None of these is sufficient, but all of them together are.
1. Complexity. Tabbed browsing/MDI would add a set of features that most people wouldn't use, but the facilities for using it would still be sitting there in menu bars and such, making the application more complex for new users to learn.
2. Inconsistency. For a third-party to release a Mac application that works in a way that is fundamentally different from the way other Mac applications is frowned upon. For Apple to do it is completely unacceptable.
3. As I've already explained at length, and won't bother reiterating here, the tabbed browsing feature in Mozilla is shamefully incomplete and underimplemented. Apple would have to go back to the drawing board to produce a tabbed browsing interface paradigm that isn't fundamentally broken, as Mozilla's is.
4. Redundancy. Adding tabbed browsing, Mozilla-style, to Safari would necessarily involve having to reproduce most of the functions of WindowServer in Safari itself. There's no justification for reimplementing WindowServer's functionality unless the new way is better, and I've already explained how tabbed browsing is most definitely not.
5. Disproportionate effort. Safari is targeted, first, at the 5 million existing Mac OS X users, followed very shortly by the 20 million Mac OS 9 users that Apple hopes will make the transition this year. Of those 25 million prospective users, I think it's fair to say that maybe 100,000 of them would use tabs. Maybe. (Consider the ratio of IE users to Netscape users. IE does not have tabs. Netscape has tabs, and is freely available to anybody who wants it. Most people, though, don't bother downloading it. The obvious conclusion is that tabbed browsing alone is not a big deal to most people.) So when you consider that maybe a fraction of one percent of all Mac users might use tabbed browsing, it just doesn't seem worth it.
6. Finally, opportunity cost. Time spent implementing tabbed browsing/MDI is time that could have been spent fixing bugs, or adding features that everybody would use. Maybe even features that none of us have ever thought of yet. Consider SnapBack. I had never even thought of such a feature before I saw Safari, and now I use it every single day. To have tabbed browsing-- which, as I've already explained, only a tiny fraction of Mac users would even use-- you implicitly have to give up something else. And based on items 1-5, I'm simply unable to support making that trade-off.
Non-minimized windows do not appear in the dock; only minimized windows appear in the dock. This is unintuitive because when you look for a window, you first have to figure out whether or not it was minimized:
Sorry, I'm not going to buy that one. See, while I don't agree that this point is counterintuitive at all-- what do you expect, that every window should be listed in the dock??-- compared to how WindowServer handles minimized windows, tabs are even less intuitive. See, the line between a tab and a window cannot be crossed, despite the fact that they are, functionally, exactly the same things. Tabs can't show up in the Window menu. Tabs can't show up in the dock menu. You can't cycle through tabs with command-` and command-shift-`.
So basically what tabs do is that make the user learn an entirely new semantic for dealing with windows. Unnecessarily, as I've pointed out time and again now.
I meant the complex bundle of gui applications you have to download in order to get gcc + make and friends.
One download, one install, and it's bundled with new systems by default. The CD (or CD image, if you're downloading) is called Developer Tools.
There is only the one application that you need for creating software: Project Builder. Well, two if you count Interface Builder, but that's not really necessary. Project Builder provides the front end to jam and gcc (C++, Objective-C, and Java) and gdb. The rest of what's included on Developer Tools is documentation, example code, and a set of secondary tools like a memory leak tracer and profiling tools and such.
My rants are simply an explanation of why I don't like using MacOS X
I appreciate your openness about this, but since this is a Mac thread, and a Safari thread in particular, I hope you can understand why I'm going to be pretty dismissive. If you want to talk about this stuff in the abstract sometime, email me or something. But if we're talking about features that should be included in Apple's bundled web browser for Mac OS X, going off on tangents about why OS X isn't as good as X11 isn't very productive.
if Apple made file forks appear as funny-looking files in HFS as they do in UFS, I might consider allowing OS X machines back into my server room
Forks are completely deprecated. I don't believe I have a single resource fork on any of my machines, except in files like Word documents. Word, being a really poorly Carbonated application, sticks a resource fork on all of its documents, for no reason that I can grasp. You can strip it off with no trouble at all, which means it must not be doing anything important.
You will find forks in Classic applications, of course, but seriously... who uses those any more?
You can at least appreciate that, but other Mac-heads seem to think that anything Apple produces is automatically better for everybody and that writing X11 software is pointless
Both of those things is true. It's just a matter of educating the nonbelievers.;-)
Seriously, pull out the tutorial and do a little Cocoa programming. In a day, you'll be completely and utterly unable to look at any C++ or (especially) X11 source code without getting the shakes. I spent about a year slogging through ViewKit, and after my first day of messing around with Cocoa I was pissed that I'd wasted a year of my life.
Sorry--because you had to go outside of the browser AND select seven SEPARATE items (compared to my one), I'll call it a win--for me.
Absolutely not. You open the bookmarks manager thingy, select something, and hit a key. I click a Finder window, select something (marquee or cmd-A) and hit a key. It's a draw, and you know it.
Instead of being stuck on the theory that they are just not Mac like... give them a try, you might actually like them.
First, even if I loved them I would be unable to use Chimera regularly. The text rendering is just awful, and the fact that they aren't using true Cocoa NSTextField and NSTextArea widgets for HTML forms cramps my style: no inline spell-checking or services.
That said, I really, really tried to love tabs. Just couldn't do it. I constantly found myself getting annoyed at the commandeering of command-W to mean "close tab" when more than one "tab" (is it a tab when there's no tab on your tab?) is open. I wanted to close the window dammit! Not the tab! If I'd wanted to close the tab, I would have said, "close tab." Quit trying to second-guess me!
Then the other issues came into play: tab label truncation, surprisingly slow tab rendering on my older machines-- opening new windows was slower than opening new tabs, but changing to an existing window was faster than changing to an existing tab-- and so on. Finally, when I discovered that I couldn't re-order tabs, I gave it up. I started using OmniWeb full-time despite the fact that it's a lot slower on those old machines.
Now that Safari is here, my girlfriend and I (it's her iBook) can have a browser that is fast, Cocoa-savvy, and easy on the eyes. Before, I could only pick, at best, two of the three.
Except that I don't want a separate proxy. Why should I download, install and worry about yet another piece of software?
Well, the only answer I can give to that is that Privoxy-- or a program like it-- lets you do stuff that the built-in filtering functions in a browser would probably never be capable of doing. But your life should only be as complicated as you want it to be; I use Privoxy because I really dislike web ads, and I find that it works really well. If you don't want to mess with it, then by all means use Chimera or OmniWeb. (OmniWeb has kick-ass regex image filtering built in; look under "Privacy" in the preferences.)
Heck Twirlip, I don't even want tabs anymore!
Oh, ha ha.;-) Thanks for humoring a grumpy old man.
you argument is basically saying "tabs are useless! they don't help people use their web browsers!"
God, did IQ's drop sharply while I was away? Does nobody on Slashdot read any more?
Are tabs useful? Yes, in the same sense that anything else is useful: the can be used. Are they more useful than multiple windows? No, you can do more with multiple windows if you know how to manage them with features like the dock and the Window menu. Are they as useful as multiple windows? No, because there are some basic things that you can't do with tabs-- reorder them, for example.
So, at best tabs replicate a function that is already implemented in WindowServer. And that's only at best. In practical terms, tabs replicate the functions of WindowServer badly.
Implementing tabs (or any form of MDI) takes time and effort. I am not in favor of reducing the priority of any work on Safari so that tabs can be added. Everything else is more important than tabs, because tabs, despite the fact that a few people like them, bring nothing at all to the application.
with that one statement, i demolish your entire argument.
Evidently you wouldn't recognize my entire argument if it crawled up your leg and bit you on the johnson.
and by the way, who the fuck are you to say that 700 pixels is a reasonable window width?
That's the width to which it seems that a majority of web sites are designed. Go to someplace like Amazon, or Google News, or Yahoo, or Slashdot. The window elements are arranged to fit in a window that is 700 pixels across, +/- 100. Yes, you can "make my window as wide as i damn well please." Yee-haw. You da man, Jethro.
You are being pointedly opinionated throughout this thread and yet you won't consider anyone else's opinion without resorting to insult and condescension.
That's because, with a few notable exceptions, I have yet to hear a contrary opinion that is worth listening to. You've got your guys who wish they were using Windows, your guys who absolutely have to have umty-bump-teen different windows open at the same time, your guys who think OS X sucks because the buttons are round, your guys who think WebCore should have been built on Gecko instead of KHTML, your guys who keep asking when OS X for IA-32 is coming out, and so on. People who are absolutely missing the point.
The point is this: Safari is designed to be a web browser for the 20 million Mac users who are still using OS 9. Are tabs an important feature for those people? No, because those people are running IE 5, and like it. IE for OS 9 is a hell of a browser; fast, standards-compliant, and stable as can be. IE for OS X is hammered shit, slow and buggy. Apple wants people who are migrating from OS 9 to OS X to have the best possible experience, particularly when it comes to surfing the web, and Microsoft just isn't coming through for them.
Life is about trade-offs. Most people who use Safari (or who will use it after it's released, rather) will never use tabs. Of those who do, many will undoubtedly choose another browser for other reasons-- image filtering, the mail client, Gecko, whatever. So you're left with a tiny (in relative terms) group of people who would both want tabbed Safari and use tabbed Safari.
During the time they spend implementing tabs in Safari, Apple could have been fixing bugs, or working on a feature that most people will use, as opposed to a feature that very few people will use.
And yet, we still get a regular influx of "if Safari don't have them tabby thangs, I ain't usin' it, nosiree" bug reports. Some people just aren't getting it, it seems.
You are ignoring the obvious evidence - many many people like and prefer tabbed browsing.
Many as a proportion of Slashdot users? Yes. Many as a proportion of the 20 million Mac OS 9 users that Apple hopes to get migrated over to OS X in the next year? Not exactly.
It should also be said that you are a being somewhat of a dictatorial prick, who cares if people are given the choice to use tabs in Safari?
We all do. See above, re: opportunity costs. This may be a difficult concept for you to grasp at first, particularly if you have ever been on the Mozilla team. It seems like a startling number of Mozilla developers are unclear on the concept of opportunity cost, which explains why it got to 1.0 four years late and weighing in at a whopping 17 MB.
You can click on the page title IN THE TAB and drag it to the tab area of another window (either to another tab OR alongside the other tabs), and voila!
