth is necessary within its scope. If I want to do some serious text editing, I want a deep text editor like Sublime or gVim, not something like TextEdit or Notepad.exe. Some people can get by with those all right, and indeed I use simple programs like that if all I need is to quickly change a typo in a .txt file--but often I need more. All of these examples are text editors, they have a similar narrow scope, their "thing", they stick with what they should be doing and nothing more--however there is a huge difference between Notepad.exe and gVim when it comes to depth within that scope.
I don't get your screenshot though, how is this supporting your case? That seems, actually, to be a prime example of a utility that would really benefit from a few menus! I mean, this is exactly why menus are a good thing. Look, they even waste space with buttons for "Exit", "Save" and Load! What a waste of space and mental serenity. Bad as that is though, I don't see anything here that would classify as being out of scope, or example of software that is trying to do too many things. All of these are integral to the function of page scouring--one thing--and thus good example of a narrow scope with depth (as would be wget, the underlying engine behind this particular front-end).
I shudder to think what is behind that "Pro Mode" though. Ha.
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My text editor (I prefer TextMate, but Sublime shares a lot of its roots with TM) is another one with lots of menu stuff. Truth be told, 90% of it could go away and I'd never notice (because I am only coding in a handful of languages and don't need a universal editor all of the time). But I think these complex tools are an exception, and I would not provide tools like that to the vast majority of people who are better served by a simple editor like TextEdit (which is far simpler, but also far more powerful than Notepad).
That seems, actually, to be a prime example of a utility that would really benefit from a few menus!
Oh come on, this is just brushing the problem under the rug. You're moving all of that complexity out of view, but you're not removing it. Making HTTP requests is hardly a complex thing for a user. I do it with my web browser all the time without having to check a single checkbox ever. The whole example is kind of contrived, but the point is that engineers design poor UIs. Whether those UIs are visible or tucked away to be less discoverable is hardly material. The fact that it's a front-end to wget points to the fact that the UI of the underlying command prompt is the source of the design problem, and that has neither menus nor checkboxes! They're all fundamentally the same UI, just presented (or not) slightly differently.
Making software simple to use is quite hard, but it's worth doing, and it doesn't mean the software is not powerful or useful. It's the difference between computing being accessible to everyone versus reserved for people who have spare time or resources (like income) to dedicate to it.
That's fine, nobody is saying that everyone needs Maya. You were saying, however, that menus are a sign that a program is "too complicated", and to that I strongly disagree.
Menus are an important aspect of a program's accessibility, this is especially true on a Mac! Menus are fundamental to the architecture of the system, and programmers are encouraged to replicate all important functionality within them for this reason. They allow the handicapped access to functions that might be otherwise difficult or impossible to navigate to using stepwise controls, tongue sticks for the quadriplegics, voice commands, Braille systems, or VoiceOver. For beginners and intermediate users, they provide training wheels toward learning keyboard shortcuts and what the software is capable of. They make the Help menu more useful as you can search for features using common language. For power users they provide extensive automation hooks (especially where there is no AppleScript dictionary) and customisation since on a Mac, menus are fully keyboard customisable.
This stuff is useful, even essential, from Stickies on up. Just because you don't need it doesn't mean the software doesn't either, as a tool for many. You don't know how I use a computer, I don't know how you use yours. You can't make assumptions about design based on your usage patterns or preferences.
You misunderstand me. Part of the problem with the UI you posted a link to is that because of the irrational fear of using menus, they have had to relocate bog standard application control functions as permanently visible buttons. By simply adding a File menu and a Help menu, you could remove 25% of the clutter in this screenshot. Next, some of these things are clearly configuration related, rather than something you need constant access to, such as proxies. They can be located in menus as toggles, or in a preference window.
The answer isn't to strip out all of the features, but to create a design that supports the features, and part of that is putting standard (such as File:Quit) or seldom-used stuff (like links to a web page) into menus.
I don't really follow that argument. Modern CLI is as much for automation as it is for the user. Geeks use this stuff to build complex toolchains and to configure systems for unattended operation. Think of command-line flags as a sort of "API" and you're closer to the truth. Since commands are simple text strings, they can be constructed programmatically, parsed and dropped into anything that can store text.
How a user-land GUI approaches the underlying tool has nothing to do with the underlying tool's "API" save for its core feature breadth (though there is much you can do on top of an API of course). It's the responsibility of the programmer/designer to turn the raw functionality of the tool into a system that humans can interface with efficiently.
Indeed, to the point that it doesn't serve your argument well at all. A front-end to wget is hardly an example of something that needs to be made as simple as TextEdit. It's a power tool to start with, and the basic goal of it is in itself a complex task, so much so that you'd have to describe what it even does to the average person who doesn't conceptu
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