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Mozilla Preparing To Scrap Tabbed Browsing?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon May 18, 2009 07:36 AM
from the if-it-ain't-broke-fix-it dept.
Barence writes "Mozilla Labs has launched a design competition that aims to find an alternative to tabbed browsing. 'Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin internet, where ten browser sessions were "many browser sessions,"' Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website. 'Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless.' Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces)."
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  • by ionix5891 (1228718) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:37AM (#27994077)

    We need a ribbon!

    • by sakdoctor (1087155) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:42AM (#27994155)

      Can we call it the awesome ribbon?

      • by ta bu shi da yu (687699) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:43AM (#27994163) Homepage

        From the article:

        Mozilla has already given serious thought to the idea of replacing tabbed browsing itself. Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces).

        Oh man. The very, very first thing I ever do on a fresh Windows XP installation is turn off folder grouping. And now Firefox wants to implement this stupidity? NOT a good idea.

        Note to the Mozilla devs: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

        • by AliasMarlowe (1042386) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:57AM (#27994365) Journal

          Note to the Mozilla devs: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

          More directly: if it ain't broke, don't break it!

          With all the 16:9 and 16:10 wide format screens now, moving the tabs to the side would make more sense. A lot more can be usefully fit in that way (about 30-60, depending on font preference & screen size), even with the current tabbing metaphor. In fact, it would work for me on a regular 4:3 screen as well, since I usually keep the web page displayed in a sort of "portrait" aspect ratio, leaving a lot of spare room beside the browser - enough for tabs to fit easily.

          • by hitmark (640295) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:02AM (#27994455) Journal

            and then we get into hissy fits as more and more designers design pages based on their shiny new 16:9 display...

            designs that break on screens that are 4:3 or in any other way width "challenged".

          • Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Informative)

            by mspohr (589790) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:06AM (#27994521)
            Tree Style Tab does this... it's a very nice Add-on.

            Tree Style Tab [mozilla.org]

            • I use Tab Mix Plus [mozilla.org] and Colorful Tabs [mozilla.org].

              More than 200 CPU and memory hogging bugs in Firefox

              Mozilla Labs seems a little like Microsoft: They want to change things that don't matter, rather than fix the huge, serious bugs, like the CPU and memory hogging bug. There are more than 200 CPU and memory hogging bugs [mozilla.org] listed in Bugzilla. There are more than 200 CPU hogging bugs, but Mozilla Labs only allows you to see the first 200.

              If Mozilla doesn't allow visitors coming from Slashdot to see the bug list directly, put this URL into your browser: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org [mozilla.org], simply enter CPU into the "Find a bug" field, and click on "Find".

              Yesterday I had a few Windows and tabs open, but my computer seemed very slow. I discovered that Firefox was taking 89% of the CPU, doing nothing! I first reported the CPU hogging bug in version 1.9, perhaps 7 years ago. My experience is that CPU hogging in Firefox has become much worse since version 3.0.5, and worse than that in version 3.0.10.

              Firefox, the laptop killer

              The first component in a laptop to fail is often the fan. Usually a replacement fan is expensive to buy and install. Firefox's CPU hogging causes laptop fans to run much more often, and thus reach their end of life sooner.

              In my experience with hundreds of programs, Firefox is the only one that consistently hogs the CPU.
              • by MindKata (957167) on Monday May 18 2009, @09:55AM (#27996721) Journal
                "If Mozilla really hates the way the default tabs function, they need to start looking at Tree Style Tabs for a replacement."

                I wish they could just *let users choose* which way *they wish to work*.

                For example, I use tabs a lot. I don't want tree tabs on by default, its as bad as grouping on the task bar (which is off on any machine I have to use). I want a minimalist user interface, I don't want any more levels of indirection added. (e.g. Each tree click etc.. forces more interactions). But even if I do want grouping, I can do that now. I hit CTRL-N and I've got a new group of tabs, which I do sometimes already use.

                Keeping it minimalist makes it easier to use, a smaller download and faster to learn. We want more people to move onto Firefox. Adding ever more complexity risks alienating ever more non-technical users. If people want additional extra complex functionality, then let them have the ability to choose to add it in a modular way. (Again that idea of user choice).