Okay, I stand corrected. That's a good point, and I didn't know about it before. I will no longer complain that you can't drag tabs from one window to another. I will instead concentrate on complaining about all the other stuff I've mentioned, including the fact that you can't reorder tabs in the same window. In fact, if you drag a tab from one window to the same window, as if to move it to another place in the tab bar, Chimera simply creates a new tab and begins downloading the page you dragged. Weird, weird.
I can open seven bookmarked webpages AT ONCE with one click on a bookmark created with the "Bookmark all tabs" feature of Chimera.
You can do exactly the same thing with webloc files, FYI. Select seven of them, then command-O. Poof! Seven nice new windows, each one with a different page in it.
That's pretty close to being a good answer. Because I had to go outside the browser to do it, let's call it a draw, okay?
The popularity of tabs, and the similar reasonings behind liking them, would suggest otherwise.
Are there tabs in IE? No? Well, then I think "popular" is an absurd overstatement of the facts. Tabs are very popular among people who are far, far away from Apple's target audience.
If you believe any of my statements are factually incorrect, then please demonstrate why.
I already have. The horse is dead, put down the bat. Each of your criticisms of one of the five (!) methods of switching between open windows applies to that method and that method only. You seem to be missing the fact that you can use any of those methods at any time. The fact that none of them is perfect amounts to a hill of beans.
And your favorite-- too slow!-- is demonstrably false. So why argue about it any more?
(I always did love that one. "Tabs are faster, because switching windows is more computationally expensive!" Back in the bad old days before Quartz Extreme, that wasn't really true, but it was closer to true than it is now. [In those days, redraw versus restack was pretty much a wash.] Now that every Mac sold stores a buffer of every window in the graphics card and uses the GPU to do the buffer-swapping, it's completely untrue. The CPU cost of switching windows is very, very close to zero.)
Unix Sysadmin. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is a textbook example of one of the types of user Apple is aiming OS X at.
You're mistaken. Apple is aiming OS X at, first, users of OS 9. There's something like 20 million of 'em out there. Next, Apple is aiming OS X at people who have never owned a computer before, and who want to do relatively new tasks like surf the web, listen to music, manage their photographs, and make movies. Next, Apple is aiming OS X at Windows users who are fed up with how hard it is to do the aforementioned tasks with Windows.
Hardcore UNIX users are way, way down the list. Somewhere after professional audio and film/video production (Shake, Final Cut Pro/Express, Logic) and bioscience (BLAST).
I can quite confidently say that OS X's GUI is *much* slower than Windows'
Well, if you say so, then it must be true. Look, I'm not here to teach remedial benchmarking. If you think it's faster, then it's faster. Maybe it's even true in your environment. If you're wrong, then you're wrong. If you're right, then it just doesn't matter, because nobody but nobody uses Macs because they're the fastest. There are, as you may have guessed, other reasons.
I can fix the order of tabs in the taskbar by starting applications and opening windows in that order, and have them remain in that order.
In other words, you are unable to reorder the little widgets in the task bar. I do so love the way you flip things like this on their heads. Instead of "you can't move it," it becomes, "you can fix the order." If I didn't know better, I'd say you're an apologist.
While OS X lets you drag stuff around the Dock (which is nice, and sorely lacking from the Windows taskbar) is doesn't allow any way of pinning an icon in a certain spot.
Okay, I see what you mean now. When you minimize a window, its thumbnail appears at the right side of the dock, next to the trash. When you unminimize it, it disappears from the dock. When you minimize it again, it appears at the right side of the dock. Not very complicated, but I see your point: unminimize a window, then minimize it again, and its thumbnail is now at the right side of the dock instead of in the middle where it originally was. But, in all fairness, I'm not entirely sure how else it could be done, practically speaking.
You are the epitomy of a Mac Wanker.
Fuck you, too.
I've offered many reasons, along with my needs, why I think some ways of doing things are better than others. Your replies, when distilled from direct or implied insults, effectively are "Why would you want to do that ?"
At first, yes, that was my response. Because you were asking for things that are not typical, not even within the range of typical. Then you explained that you work this way, and my response was, in paraphrase, "Fine. Use Windows or UNIX, then. Because a Mac is not for you."
What's the problem?
You are one of the reasons people like me don't like to be thought of as "Mac users".
That's really okay. We Mac users really don't like people such as yourself-- who do nothing but complain about how the Mac isn't like Windows/UNIX/their Toyota/whatever, constantly trying to squeeze the Mac's lima-bean-shaped peg into a round hole-- being thought of as Mac users, either. We're a pretty happy bunch, as a rule, and the degree of discord that your posts would bring to our party just isn't welcome.
It is a free world. Use whatever computer you like. If Windows would better fit your needs and you pick a Mac, expect no sympathy at all from us.
You cannot, in OS X, select a window by choosing its name or iconic representation from a list.
That is completely untrue. You can get from one window to another in the same application in five different ways: the Window menu (select by name), the dock menu (functionally similar to the Window menu; select by name), minimizing and unminimizing (select by thumbnail), command-` and command-shift-`, and simple point and click.
I also object to cmd-` because it is not intuitive
None of this stuff is intuitive. Intuition stops with the nipple. In all fairness, though, command-` was started by Microsoft in their Office and IE products; OS X just codified it. So while I think it's fair to say that it's kind of a hidden feature, it's also fair to say that it has lots of precedent behind it.
for one, minimized windows are treated differently from non-minimized windows.
I'm not seeing what you mean here. Can you elaborate?
I'm not certain why Apple created this artificial division between "application" and "window" in OS X, because it leads to inefficiency.
Apple didn't create it in OS X. It goes all the way back to the original Mac OS, and the rationale behind the systemwide menu bar. The running application takes over the menu bar. When MultiFinder was introduced and multitasking became a feature, "running" was changed to "foremost," where it stays today. In fact, OS X brings something brand new to the Mac: window interleaving. In the classic Mac OS, it was not possible to bring only a single window from a background application to the foreground; either all application windows had to be on top, or none could be. WindowServer does things differently, by letting you bring (say) a single Terminal window to the front, leaving all others in the background.
Users certainly will not bring the application to the foreground by clicking on the applications dock icon (or using cmd-tab) and then select the correct window by using the Window menu (or cmd-`) - it's much faster to find the needed window in the background and simply click on it. That is, however, a terribly inefficient with lots of windows.
Wait, wait. You're saying that you have one way of getting to the right window that isn't optimal when there are few windows, and another that isn't optimal when you have many windows. I think perhaps you might be standing on your head. Flip-flop your objections and you will find that they become strengths.
The barrier is also artificial, especially when you're working with stuff like Apple's Developer Studio
Um. Apple's what now? I'm not familiar with a product called "Developer Studio."
In my preferred environment (X11 with a window manager I wrote), I never work with non-maximized windows, I can select windows immediately from an always-accessible hot-corner menu (with no pointless delays on the menu), or a global alt-tab list (using a proper stack which naturally brings MRU applications to within fewer keystrokes (think about that if you haven't realized it already)), and I can organize windows into workspaces at the touch of a key combo.
Boy, oh boy. Should you ever not be using OS X.
Or, perhaps more accurately, should you ever be running X11 on OS X instead of WindowServer.
Makes OS X feel like early 1980s tech with modern visuals.
Sorry, but from your description it sounds like your preferred environment is early 80's technology, with or without modern visuals. Like the other guy, I'm happy that it works for you, but it's not a Mac, and you shouldn't be surprised by this fact.
I will try to make this point as broadly applicable as possible, so that persons like yourself can read it and know where I'm coming from. If you are an unusual user-- meaning you use your computer in a way that's signficantly different from the way the average user uses it-- then you will not be happy with OS X. OS X was designed, from the ground up, to be the most powerful operating system under the hood, but the simplest on top. The number of basic Finder and OS-level features actually dropped, significantly, between OS 9 and OS X. Desk accessories: gone. Control panels: gone. System extensions: gone. Spring-loaded folders: gone, returned by popular demand. Window-shade: gone. Appearance Manager: gone. Apple Menu: gone. Chooser: gone. Balloon help: gone. Control strip: gone. Desktop printing: gone. Do people miss some of them? Sure. I'm sure there are three, maybe four people out there who miss the hell out of window-shading, or the control strip, or desktop printers. Does that mean Apple should weigh OS X down with all of those features? Absolutely not.
I guess what I'm saying is this: if you genuinely want to use a Mac, then let's talk about your ideas. But if you really wish you were using Linux, or Windows, or whatever, then please just use them and be happy. Use the tools that you find most appropriate for the job, okay?
Nor do you need [an equivalent of the Window menu for tabs], if you keep your tabs organised by window as I do.
Somehow you've managed to spin a massive omission from the UI into an advantage. I salute your moxie. Didn't work, of course, but damn fine try.
And, as mentioned, just because the OS gives me several different methods doesn't mean any of them are any good for what I want to do.
It doesn't mean anybody else wants to do what you want to do, either.
Your argument-- with all the gross factual inaccuracies strained out-- basically boils down to this: "A car sucks because it can only leave the ground for brief periods of time, you can't drop bombs from it, and you can't get to and from an aircraft carrier with it." Gee whiz, Sparky, have you ever considered the possibility that you might be happier with a plane?
I'm having a problem because the tools in the GUI to do this are inadequate. And it is a problem of the GUI, because I don't have the same problem in the Windows and KDE GUIs.
Then I ask you, with all sincerity, respect, and politeness, to shut the fuck up and go use Windows or KDE. If the tool doesn't work for you, use another one. You are decidedly in the minority, to the tune of about 4,999,999 to one, plus or minus a margin of sampling error.
I'm sorry if you don't understand, but trying to claim a flat, unordered and dynamic collection of windows is is any way *more* organised is just plain wrong.
What does the top of your desk look like? Does it have papers and other sundries on it arranged in stacks? Or does it consist merely of a series of open bins that you can put things in? I would wager that your desktop is flat, just like everybody else's. And you get by by putting things in stacks, just like everybody else does. And yet, somehow, you are able to get through your day. Amazing, huh?
I do, and tabs are, thus far, the best available solution on my preferred platform.
As I said before, it sounds like a Mac is the wrong tool for you. Multiple tabbed monitoring windows that never change? Forty-plus terminal windows? I don't know what the hell you're doing, friend, but it's not typical desktop computer use.
I fail to see how the "your opinion is different to mine, so you're wrong" attitude you have is any different.
My attitude is, "Your opinion is different from virtually everybody's, so you're wrong."
Now we get to the good stuff. The point was raised that Windows does a better job of managing open windows than the Mac does. The question was posted: how? The responses:
It's faster.
Demonstrably false. Move on.
It groups similar windows.
So does your Mac. See the application icon in the dock, and the "hide" and "hide others" functions.
It allows me to move quickly to *any* window by either mouse or keyboard.
Haven't you been reading? So. Does. Your. Mac. In five different ways, any one of which you can use on any occasion, depending on your situation, your mood, or the tides.
It allows me to order the tabs in the taskbar (only kludgily, but that's better than not at all)
I don't have any idea what that means. Sorry. Last time I used Windows, those little thingies-- what are they, anyway; icons? menus?-- appear in the task bar in the order that they were opened, and cannot be rearranged. This may be different in XP; I never noticed one way or the other. In any case, the Mac lets you drag icons around the dock to your heart's content, and leaves them where they were put until you move them again.
The placement of things in the taskbar is almost completely static
Apart from sounding like a contradiction of your previous point, this is substantively the same on a Mac. The placement of things on the dock is completely static until you move them, that is; they do not reorder themselves.
It allows me to completely maximise windows.
You win. Because the Mac doesn't let you do this, it must suck. I apologize for ever doubting you.
In conclusion: please stop interjecting your opinions, which thus far have been based solely on some highly specialized and absurdly atypical situations, into a discussion of the interface of a general-purpose application. Your opinions simply don't count, because the vast majority of users don't exist in an environment even remotely similar to yours. You are at the far end of the bell curve. You are outside the standard deviation. Your data point will be weighted completely out of existence. So the only possible outcome will be for those of us who listen to say, "Whatever, dude, go back to Windows if it makes you happier," and for you to go away frustrated and disenfranchised.
But what the hell, it's a free country, gripe all you want.
Your dumb conclusion is almost as dumb as your main facts
Wow. With that kind of wit and charisma, how can I hope to win an argument against you?
Good thing I've got a soft spot for lost causes.
Apple could have easily, (and legaly) built OS X on Linux, and simply kept aqua back, closed source, just like they did with BSD.
Maybe, if they'd been extremely careful to do everything just right. They still would have had to use the FreeBSD user environment, because the GNU one is just too restrictive (refer to the infamouse OpenSSL/GNU conflict).
But the most important point is one that you made in passing: "The only thing they wouldn't be able to do was release Darwin under a the APL [sic]." Apple released Darwin and other open source components under the APSL for a reason. Had they thrown their lot in with any GPL component or library, it would have "infected" the entire kernel or userland or whatever, making it impossible for Apple to retain ownership and control of their code.
And apple isn't the biggest Unix software company in the world
No? Computerworld, August 30, 2002: "Rendezvous isn't Apple's first foray into the open-source community. With the release of Mac OS X, Apple became the largest vendor of Unix in the world."
they're merely the largest growing due entirely to dumb looking computers (iMac, etc.)
Wow. You really got me there. We'd better not give Apple any credit for their accomplishments, because their computers look "dumb." You are absolutely right.
Your arguments are all derived from the way you -- a relatively expert power user -- utilizes his screen real-estate with maximum efficiency.
Well, I don't know what else to say to that except for "nuh-uh." I won't go into details in the interest of protecting my privacy, but I have done and continue to do more UI work than you are aware.
Titles are not always nessesary, Infact, I don't even read the most of the time. I go by were they are.
The spatial organization argument is bogus, and it's incompatible with another major pro-tabs argument: logical organization. Windows can be put anywhere on the screen you like, so it's easy to remember that this was over here and that was over there. That's one of the main benefits of moveable windows in a UI.
If the big deal about tabs is that they always show up in the order that you opened them, then that invalidates the "tabs are good for logical organization" argument. Tabs that always show up in the order that you opened them are not good for logical organization; you can't stack them or arrange them in any way. In fact, you can't interact with them at all except to open and close, reveal and hide them.
My bet is on the 2nd to 4th ones. Of course. I would have a more accurate guess if I had knowen when that window was opened.
This is the crux of my point. If you want to keep track, in your head, of which window is which, then by all means keep using tabs. Myself, I don't like having to do that. I have a computer that's supposed to do that for me. That's why I use the Window menu. It shows me which window is which, when I need to know. Unlike tabs, which are incapable of showing me what I need to know when I have more than a few (i.e., 6-8, depending on window size and title lengths) windows open.
Maybe tabs suck for YOU, but they obviously don't suck for everyone.
I'm sorry, but you've got it backwards. Tabs suck for some very objective reasons, outlined here and elsewhere. The fact that you, and a few others, have adopted them as a workaround for OS's with inadequate window management features, and have learned to live with their critical limitations, does not mean that tabs don't suck.
On an OS like Windows or Solaris, not having tabs may suck worse than having them. But on an OS like OS X, where the OS provides you with all the window juggling services you require, tabs are at best redundant and at worst a huge waste of time and resources on the part of the developers.
If you're so enamoured with tabs, find one thing-- just one thing!-- that you can do with them that you can't do better without them. Just one!
Take a look at amazon.com or google.com or any other site that has been designed around users, most of them have tabs, because of the advantages they offer over things like menus. (menus are generally used for commands, not for navigation).
The purpose of a tabbed interface is to reduce complexity. With a tabbed interface, you can take a set of controls that are logically or functionally related and present them to the user all at once, but separately from other sets of controls to which they are not related. For example, consider the Network pref pane. On my computer, I see four tabs: TCP/IP, AppleTalk, Proxies, AirPort. (Yours will differ depending on whether you're using an AirPort interface or a wired interface or a VPN interface or what.) When I click the TCP/IP tab, I see controls related to TCP/IP settings: IP address, gateway, and so on. When I click the AppleTalk tab, I see controls related to AppleTalk.
I do not, however, have a tab called "Display" on which I see screen resolution setting controls. That tab is on a completely separate pref pane, the Displays pref pane. It would make no sense to put the Display tab on the Network pref pane.
So what's my point? That tabs are an organizational feature, not a navigational feature. When you go to Amazon's web site and see something that vaguely resembles a row of tabs across the top, what you are seeing is essentially an organizational structure. Clicking on the "Books" tab (assuming there is such a thing; I don't feel like increasing Amazon's site traffic just to make a point) shows you content and controls related to books. Clicking the "Underwear" tab shows you content and controls related to underwear.
Using tabs in a tabbed browser, though, is different. In that context, you're trying to use tabs as a document management feature. Tabs don't work well for that purpose, as discussed at great length elsewhere.
So, in summary, tabs as an organizational feature are fine, whether in a program UI or a web page or a day planner. Tabs as a document/window management feature are not fine; they don't work, and even in the limited contexts in which they do, the existing features work better.
Even so, I also don't understand your logic behide; that if a lot of users have never head of tabs, than they would not benifit from them.
I assert that most Safari users would not use tabs if they were available. Why? Because we have been writing document-based applications for the Mac for nearly 20 years, and never once has the question of an MDI-style interface, tabbed or otherwise, come up. MDI was the standard on Windows for many years, until they deprecated it around the time of Windows 95. (I don't recall precisely when Microsoft's position shifted from MDI to mixed MDI/SDI to don't-use-MDI, but it happened around that time.) During that time, did users clamor for MDI on the Mac? No. Web browsers have been around for more than a decade now; tabbed browsing only appeared recently. And where did it appear? On Mozilla, where the limitations of new window spawning are well documented, and on Windows, where the task bar makes managing several windows a challenge.
Has there ever been a native Mac document-based application-- i.e., one designed on the Mac, not designed on Windows or UNIX and ported, as in Chimera-- that had any sort of MDI interface? I don't know. But I can say with confidence that no major application had one.
The gist of my argument is that MDI, and tabbed browsing which is a specific instance of MDI, have been around for a long time. The Mac has been around for even longer. During all that time, has MDI ever been an issue? No. Will adding tabs to Safari suddenly bring out a hitherto unrecognized need on the part of Mac users to use MDI? No.
So if Apple were to take the time to implement MDI (tabbed or otherwise) correctly, a very small, albeit vocal, fraction of their users would benefit from it. Meanwhile, bugs that should have been fixed in WebCore went unfixed because the programmers were working on MDI instead. Idiotic trade-off, that.
Most people I know have never hear of linux, does that mean linux is useless?
I have opened more thna a few tabs, and still been able to read them.
Good for you. Open some more. Can you still read them? Open some more. Sooner rather than later you're going to find that the labels on your tabs are truncated to the point of being unusable. The question of where that point is depends merely on your window width. A reasonable window width-- 700 pixels or so-- means you can get about four tabs with average-length labels without truncation. The more your add, or the narrower your window is, the more truncation you get. And it's not an absurd limit, either, like 100 tabs or something like that. It's on the order of 6-8 in a window of reasonable size.
That is, in a word, dumb.
And abut the window menu, one could also add one for the tabs.
Or one could just extract one's head from one's anus and use the feature that is already there, staring you in the bloody face, instead of clamoring for developers with better things to do to implement an inferior feature that does, at best, exactly the same thing. That's an option, too, you know.
That shortcut is a pain, it's not something that I can do fast.
Then don't use it. The OS provides you with four completely independent ways of navigating from one window to another, not counting pointing-and-clicking. If you don't like the keyboard cycle shortcut, use the Window menu, or the dock menu, or use minimized windows. Or, as I said, just point and click.
It is very clear to me that you have no backgound in usability or GUI design.
Heh. I'm curious as to how you'd reach that conclusion.
I truly can't understand the mentality behind you saying that way I work is horrible, it just makes no sence, you don't even know what I do, what if I just did word processing all day?
Then I would ask you politely to shut the fuck up about web browsers, as you do not use them. But since you do make a great deal of noise about web browsers, and tabbed interfaces in web browsers in particular, it is clear that you use multiple windows. And yet you say that you zoom every window on your computer. That is, frankly, really dumb. You're just making things harder for yourself. Use the computer in the way it was designed to be used, and you will find that your life becomes easier. Suddenly having four windows open at the same time will seem, as if by magic, to be less of a onerous burden on your weary shoulders.
I can't fit both a browser and my text editor in the screen at the some time without it being too cramped, so I might as well maxmise both and flick between them.
How do you "flick between them?" Surely not by using the (gasp!) keyboard shortcut, hmm? The very one-- well, one identical to the very one-- that you said "is a pain, it's not something that I can do fast?" And that you went on to say is, "easy to make a mistake, and it requires extra effort to correct it?" That keyboard shortcut?
I'll repeat myself just one more time: learn how to use the computer. Do not sit down at a Mac and try to use it like you would use Windows. They are not the same. The Mac is different. Learn to use a Mac. You will find that tasks you currently believe to be burdensome are, in fact, quite easy.