                If they want to improve peoples work flow, they would do far better to fix these kinds of bugs:
                (1) drag and drop into sub folders can sometimes fail due to boundaries of sub-folders being outside folders and so windows close and sub folders get lost, before drop operation can complete.

                (2) Creating new bookmark folders sometimes fails to allow drag and drop into them, as if they are not there (work around is CTRL-N and then drag and drop into new version of bookmark folder lists).

                (3) Creating new bookmark folders some times gets duplicated.

                (4) Sometimes fails to hold open selected currently opened main bookmark folder. This has the effect of again droping windows when cursor moves left/right even within opened list window.

                I could go on, but these bugs have been there for a long time and each slow up work flow.

                If they want to improve peoples work flow, they would do better to fix these kinds of bugs rather than find new ways to complicate the design, but then almost all programmers know its so much more fun to writing new functionality than it is to fix existing bugs.
          • by MBGMorden (803437) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:15AM (#27994655)

            Problem with your idea is that current tabs have a width to height ratio of about 5:1. Without implementing tricks that a lot of users won't like (popping out the tab on a mouseover for example, or worse, having the tabs read down sideways), you can't really make the tabs that much more narrow.

            So yes, there is more physical screen real estate from side to side, but from a percentage of the total dimension standpoint, it makes sense to keep the horizontal rather than vertical. Or more simply, 100 pixels shaved off the side of my screen is a bigger negative to me than 20 shaved off the top.

          • by Peet42 (904274) <Peet42@@@Netscape...net> on Monday May 18 2009, @08:34AM (#27995029)

            it would work for me on a regular 4:3 screen as well, since I usually keep the web page displayed in a sort of "portrait" aspect ratio,

            Good for you. I, on the other hand, have two 24" screens side-by-side in portrait mode. I'm already pissed off by how much space the redesign of iGoogle wastes, and adding space for tabs on the left of that will effectively lose me a quarter of one of my screens.

            • by Megane (129182) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:26AM (#27994869)
              I should clarify that I'm not saying this change would be useless for everybody, just that I don't want to have the current tab system forcibly taken away and replaced with this. Consider the windows task bar that I mentioned. You can choose which way you want it. Microsoft hasn't (yet) forced you to put it only on the right side of the screen. Same with the OS X Dock, though originally you had to to do tricky stuff to move it.
        • Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Interesting)

          by mysidia (191772) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:00AM (#27994423)

          What they really need to do is making "tabs" VS "bookmarks" seamless.

          The concept of a live bookmark comes to mind.

          Bookmarks that when you click, act just like tabs, the site should just pop open, in the exact same state as it was when the bookmark was saved, scroll position, etc.

          Then comes the possibility of "archiving" tabs.

          i.e. tabs that haven't been accessed in a few days get transformed into "Live bookmarks" that you can call up by using your location bar to "Search for tabs"

          • by ta bu shi da yu (687699) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:02AM (#27994457) Homepage

            Ever heard of opening a new window?

            I concede that Sidebars, as mentioned by someone else further on down, would be OK if they are optional. But for most people, the solution to the problem is not really a solution at all. Tabs are popular because (gasp!) they work extremely well in a browser. Why do you think that Microsoft eventually capitulated and included them in IE7?

            I guess what surprises me the most is that I'd have thought the biggest problem with having 20 tabs open is... you have 20 tabs open. Are you seriously reading all those websites at the one time? If so, then you must have the worst case of ADHD I've ever come across! Please, get some help :-)

            • It's not that I'm reading them all at the same time, it's that I can queue up things to read. For example, me on Slashdot back in 2004 when I still used IE:

              1. Open Slashdot
              2. See interesting headline
              3. Click article (*gasp*)
              4. Read article
              5. Click back
              6. If content was interesting and there might be a good discussion, click Comments link
              7. Read, reply, repeat.
              8. GOTO 1 unless I've gone back far enough to come across stuff I read/commented on yesterday.

              Now with tabs I just run through the front pages of all my normal news sites until I hit old articles middle-clicking on everything that looks interesting, then I swing back to the beginning and read through every tab. I know it's technically the same experience as opening multiple windows, but tabs feel cleaner to me as a matter of personal opinion.