Simply pause the mouse pointer over the truncated tab for a very brief moment, and the FULL name of the truncated tab/webpage appears just below the tab, inside of a yellow box.
For crying out loud, have you lost all sense of reason? How in the name of hell is this better than the systemwide Window menu, or the dock menu, both of which show complete names without truncation, both of which all Cocoa applications get for free, with complete universal access support, both of which work in a consistent manner across all Cocoa (and even Carbon, I believe) applications?
This just stands as even more proof that people who are rabid about tabs-- as this poster appears to be-- just don't know how to use a Mac. If you're on Windows, where there is no systemwide Window menu and (in pre-XP days) the task bar rapidly becomes crowded by multiple windows, then tabs make sense. But this is Mac OS X. The OS does helpful things for you like providing menus to manage your windows. Use them!
Thanks for saying so. As confident as I am in my opinions, I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only person who holds them.;-)
At 1280x854, full-screen is out, tabs are the way I've found to manage all the windows without having to resize/drag each individual window when I move a new object/window to the desktop.
I have to confess that I didn't really follow that. Can you explain how you deal with windows in a little more detail?
If there were a way to enhance the 'window' menu to provide some of the functionality of tabs, I'm be much more in favor of that.
I think I would happily throw my support behind an enhancement to the window server that lets users deal with windows in a new way. Consider Photoshop's palettes, for example. Some time ago-- version 4 or 5 or something-- Adobe came up with this neat idea of stackable palettes. Each palette occupies its own utility window, but one palette can be dragged on top of another to form a tabbed palette. I've seen people who kept each palette in its own window, and people who drag all the palettes together to form one monster uber-palette. I think I would be interested in an enhancement to the window server to let any Cocoa application manage its windows that way. The default behavior would be to keep windows separate, but dragging one window over another (possibly with a modifier key) would let you turn two windows into a single "window stack," and to cycle among them somehow. (Tabs aren't the right answer, for reasons I've already gotten into. Truncation sucks.)
But since I have no idea how window server works, I don't know if this would be a hugely impossible task, or merely a very difficult one.
I wouldn't know (beyond saying "One of the 3 NST pages, obviously"), but I'd assume you do since you're the one who made the tabs.
If they were windows instead of tabs, I could go to the Window menu or the dock menu to find out. But since they're tabs, I have to either click on them one at a time, or cycle through them using a keyboard shortcut. This is a major shortcoming of the tabbed interface.
The point of the discussion as I see it is that you don't think tabs serve any useful function.
Then let me be more clear about what I'm saying. Tabs serve no useful function that is not better served by the various and several existing features of the window server. The fact that they let you do the same thing in a different way is fine and good, but since they solve no problems, the degree to which they cause usability problems means that they have no place, in their current state, in an application like Safari.
I'm saying they don't hinder YOU if YOU don't use them.
Opportunity costs, my friend. For every minute that an Apple programmer spends working on tabs, that's one minute not spent fixing bugs in the model or view classes, or the renderer. If tabs were a good thing-- that is, if they brought something new or improved to the table-- then I'd be all for them. But since they do not, and since implementing them would take valuable time away from more important work, I oppose their inclusion wholeheartedly.
I won't use Safari until they're included.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's not a very big deal. Apple isn't writing Safari for a few thousand former-Mozilla users. Apple is writing Safari for over 5 million former IE users. If you don't like it, don't use it! Nobody will take offense at your decision.
My girlfriend is the antithesis of a "power user," and she'd rather...
Yeah, I have a girlfriend too, and she loves Safari. I showed her tabs once, in Chimera, and her response was, "Why would I go to all that trouble when I can just open a new window?" So I guess our anecdotal evidence cancels out.
The primary functional advantages of tabs are a) speed of access, b) organisation and c) a reduction in window clutter. And, as I've stated before, since OS X's task-switching paradigms still all suck, (c) is in IMHO one of the most important.[windows] fill the screen with wasted space
I do not know what the hell you are talking about here. How do you waste screen space with multiple windows? If you want to use all of your screen for a single window, go for it. Windows are resizeable. If, on the other hand, you only need to see something small, make the window small and put it in the corner or something where you can see it behind your main window. Wasted space? What?
[windows are] difficult to navigate between in large numbers
First, the OS provides you with no fewer than four different ways of dealing with windows. One, the Window menu. (Menus have been proven time and again in useability studies to be easier to use than in-window widgets, both for the disabled and for mundanes.) Two, the dock menu. Works the same as the window menu, but it's accessed by control-clicking the application icon in the dock. Three, minimizing windows to the dock. This also addresses the oft-cited clutter issue. Four, the command-` and command-shift-` shortcuts for cycling and toggling. Very handy, those.
And finally, as demonstrated elsewhere tabs are completely unacceptable in large numbers. Depending on window size, the tab labels start to get truncated at four to six open tabs, and by the time you get to 10 or 12, chances are fair that they're completely obscured. And because applications like Mozilla have no tab-based equivalent of the Window menu or the dock menu, you're stuck clicking to find or cycling through tabs. Terrible.
Discrete windows also lose out because they cannot be collected together into organisational groups under OS X.
You can stack your windows however you like. Here's a quick taste test. Open a Chimera window with four tabs. Now move two of the tabs to another window. We're trying to stay organized, right? So put two of the tabs in one window and two in the other. Oops. Can't do it without opening a new window with two tabs and cutting-and-pasting some URL's. With windows, on the other hand, I can make a pile in a corner of my screen or whatever, stacking and restacking to suit my purposes.
I still didn't have anywhere near enough desktop real estate to keep just my active terminal windows all accessible
I don't know what to say except, "maybe you were doing something wrong."
Multiple windows are "self-limiting" because after a certain number they become time-consuming and frustrating to task switch between.
That's simply bogus. Sorry, but it's true. As I said, the OS gives you no fewer than four ways of getting from one window to another, and that doesn't count the simple expedient of point-and-click. All of these methods scale to a practically unlimited number of windows; the Window menu and dock menu, for example, can show you any number of window titles without truncating their names. (Well, you have to truncate past about 80-100 characters, but that's only because screens are only so wide.) I don't know why you have a problem dealing with open windows, but it's not the fault of the OS or the application.
The problem with your solution is the "cycling" part
If you don't want to use the shortcuts, then done. As I said, the OS provides you with no fewer than four separate ways to get from one window to another, not counting pointing-and-clicking.
Think in terms of multiple windows full of tabs, with each window carrying a certain type of page.
Doesn't work that way. Pages are opened by clicking links. When you click a link with Mozilla, your only choices are to open it in the current window, replacing the page you're currently looking at; to open it in another window; or to open it in another tab in the current window. You can't open a link in another tab in another window. So what you call a powerful organizational feature is really nothing more than the illusion thereof.
Tabs are a good work-in-progress solution to the problem of managing and efficiently accessing a large number of active web pages.
Exactly. Like I said, tabs are a bad solution-- "work-in-progress" doesn't begin to cover the ramifications of a UI design that hasn't even been throught out yet, much less implemented completely-- to a problem that we don't even have.
In all honesty, if you truly find multiple discrete browser windows not only more usable, but workable at all under OS X, then I can only assume you rarely have a significant number of active windows open at any time.
Ah, I see. "Your opinion differs from mine, so you must not be as sophisticated as I am." Very mature.
But, on the whole, they are a good solution to a problem faced by many users.
From my experience, which is not complete by any means but I think does provide some representative samples-- people who find tabs to be an enabling solution are handicapped by the fact that they don't know how to use the features that the OS already provides.
Thus far, the only real criticisms I can see you have made of tabs is that...
Your assessment of my criticisms is, unfortunately, not accurate. If you'd like to know what I'm saying about tabs, please go back and read my posts again.
Managing large numbers of windows is one of only a few glaring faults that exist in the OS X UI.... It is something Windows handles *much* better, I think.
How? How does Windows handle it much better? Because I'm fairly confident that you're going to say, "Windows lets you do X," and I'm going to say, "You can do the same thing, or something completely equivalent, under OS X by doing thus-and-so." Let's see if I'm right.
If Safari's 1.0 release doesn't have better cookie management, a popup whitelist, and image blocker, then you will find some people going back to Chimera. I know I will.
Yes, of course, it makes much more sense to trade in a good browser (spell-checking in text fields alone is worth the price of admission) in for an also good but considerably less so browser based on features that really belong in the proxy anyway. Get thee over to the Privoxy home page and give it a download. Problems solved.
One big-ass caveat, though. The build of Privoxy that is available on their web site includes some OS X features of questionable worth. The installation package, for example, does some things that it shouldn't do, and the start scripts aren't technically compatible with Jaguar's new SystemStarter. (They don't cause a problem, they're just not technically right.) I have fixed these problems in the copy I got from CVS, but I have yet to submit my changes back to the project. So buyer beware and all that.
Is there any reason why Chimera could not be ported to GNUstep?
Sorry to give the obvious answer, but it depends on whether Chimera has any Carbon code in it. If Chimera is entirely Cocoa-fied, then a port should be pretty easy, modulo some AppKit features like the toolbar that I don't believe have counterparts in GNUstep.
Tabs are better than windows because all the tabs can be seen at once, and the user can see exactly what they want, and reach for it with a single click.
Wrong. If you have more than a few tabs open, their names are truncated to the point where you cannot tell which is which. And unlike with windows, there is no "tab" menu to allow you to see all the names in full.
Also, usability studies have time and again demonstrated that it's easier to hit a systemwide menu bar item than an in-window item. People think that just because in-window items are closer to the point of focus that they're easier to use; this is not true. Systemwide menu bar items do not move; you don't have to "aim" to hit them. Not to mention the fact that the systemwide menu bar already has a usability infrastructure built up around it to allow things like full keyboard navigation for the disabled and such. No tab interface has that.
Cycling through each window, to see if it's the right one is a pain. If you fuck-up, you have to go though the entire cycle again!
Wrong. Command-` cycles one way through the list; command-shift-` cycles the other way.
This is one of thing that I prefer on Win than Mac. All my apps open maximised
Horrible. I don't know what kind of work you do, but when I use my computer I almost always have two or more windows arranged for use at once. For example, when I'm not goofing off as I am as I write this, I'm working on a programming project. I have my project window open over here, and my interface window open there, and two browser windows with documentation in them over here and here. I want to see all of these at once. Zooming any of them up to fill the screen would, at best, be a huge waste of screen real-estate.
Slashdot Mirror
None of these is sufficient, but all of them together are.
1. Complexity. Tabbed browsing/MDI would add a set of features that most people wouldn't use, but the facilities for using it would still be sitting there in menu bars and such, making the application more complex for new users to learn.
2. Inconsistency. For a third-party to release a Mac application that works in a way that is fundamentally different from the way other Mac applications is frowned upon. For Apple to do it is completely unacceptable.
3. As I've already explained at length, and won't bother reiterating here, the tabbed browsing feature in Mozilla is shamefully incomplete and underimplemented. Apple would have to go back to the drawing board to produce a tabbed browsing interface paradigm that isn't fundamentally broken, as Mozilla's is.
4. Redundancy. Adding tabbed browsing, Mozilla-style, to Safari would necessarily involve having to reproduce most of the functions of WindowServer in Safari itself. There's no justification for reimplementing WindowServer's functionality unless the new way is better, and I've already explained how tabbed browsing is most definitely not.
5. Disproportionate effort. Safari is targeted, first, at the 5 million existing Mac OS X users, followed very shortly by the 20 million Mac OS 9 users that Apple hopes will make the transition this year. Of those 25 million prospective users, I think it's fair to say that maybe 100,000 of them would use tabs. Maybe. (Consider the ratio of IE users to Netscape users. IE does not have tabs. Netscape has tabs, and is freely available to anybody who wants it. Most people, though, don't bother downloading it. The obvious conclusion is that tabbed browsing alone is not a big deal to most people.) So when you consider that maybe a fraction of one percent of all Mac users might use tabbed browsing, it just doesn't seem worth it.
6. Finally, opportunity cost. Time spent implementing tabbed browsing/MDI is time that could have been spent fixing bugs, or adding features that everybody would use. Maybe even features that none of us have ever thought of yet. Consider SnapBack. I had never even thought of such a feature before I saw Safari, and now I use it every single day. To have tabbed browsing-- which, as I've already explained, only a tiny fraction of Mac users would even use-- you implicitly have to give up something else. And based on items 1-5, I'm simply unable to support making that trade-off.
Non-minimized windows do not appear in the dock; only minimized windows appear in the dock. This is unintuitive because when you look for a window, you first have to figure out whether or not it was minimized:
;-)
Sorry, I'm not going to buy that one. See, while I don't agree that this point is counterintuitive at all-- what do you expect, that every window should be listed in the dock??-- compared to how WindowServer handles minimized windows, tabs are even less intuitive. See, the line between a tab and a window cannot be crossed, despite the fact that they are, functionally, exactly the same things. Tabs can't show up in the Window menu. Tabs can't show up in the dock menu. You can't cycle through tabs with command-` and command-shift-`.
So basically what tabs do is that make the user learn an entirely new semantic for dealing with windows. Unnecessarily, as I've pointed out time and again now.
I meant the complex bundle of gui applications you have to download in order to get gcc + make and friends.
One download, one install, and it's bundled with new systems by default. The CD (or CD image, if you're downloading) is called Developer Tools.
There is only the one application that you need for creating software: Project Builder. Well, two if you count Interface Builder, but that's not really necessary. Project Builder provides the front end to jam and gcc (C++, Objective-C, and Java) and gdb. The rest of what's included on Developer Tools is documentation, example code, and a set of secondary tools like a memory leak tracer and profiling tools and such.
My rants are simply an explanation of why I don't like using MacOS X
I appreciate your openness about this, but since this is a Mac thread, and a Safari thread in particular, I hope you can understand why I'm going to be pretty dismissive. If you want to talk about this stuff in the abstract sometime, email me or something. But if we're talking about features that should be included in Apple's bundled web browser for Mac OS X, going off on tangents about why OS X isn't as good as X11 isn't very productive.
if Apple made file forks appear as funny-looking files in HFS as they do in UFS, I might consider allowing OS X machines back into my server room
Forks are completely deprecated. I don't believe I have a single resource fork on any of my machines, except in files like Word documents. Word, being a really poorly Carbonated application, sticks a resource fork on all of its documents, for no reason that I can grasp. You can strip it off with no trouble at all, which means it must not be doing anything important.
You will find forks in Classic applications, of course, but seriously... who uses those any more?
You can at least appreciate that, but other Mac-heads seem to think that anything Apple produces is automatically better for everybody and that writing X11 software is pointless
Both of those things is true. It's just a matter of educating the nonbelievers.
Seriously, pull out the tutorial and do a little Cocoa programming. In a day, you'll be completely and utterly unable to look at any C++ or (especially) X11 source code without getting the shakes. I spent about a year slogging through ViewKit, and after my first day of messing around with Cocoa I was pissed that I'd wasted a year of my life.
Sorry--because you had to go outside of the browser AND select seven SEPARATE items (compared to my one), I'll call it a win--for me.
Absolutely not. You open the bookmarks manager thingy, select something, and hit a key. I click a Finder window, select something (marquee or cmd-A) and hit a key. It's a draw, and you know it.
Instead of being stuck on the theory that they are just not Mac like... give them a try, you might actually like them.
First, even if I loved them I would be unable to use Chimera regularly. The text rendering is just awful, and the fact that they aren't using true Cocoa NSTextField and NSTextArea widgets for HTML forms cramps my style: no inline spell-checking or services.
That said, I really, really tried to love tabs. Just couldn't do it. I constantly found myself getting annoyed at the commandeering of command-W to mean "close tab" when more than one "tab" (is it a tab when there's no tab on your tab?) is open. I wanted to close the window dammit! Not the tab! If I'd wanted to close the tab, I would have said, "close tab." Quit trying to second-guess me!
Then the other issues came into play: tab label truncation, surprisingly slow tab rendering on my older machines-- opening new windows was slower than opening new tabs, but changing to an existing window was faster than changing to an existing tab-- and so on. Finally, when I discovered that I couldn't re-order tabs, I gave it up. I started using OmniWeb full-time despite the fact that it's a lot slower on those old machines.
Now that Safari is here, my girlfriend and I (it's her iBook) can have a browser that is fast, Cocoa-savvy, and easy on the eyes. Before, I could only pick, at best, two of the three.
Except that I don't want a separate proxy. Why should I download, install and worry about yet another piece of software?
;-) Thanks for humoring a grumpy old man.
Well, the only answer I can give to that is that Privoxy-- or a program like it-- lets you do stuff that the built-in filtering functions in a browser would probably never be capable of doing. But your life should only be as complicated as you want it to be; I use Privoxy because I really dislike web ads, and I find that it works really well. If you don't want to mess with it, then by all means use Chimera or OmniWeb. (OmniWeb has kick-ass regex image filtering built in; look under "Privacy" in the preferences.)
Heck Twirlip, I don't even want tabs anymore!
Oh, ha ha.
you argument is basically saying "tabs are useless! they don't help people use their web browsers!"
God, did IQ's drop sharply while I was away? Does nobody on Slashdot read any more?
Are tabs useful? Yes, in the same sense that anything else is useful: the can be used. Are they more useful than multiple windows? No, you can do more with multiple windows if you know how to manage them with features like the dock and the Window menu. Are they as useful as multiple windows? No, because there are some basic things that you can't do with tabs-- reorder them, for example.
So, at best tabs replicate a function that is already implemented in WindowServer. And that's only at best. In practical terms, tabs replicate the functions of WindowServer badly.
Implementing tabs (or any form of MDI) takes time and effort. I am not in favor of reducing the priority of any work on Safari so that tabs can be added. Everything else is more important than tabs, because tabs, despite the fact that a few people like them, bring nothing at all to the application.
with that one statement, i demolish your entire argument.
Evidently you wouldn't recognize my entire argument if it crawled up your leg and bit you on the johnson.
and by the way, who the fuck are you to say that 700 pixels is a reasonable window width?
That's the width to which it seems that a majority of web sites are designed. Go to someplace like Amazon, or Google News, or Yahoo, or Slashdot. The window elements are arranged to fit in a window that is 700 pixels across, +/- 100. Yes, you can "make my window as wide as i damn well please." Yee-haw. You da man, Jethro.
You are being pointedly opinionated throughout this thread and yet you won't consider anyone else's opinion without resorting to insult and condescension.
That's because, with a few notable exceptions, I have yet to hear a contrary opinion that is worth listening to. You've got your guys who wish they were using Windows, your guys who absolutely have to have umty-bump-teen different windows open at the same time, your guys who think OS X sucks because the buttons are round, your guys who think WebCore should have been built on Gecko instead of KHTML, your guys who keep asking when OS X for IA-32 is coming out, and so on. People who are absolutely missing the point.
The point is this: Safari is designed to be a web browser for the 20 million Mac users who are still using OS 9. Are tabs an important feature for those people? No, because those people are running IE 5, and like it. IE for OS 9 is a hell of a browser; fast, standards-compliant, and stable as can be. IE for OS X is hammered shit, slow and buggy. Apple wants people who are migrating from OS 9 to OS X to have the best possible experience, particularly when it comes to surfing the web, and Microsoft just isn't coming through for them.
Life is about trade-offs. Most people who use Safari (or who will use it after it's released, rather) will never use tabs. Of those who do, many will undoubtedly choose another browser for other reasons-- image filtering, the mail client, Gecko, whatever. So you're left with a tiny (in relative terms) group of people who would both want tabbed Safari and use tabbed Safari.
During the time they spend implementing tabs in Safari, Apple could have been fixing bugs, or working on a feature that most people will use, as opposed to a feature that very few people will use.
And yet, we still get a regular influx of "if Safari don't have them tabby thangs, I ain't usin' it, nosiree" bug reports. Some people just aren't getting it, it seems.
You are ignoring the obvious evidence - many many people like and prefer tabbed browsing.
Many as a proportion of Slashdot users? Yes. Many as a proportion of the 20 million Mac OS 9 users that Apple hopes to get migrated over to OS X in the next year? Not exactly.
It should also be said that you are a being somewhat of a dictatorial prick, who cares if people are given the choice to use tabs in Safari?
We all do. See above, re: opportunity costs. This may be a difficult concept for you to grasp at first, particularly if you have ever been on the Mozilla team. It seems like a startling number of Mozilla developers are unclear on the concept of opportunity cost, which explains why it got to 1.0 four years late and weighing in at a whopping 17 MB.
You can click on the page title IN THE TAB and drag it to the tab area of another window (either to another tab OR alongside the other tabs), and voila!
Okay, I stand corrected. That's a good point, and I didn't know about it before. I will no longer complain that you can't drag tabs from one window to another. I will instead concentrate on complaining about all the other stuff I've mentioned, including the fact that you can't reorder tabs in the same window. In fact, if you drag a tab from one window to the same window, as if to move it to another place in the tab bar, Chimera simply creates a new tab and begins downloading the page you dragged. Weird, weird.
I can open seven bookmarked webpages AT ONCE with one click on a bookmark created with the "Bookmark all tabs" feature of Chimera.
You can do exactly the same thing with webloc files, FYI. Select seven of them, then command-O. Poof! Seven nice new windows, each one with a different page in it.
That's pretty close to being a good answer. Because I had to go outside the browser to do it, let's call it a draw, okay?
The popularity of tabs, and the similar reasonings behind liking them, would suggest otherwise.
Are there tabs in IE? No? Well, then I think "popular" is an absurd overstatement of the facts. Tabs are very popular among people who are far, far away from Apple's target audience.
If you believe any of my statements are factually incorrect, then please demonstrate why.
I already have. The horse is dead, put down the bat. Each of your criticisms of one of the five (!) methods of switching between open windows applies to that method and that method only. You seem to be missing the fact that you can use any of those methods at any time. The fact that none of them is perfect amounts to a hill of beans.
And your favorite-- too slow!-- is demonstrably false. So why argue about it any more?
(I always did love that one. "Tabs are faster, because switching windows is more computationally expensive!" Back in the bad old days before Quartz Extreme, that wasn't really true, but it was closer to true than it is now. [In those days, redraw versus restack was pretty much a wash.] Now that every Mac sold stores a buffer of every window in the graphics card and uses the GPU to do the buffer-swapping, it's completely untrue. The CPU cost of switching windows is very, very close to zero.)
Unix Sysadmin. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is a textbook example of one of the types of user Apple is aiming OS X at.
You're mistaken. Apple is aiming OS X at, first, users of OS 9. There's something like 20 million of 'em out there. Next, Apple is aiming OS X at people who have never owned a computer before, and who want to do relatively new tasks like surf the web, listen to music, manage their photographs, and make movies. Next, Apple is aiming OS X at Windows users who are fed up with how hard it is to do the aforementioned tasks with Windows.
Hardcore UNIX users are way, way down the list. Somewhere after professional audio and film/video production (Shake, Final Cut Pro/Express, Logic) and bioscience (BLAST).
I can quite confidently say that OS X's GUI is *much* slower than Windows'
Well, if you say so, then it must be true. Look, I'm not here to teach remedial benchmarking. If you think it's faster, then it's faster. Maybe it's even true in your environment. If you're wrong, then you're wrong. If you're right, then it just doesn't matter, because nobody but nobody uses Macs because they're the fastest. There are, as you may have guessed, other reasons.
I can fix the order of tabs in the taskbar by starting applications and opening windows in that order, and have them remain in that order.
In other words, you are unable to reorder the little widgets in the task bar. I do so love the way you flip things like this on their heads. Instead of "you can't move it," it becomes, "you can fix the order." If I didn't know better, I'd say you're an apologist.
While OS X lets you drag stuff around the Dock (which is nice, and sorely lacking from the Windows taskbar) is doesn't allow any way of pinning an icon in a certain spot.
Okay, I see what you mean now. When you minimize a window, its thumbnail appears at the right side of the dock, next to the trash. When you unminimize it, it disappears from the dock. When you minimize it again, it appears at the right side of the dock. Not very complicated, but I see your point: unminimize a window, then minimize it again, and its thumbnail is now at the right side of the dock instead of in the middle where it originally was. But, in all fairness, I'm not entirely sure how else it could be done, practically speaking.
You are the epitomy of a Mac Wanker.
Fuck you, too.
I've offered many reasons, along with my needs, why I think some ways of doing things are better than others. Your replies, when distilled from direct or implied insults, effectively are "Why would you want to do that ?"
At first, yes, that was my response. Because you were asking for things that are not typical, not even within the range of typical. Then you explained that you work this way, and my response was, in paraphrase, "Fine. Use Windows or UNIX, then. Because a Mac is not for you."
What's the problem?
You are one of the reasons people like me don't like to be thought of as "Mac users".
That's really okay. We Mac users really don't like people such as yourself-- who do nothing but complain about how the Mac isn't like Windows/UNIX/their Toyota/whatever, constantly trying to squeeze the Mac's lima-bean-shaped peg into a round hole-- being thought of as Mac users, either. We're a pretty happy bunch, as a rule, and the degree of discord that your posts would bring to our party just isn't welcome.
It is a free world. Use whatever computer you like. If Windows would better fit your needs and you pick a Mac, expect no sympathy at all from us.
Sorry, but there it is.
You cannot, in OS X, select a window by choosing its name or iconic representation from a list.
That is completely untrue. You can get from one window to another in the same application in five different ways: the Window menu (select by name), the dock menu (functionally similar to the Window menu; select by name), minimizing and unminimizing (select by thumbnail), command-` and command-shift-`, and simple point and click.
I also object to cmd-` because it is not intuitive
None of this stuff is intuitive. Intuition stops with the nipple. In all fairness, though, command-` was started by Microsoft in their Office and IE products; OS X just codified it. So while I think it's fair to say that it's kind of a hidden feature, it's also fair to say that it has lots of precedent behind it.
for one, minimized windows are treated differently from non-minimized windows.
I'm not seeing what you mean here. Can you elaborate?
I'm not certain why Apple created this artificial division between "application" and "window" in OS X, because it leads to inefficiency.
Apple didn't create it in OS X. It goes all the way back to the original Mac OS, and the rationale behind the systemwide menu bar. The running application takes over the menu bar. When MultiFinder was introduced and multitasking became a feature, "running" was changed to "foremost," where it stays today. In fact, OS X brings something brand new to the Mac: window interleaving. In the classic Mac OS, it was not possible to bring only a single window from a background application to the foreground; either all application windows had to be on top, or none could be. WindowServer does things differently, by letting you bring (say) a single Terminal window to the front, leaving all others in the background.
Users certainly will not bring the application to the foreground by clicking on the applications dock icon (or using cmd-tab) and then select the correct window by using the Window menu (or cmd-`) - it's much faster to find the needed window in the background and simply click on it. That is, however, a terribly inefficient with lots of windows.
Wait, wait. You're saying that you have one way of getting to the right window that isn't optimal when there are few windows, and another that isn't optimal when you have many windows. I think perhaps you might be standing on your head. Flip-flop your objections and you will find that they become strengths.
The barrier is also artificial, especially when you're working with stuff like Apple's Developer Studio
Um. Apple's what now? I'm not familiar with a product called "Developer Studio."
In my preferred environment (X11 with a window manager I wrote), I never work with non-maximized windows, I can select windows immediately from an always-accessible hot-corner menu (with no pointless delays on the menu), or a global alt-tab list (using a proper stack which naturally brings MRU applications to within fewer keystrokes (think about that if you haven't realized it already)), and I can organize windows into workspaces at the touch of a key combo.
Boy, oh boy. Should you ever not be using OS X.
Or, perhaps more accurately, should you ever be running X11 on OS X instead of WindowServer.
Makes OS X feel like early 1980s tech with modern visuals.
Sorry, but from your description it sounds like your preferred environment is early 80's technology, with or without modern visuals. Like the other guy, I'm happy that it works for you, but it's not a Mac, and you shouldn't be surprised by this fact.
I will try to make this point as broadly applicable as possible, so that persons like yourself can read it and know where I'm coming from. If you are an unusual user-- meaning you use your computer in a way that's signficantly different from the way the average user uses it-- then you will not be happy with OS X. OS X was designed, from the ground up, to be the most powerful operating system under the hood, but the simplest on top. The number of basic Finder and OS-level features actually dropped, significantly, between OS 9 and OS X. Desk accessories: gone. Control panels: gone. System extensions: gone. Spring-loaded folders: gone, returned by popular demand. Window-shade: gone. Appearance Manager: gone. Apple Menu: gone. Chooser: gone. Balloon help: gone. Control strip: gone. Desktop printing: gone. Do people miss some of them? Sure. I'm sure there are three, maybe four people out there who miss the hell out of window-shading, or the control strip, or desktop printers. Does that mean Apple should weigh OS X down with all of those features? Absolutely not.
I guess what I'm saying is this: if you genuinely want to use a Mac, then let's talk about your ideas. But if you really wish you were using Linux, or Windows, or whatever, then please just use them and be happy. Use the tools that you find most appropriate for the job, okay?
Okay.
Nor do you need [an equivalent of the Window menu for tabs], if you keep your tabs organised by window as I do.
Somehow you've managed to spin a massive omission from the UI into an advantage. I salute your moxie. Didn't work, of course, but damn fine try.
And, as mentioned, just because the OS gives me several different methods doesn't mean any of them are any good for what I want to do.
It doesn't mean anybody else wants to do what you want to do, either.
Your argument-- with all the gross factual inaccuracies strained out-- basically boils down to this: "A car sucks because it can only leave the ground for brief periods of time, you can't drop bombs from it, and you can't get to and from an aircraft carrier with it." Gee whiz, Sparky, have you ever considered the possibility that you might be happier with a plane?
I'm having a problem because the tools in the GUI to do this are inadequate. And it is a problem of the GUI, because I don't have the same problem in the Windows and KDE GUIs.
Then I ask you, with all sincerity, respect, and politeness, to shut the fuck up and go use Windows or KDE. If the tool doesn't work for you, use another one. You are decidedly in the minority, to the tune of about 4,999,999 to one, plus or minus a margin of sampling error.
I'm sorry if you don't understand, but trying to claim a flat, unordered and dynamic collection of windows is is any way *more* organised is just plain wrong.
What does the top of your desk look like? Does it have papers and other sundries on it arranged in stacks? Or does it consist merely of a series of open bins that you can put things in? I would wager that your desktop is flat, just like everybody else's. And you get by by putting things in stacks, just like everybody else does. And yet, somehow, you are able to get through your day. Amazing, huh?
I do, and tabs are, thus far, the best available solution on my preferred platform.
As I said before, it sounds like a Mac is the wrong tool for you. Multiple tabbed monitoring windows that never change? Forty-plus terminal windows? I don't know what the hell you're doing, friend, but it's not typical desktop computer use.
I fail to see how the "your opinion is different to mine, so you're wrong" attitude you have is any different.
My attitude is, "Your opinion is different from virtually everybody's, so you're wrong."
Now we get to the good stuff. The point was raised that Windows does a better job of managing open windows than the Mac does. The question was posted: how? The responses:
It's faster.
Demonstrably false. Move on.
It groups similar windows.
So does your Mac. See the application icon in the dock, and the "hide" and "hide others" functions.
It allows me to move quickly to *any* window by either mouse or keyboard.
Haven't you been reading? So. Does. Your. Mac. In five different ways, any one of which you can use on any occasion, depending on your situation, your mood, or the tides.
It allows me to order the tabs in the taskbar (only kludgily, but that's better than not at all)
I don't have any idea what that means. Sorry. Last time I used Windows, those little thingies-- what are they, anyway; icons? menus?-- appear in the task bar in the order that they were opened, and cannot be rearranged. This may be different in XP; I never noticed one way or the other. In any case, the Mac lets you drag icons around the dock to your heart's content, and leaves them where they were put until you move them again.
The placement of things in the taskbar is almost completely static
Apart from sounding like a contradiction of your previous point, this is substantively the same on a Mac. The placement of things on the dock is completely static until you move them, that is; they do not reorder themselves.
It allows me to completely maximise windows.
You win. Because the Mac doesn't let you do this, it must suck. I apologize for ever doubting you.
In conclusion: please stop interjecting your opinions, which thus far have been based solely on some highly specialized and absurdly atypical situations, into a discussion of the interface of a general-purpose application. Your opinions simply don't count, because the vast majority of users don't exist in an environment even remotely similar to yours. You are at the far end of the bell curve. You are outside the standard deviation. Your data point will be weighted completely out of existence. So the only possible outcome will be for those of us who listen to say, "Whatever, dude, go back to Windows if it makes you happier," and for you to go away frustrated and disenfranchised.
But what the hell, it's a free country, gripe all you want.
Your dumb conclusion is almost as dumb as your main facts
Wow. With that kind of wit and charisma, how can I hope to win an argument against you?
Good thing I've got a soft spot for lost causes.
Apple could have easily, (and legaly) built OS X on Linux, and simply kept aqua back, closed source, just like they did with BSD.
Maybe, if they'd been extremely careful to do everything just right. They still would have had to use the FreeBSD user environment, because the GNU one is just too restrictive (refer to the infamouse OpenSSL/GNU conflict).
But the most important point is one that you made in passing: "The only thing they wouldn't be able to do was release Darwin under a the APL [sic]." Apple released Darwin and other open source components under the APSL for a reason. Had they thrown their lot in with any GPL component or library, it would have "infected" the entire kernel or userland or whatever, making it impossible for Apple to retain ownership and control of their code.
And apple isn't the biggest Unix software company in the world
No? Computerworld, August 30, 2002: "Rendezvous isn't Apple's first foray into the open-source community. With the release of Mac OS X, Apple became the largest vendor of Unix in the world."
they're merely the largest growing due entirely to dumb looking computers (iMac, etc.)
Wow. You really got me there. We'd better not give Apple any credit for their accomplishments, because their computers look "dumb." You are absolutely right.
Pfff.
Your arguments are all derived from the way you -- a relatively expert power user -- utilizes his screen real-estate with maximum efficiency.
Well, I don't know what else to say to that except for "nuh-uh." I won't go into details in the interest of protecting my privacy, but I have done and continue to do more UI work than you are aware.
Titles are not always nessesary, Infact, I don't even read the most of the time. I go by were they are.
The spatial organization argument is bogus, and it's incompatible with another major pro-tabs argument: logical organization. Windows can be put anywhere on the screen you like, so it's easy to remember that this was over here and that was over there. That's one of the main benefits of moveable windows in a UI.
If the big deal about tabs is that they always show up in the order that you opened them, then that invalidates the "tabs are good for logical organization" argument. Tabs that always show up in the order that you opened them are not good for logical organization; you can't stack them or arrange them in any way. In fact, you can't interact with them at all except to open and close, reveal and hide them.
My bet is on the 2nd to 4th ones. Of course. I would have a more accurate guess if I had knowen when that window was opened.
This is the crux of my point. If you want to keep track, in your head, of which window is which, then by all means keep using tabs. Myself, I don't like having to do that. I have a computer that's supposed to do that for me. That's why I use the Window menu. It shows me which window is which, when I need to know. Unlike tabs, which are incapable of showing me what I need to know when I have more than a few (i.e., 6-8, depending on window size and title lengths) windows open.
Maybe tabs suck for YOU, but they obviously don't suck for everyone.
I'm sorry, but you've got it backwards. Tabs suck for some very objective reasons, outlined here and elsewhere. The fact that you, and a few others, have adopted them as a workaround for OS's with inadequate window management features, and have learned to live with their critical limitations, does not mean that tabs don't suck.
On an OS like Windows or Solaris, not having tabs may suck worse than having them. But on an OS like OS X, where the OS provides you with all the window juggling services you require, tabs are at best redundant and at worst a huge waste of time and resources on the part of the developers.
If you're so enamoured with tabs, find one thing-- just one thing!-- that you can do with them that you can't do better without them. Just one!
You obviously don't own a 600Mhz iBook.
No, I own a 400 MHz iMac, and a 300 MHz iBook. Blueberry. What of it?
Take a look at amazon.com or google.com or any other site that has been designed around users, most of them have tabs, because of the advantages they offer over things like menus. (menus are generally used for commands, not for navigation).
;-)
The purpose of a tabbed interface is to reduce complexity. With a tabbed interface, you can take a set of controls that are logically or functionally related and present them to the user all at once, but separately from other sets of controls to which they are not related. For example, consider the Network pref pane. On my computer, I see four tabs: TCP/IP, AppleTalk, Proxies, AirPort. (Yours will differ depending on whether you're using an AirPort interface or a wired interface or a VPN interface or what.) When I click the TCP/IP tab, I see controls related to TCP/IP settings: IP address, gateway, and so on. When I click the AppleTalk tab, I see controls related to AppleTalk.
I do not, however, have a tab called "Display" on which I see screen resolution setting controls. That tab is on a completely separate pref pane, the Displays pref pane. It would make no sense to put the Display tab on the Network pref pane.
So what's my point? That tabs are an organizational feature, not a navigational feature. When you go to Amazon's web site and see something that vaguely resembles a row of tabs across the top, what you are seeing is essentially an organizational structure. Clicking on the "Books" tab (assuming there is such a thing; I don't feel like increasing Amazon's site traffic just to make a point) shows you content and controls related to books. Clicking the "Underwear" tab shows you content and controls related to underwear.
Using tabs in a tabbed browser, though, is different. In that context, you're trying to use tabs as a document management feature. Tabs don't work well for that purpose, as discussed at great length elsewhere.
So, in summary, tabs as an organizational feature are fine, whether in a program UI or a web page or a day planner. Tabs as a document/window management feature are not fine; they don't work, and even in the limited contexts in which they do, the existing features work better.
Even so, I also don't understand your logic behide; that if a lot of users have never head of tabs, than they would not benifit from them.
I assert that most Safari users would not use tabs if they were available. Why? Because we have been writing document-based applications for the Mac for nearly 20 years, and never once has the question of an MDI-style interface, tabbed or otherwise, come up. MDI was the standard on Windows for many years, until they deprecated it around the time of Windows 95. (I don't recall precisely when Microsoft's position shifted from MDI to mixed MDI/SDI to don't-use-MDI, but it happened around that time.) During that time, did users clamor for MDI on the Mac? No. Web browsers have been around for more than a decade now; tabbed browsing only appeared recently. And where did it appear? On Mozilla, where the limitations of new window spawning are well documented, and on Windows, where the task bar makes managing several windows a challenge.
Has there ever been a native Mac document-based application-- i.e., one designed on the Mac, not designed on Windows or UNIX and ported, as in Chimera-- that had any sort of MDI interface? I don't know. But I can say with confidence that no major application had one.
The gist of my argument is that MDI, and tabbed browsing which is a specific instance of MDI, have been around for a long time. The Mac has been around for even longer. During all that time, has MDI ever been an issue? No. Will adding tabs to Safari suddenly bring out a hitherto unrecognized need on the part of Mac users to use MDI? No.
So if Apple were to take the time to implement MDI (tabbed or otherwise) correctly, a very small, albeit vocal, fraction of their users would benefit from it. Meanwhile, bugs that should have been fixed in WebCore went unfixed because the programmers were working on MDI instead. Idiotic trade-off, that.
Most people I know have never hear of linux, does that mean linux is useless?
Dear Lord, why dost thee tempt me this way?
I have opened more thna a few tabs, and still been able to read them.
Good for you. Open some more. Can you still read them? Open some more. Sooner rather than later you're going to find that the labels on your tabs are truncated to the point of being unusable. The question of where that point is depends merely on your window width. A reasonable window width-- 700 pixels or so-- means you can get about four tabs with average-length labels without truncation. The more your add, or the narrower your window is, the more truncation you get. And it's not an absurd limit, either, like 100 tabs or something like that. It's on the order of 6-8 in a window of reasonable size.
That is, in a word, dumb.
And abut the window menu, one could also add one for the tabs.
Or one could just extract one's head from one's anus and use the feature that is already there, staring you in the bloody face, instead of clamoring for developers with better things to do to implement an inferior feature that does, at best, exactly the same thing. That's an option, too, you know.
That shortcut is a pain, it's not something that I can do fast.
Then don't use it. The OS provides you with four completely independent ways of navigating from one window to another, not counting pointing-and-clicking. If you don't like the keyboard cycle shortcut, use the Window menu, or the dock menu, or use minimized windows. Or, as I said, just point and click.
It is very clear to me that you have no backgound in usability or GUI design.
Heh. I'm curious as to how you'd reach that conclusion.
I truly can't understand the mentality behind you saying that way I work is horrible, it just makes no sence, you don't even know what I do, what if I just did word processing all day?
Then I would ask you politely to shut the fuck up about web browsers, as you do not use them. But since you do make a great deal of noise about web browsers, and tabbed interfaces in web browsers in particular, it is clear that you use multiple windows. And yet you say that you zoom every window on your computer. That is, frankly, really dumb. You're just making things harder for yourself. Use the computer in the way it was designed to be used, and you will find that your life becomes easier. Suddenly having four windows open at the same time will seem, as if by magic, to be less of a onerous burden on your weary shoulders.
I can't fit both a browser and my text editor in the screen at the some time without it being too cramped, so I might as well maxmise both and flick between them.
How do you "flick between them?" Surely not by using the (gasp!) keyboard shortcut, hmm? The very one-- well, one identical to the very one-- that you said "is a pain, it's not something that I can do fast?" And that you went on to say is, "easy to make a mistake, and it requires extra effort to correct it?" That keyboard shortcut?
I'll repeat myself just one more time: learn how to use the computer. Do not sit down at a Mac and try to use it like you would use Windows. They are not the same. The Mac is different. Learn to use a Mac. You will find that tasks you currently believe to be burdensome are, in fact, quite easy.
Simply pause the mouse pointer over the truncated tab for a very brief moment, and the FULL name of the truncated tab/webpage appears just below the tab, inside of a yellow box.
For crying out loud, have you lost all sense of reason? How in the name of hell is this better than the systemwide Window menu, or the dock menu, both of which show complete names without truncation, both of which all Cocoa applications get for free, with complete universal access support, both of which work in a consistent manner across all Cocoa (and even Carbon, I believe) applications?
This just stands as even more proof that people who are rabid about tabs-- as this poster appears to be-- just don't know how to use a Mac. If you're on Windows, where there is no systemwide Window menu and (in pre-XP days) the task bar rapidly becomes crowded by multiple windows, then tabs make sense. But this is Mac OS X. The OS does helpful things for you like providing menus to manage your windows. Use them!
Twirlip, had to give you some props.
;-)
Thanks for saying so. As confident as I am in my opinions, I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only person who holds them.
At 1280x854, full-screen is out, tabs are the way I've found to manage all the windows without having to resize/drag each individual window when I move a new object/window to the desktop.
I have to confess that I didn't really follow that. Can you explain how you deal with windows in a little more detail?
If there were a way to enhance the 'window' menu to provide some of the functionality of tabs, I'm be much more in favor of that.
I think I would happily throw my support behind an enhancement to the window server that lets users deal with windows in a new way. Consider Photoshop's palettes, for example. Some time ago-- version 4 or 5 or something-- Adobe came up with this neat idea of stackable palettes. Each palette occupies its own utility window, but one palette can be dragged on top of another to form a tabbed palette. I've seen people who kept each palette in its own window, and people who drag all the palettes together to form one monster uber-palette. I think I would be interested in an enhancement to the window server to let any Cocoa application manage its windows that way. The default behavior would be to keep windows separate, but dragging one window over another (possibly with a modifier key) would let you turn two windows into a single "window stack," and to cycle among them somehow. (Tabs aren't the right answer, for reasons I've already gotten into. Truncation sucks.)
But since I have no idea how window server works, I don't know if this would be a hugely impossible task, or merely a very difficult one.
I wouldn't know (beyond saying "One of the 3 NST pages, obviously"), but I'd assume you do since you're the one who made the tabs.
If they were windows instead of tabs, I could go to the Window menu or the dock menu to find out. But since they're tabs, I have to either click on them one at a time, or cycle through them using a keyboard shortcut. This is a major shortcoming of the tabbed interface.
The point of the discussion as I see it is that you don't think tabs serve any useful function.
Then let me be more clear about what I'm saying. Tabs serve no useful function that is not better served by the various and several existing features of the window server. The fact that they let you do the same thing in a different way is fine and good, but since they solve no problems, the degree to which they cause usability problems means that they have no place, in their current state, in an application like Safari.
I'm saying they don't hinder YOU if YOU don't use them.
Opportunity costs, my friend. For every minute that an Apple programmer spends working on tabs, that's one minute not spent fixing bugs in the model or view classes, or the renderer. If tabs were a good thing-- that is, if they brought something new or improved to the table-- then I'd be all for them. But since they do not, and since implementing them would take valuable time away from more important work, I oppose their inclusion wholeheartedly.
I won't use Safari until they're included.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's not a very big deal. Apple isn't writing Safari for a few thousand former-Mozilla users. Apple is writing Safari for over 5 million former IE users. If you don't like it, don't use it! Nobody will take offense at your decision.
My girlfriend is the antithesis of a "power user," and she'd rather...
Yeah, I have a girlfriend too, and she loves Safari. I showed her tabs once, in Chimera, and her response was, "Why would I go to all that trouble when I can just open a new window?" So I guess our anecdotal evidence cancels out.
The primary functional advantages of tabs are a) speed of access, b) organisation and c) a reduction in window clutter. And, as I've stated before, since OS X's task-switching paradigms still all suck, (c) is in IMHO one of the most important.[windows] fill the screen with wasted space
I do not know what the hell you are talking about here. How do you waste screen space with multiple windows? If you want to use all of your screen for a single window, go for it. Windows are resizeable. If, on the other hand, you only need to see something small, make the window small and put it in the corner or something where you can see it behind your main window. Wasted space? What?
[windows are] difficult to navigate between in large numbers
First, the OS provides you with no fewer than four different ways of dealing with windows. One, the Window menu. (Menus have been proven time and again in useability studies to be easier to use than in-window widgets, both for the disabled and for mundanes.) Two, the dock menu. Works the same as the window menu, but it's accessed by control-clicking the application icon in the dock. Three, minimizing windows to the dock. This also addresses the oft-cited clutter issue. Four, the command-` and command-shift-` shortcuts for cycling and toggling. Very handy, those.
And finally, as demonstrated elsewhere tabs are completely unacceptable in large numbers. Depending on window size, the tab labels start to get truncated at four to six open tabs, and by the time you get to 10 or 12, chances are fair that they're completely obscured. And because applications like Mozilla have no tab-based equivalent of the Window menu or the dock menu, you're stuck clicking to find or cycling through tabs. Terrible.
Discrete windows also lose out because they cannot be collected together into organisational groups under OS X.
You can stack your windows however you like. Here's a quick taste test. Open a Chimera window with four tabs. Now move two of the tabs to another window. We're trying to stay organized, right? So put two of the tabs in one window and two in the other. Oops. Can't do it without opening a new window with two tabs and cutting-and-pasting some URL's. With windows, on the other hand, I can make a pile in a corner of my screen or whatever, stacking and restacking to suit my purposes.
I still didn't have anywhere near enough desktop real estate to keep just my active terminal windows all accessible
I don't know what to say except, "maybe you were doing something wrong."
Multiple windows are "self-limiting" because after a certain number they become time-consuming and frustrating to task switch between.
That's simply bogus. Sorry, but it's true. As I said, the OS gives you no fewer than four ways of getting from one window to another, and that doesn't count the simple expedient of point-and-click. All of these methods scale to a practically unlimited number of windows; the Window menu and dock menu, for example, can show you any number of window titles without truncating their names. (Well, you have to truncate past about 80-100 characters, but that's only because screens are only so wide.) I don't know why you have a problem dealing with open windows, but it's not the fault of the OS or the application.
The problem with your solution is the "cycling" part
If you don't want to use the shortcuts, then done. As I said, the OS provides you with no fewer than four separate ways to get from one window to another, not counting pointing-and-clicking.
Think in terms of multiple windows full of tabs, with each window carrying a certain type of page.
Doesn't work that way. Pages are opened by clicking links. When you click a link with Mozilla, your only choices are to open it in the current window, replacing the page you're currently looking at; to open it in another window; or to open it in another tab in the current window. You can't open a link in another tab in another window. So what you call a powerful organizational feature is really nothing more than the illusion thereof.
Tabs are a good work-in-progress solution to the problem of managing and efficiently accessing a large number of active web pages.
Exactly. Like I said, tabs are a bad solution-- "work-in-progress" doesn't begin to cover the ramifications of a UI design that hasn't even been throught out yet, much less implemented completely-- to a problem that we don't even have.
In all honesty, if you truly find multiple discrete browser windows not only more usable, but workable at all under OS X, then I can only assume you rarely have a significant number of active windows open at any time.
Ah, I see. "Your opinion differs from mine, so you must not be as sophisticated as I am." Very mature.
But, on the whole, they are a good solution to a problem faced by many users.
From my experience, which is not complete by any means but I think does provide some representative samples-- people who find tabs to be an enabling solution are handicapped by the fact that they don't know how to use the features that the OS already provides.
Thus far, the only real criticisms I can see you have made of tabs is that...
Your assessment of my criticisms is, unfortunately, not accurate. If you'd like to know what I'm saying about tabs, please go back and read my posts again.
Managing large numbers of windows is one of only a few glaring faults that exist in the OS X UI.... It is something Windows handles *much* better, I think.
How? How does Windows handle it much better? Because I'm fairly confident that you're going to say, "Windows lets you do X," and I'm going to say, "You can do the same thing, or something completely equivalent, under OS X by doing thus-and-so." Let's see if I'm right.
If Safari's 1.0 release doesn't have better cookie management, a popup whitelist, and image blocker, then you will find some people going back to Chimera. I know I will.
Yes, of course, it makes much more sense to trade in a good browser (spell-checking in text fields alone is worth the price of admission) in for an also good but considerably less so browser based on features that really belong in the proxy anyway. Get thee over to the Privoxy home page and give it a download. Problems solved.
One big-ass caveat, though. The build of Privoxy that is available on their web site includes some OS X features of questionable worth. The installation package, for example, does some things that it shouldn't do, and the start scripts aren't technically compatible with Jaguar's new SystemStarter. (They don't cause a problem, they're just not technically right.) I have fixed these problems in the copy I got from CVS, but I have yet to submit my changes back to the project. So buyer beware and all that.
Is there any reason why Chimera could not be ported to GNUstep?
Sorry to give the obvious answer, but it depends on whether Chimera has any Carbon code in it. If Chimera is entirely Cocoa-fied, then a port should be pretty easy, modulo some AppKit features like the toolbar that I don't believe have counterparts in GNUstep.
Tabs are better than windows because all the tabs can be seen at once, and the user can see exactly what they want, and reach for it with a single click.
Wrong. If you have more than a few tabs open, their names are truncated to the point where you cannot tell which is which. And unlike with windows, there is no "tab" menu to allow you to see all the names in full.
Also, usability studies have time and again demonstrated that it's easier to hit a systemwide menu bar item than an in-window item. People think that just because in-window items are closer to the point of focus that they're easier to use; this is not true. Systemwide menu bar items do not move; you don't have to "aim" to hit them. Not to mention the fact that the systemwide menu bar already has a usability infrastructure built up around it to allow things like full keyboard navigation for the disabled and such. No tab interface has that.
Cycling through each window, to see if it's the right one is a pain. If you fuck-up, you have to go though the entire cycle again!
Wrong. Command-` cycles one way through the list; command-shift-` cycles the other way.
This is one of thing that I prefer on Win than Mac. All my apps open maximised
Horrible. I don't know what kind of work you do, but when I use my computer I almost always have two or more windows arranged for use at once. For example, when I'm not goofing off as I am as I write this, I'm working on a programming project. I have my project window open over here, and my interface window open there, and two browser windows with documentation in them over here and here. I want to see all of these at once. Zooming any of them up to fill the screen would, at best, be a huge waste of screen real-estate.