          • by zwei2stein (782480) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:03AM (#27994467) Homepage

            Simple fix: Adopt video-only policy for porn.

          • by PsychoSlashDot (207849) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:05AM (#27994505)

            but it is broke. I have 4 firefox windows each with over 20 tabs, and I have 2 IE8 windows also with 0ver 20 tabs each. Last, I have 5 bookmark folders of tab windows so I did not have to keep more windows open. I need to find a new way to deal with this.

            Close something.

            I'm not being sarcastic. You're telling us your productivity flow involves 120+ simultaneous web views. Your workflow is what's broken, not the browser.

            • by AmiMoJo (196126) <mojo.world3@net> on Monday May 18 2009, @08:23AM (#27994821) Homepage

              There are times I have 50+ tabs open, but I certainly don't find them "useless" as the summary states. For example, when browsing a web site with thumbnails I just middle click all the interesting ones and then go through them choosing the ones I want with ctrl-w.

              Right now I'm shopping for electronic components and it helps to have about 20 tabs with different suppliers and different sections of each suppliers web site open. It saves a lot of clicking on the back button.

      • by foniksonik (573572) on Monday May 18 2009, @09:07AM (#27995721) Homepage Journal

        A ribbon is a dynamic horizontal menu. It is contextual to what you are doing in your workspace. There is nothing dynamic about a set of urls that the user has selected.. it is very static. There is nothing contextual about browser features for each url selected.

        A ribbon does not fit the UI needs of a browser.

        A ribbon could be used if you were to integrate a browser within a productivity application... at which point the user would be switching to the 'browser' workspace wherein the options for 'browsing' would be presented within the ribbon menu, replacing whatever options were present in the other tools.

      • Re:We need a taskbar (Score:5, Informative)

        by Firethorn (177587) on Monday May 18 2009, @09:46AM (#27996549) Homepage Journal

        Personally, I'm just the opposite. As I'm browsing through something, I tend to open up new tabs for stuff that's interesting, because I don't want to interupt my reading of the current page. Then I go through the tabs, closing them when I'm finished.

        Then there's the slashdot thing - where I use a new tab to post a comment without losing my place on the thread.

        • by gfxguy (98788) on Monday May 18 2009, @10:16AM (#27997113)

          Me, too.

          I rarely get up to "20" open tabs, but I really very much prefer 20 tabs than a task bar with 20 Firefox buttons on it, all of them squished so much that you just see the little Firefox logo with no meaningful text.

          At least on the tabs you can see the icons for each website.

          No matter... if they remove built in tabs, someone will add it as an add-on.

          • Re:We need a taskbar (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Curtman (556920) * on Monday May 18 2009, @11:03AM (#27998079)
            Have you seen the "Tree Style Tab [mozilla.org]" addon? I just found it the other day, and I'm not sure how I lived without it.

            This provides tree-style tab bar, like a folder tree of Windows Explorer. You can collapse/expand sub trees, etc.. Very nice.
  • Not quite right (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Masami Eiri (617825) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `vaw.niarb'> on Monday May 18 2009, @07:41AM (#27994137) Journal
    Sounds less like ditching tabs, and more like adding grouping. Make it optional, and I don't see a problem.
  • Bah (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MyLongNickName (822545) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:42AM (#27994149) Journal

    Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website. "Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.

    And here we see the next step in FireFox going down the drain. I want a browser not an OS. FireFox is bloated and crash prone, even more so that IE7. If Opera had the plug-in capability of Firefox, I'd move back to it.

  • Stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)

    Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces).

    Insanely stupid IMO! I personally because I want browser space, totally remove every toolbar - including the tab bar (scroll through them with Ctrl-Tab in Opera) - and now some idiots want to waste more space.

    I don't want a 'Safari look' on my browser, I just want it to be functional and work the way I want. What turns me on is the fact that I can open more than 10 tabs freely on a PC with 512 megs of RAM and not be hogged.

    Sadly, more and more people turn on to other browsers because of their pimped looks (IE) only later to find out that they're peace of crap in the features included.

  • by Manip (656104) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:44AM (#27994175)

    Traditionally when competition exists it pushes the technology (or industry) forward but unfortunately that hasn't been the case with browsers.

    While browsers improve they also remain very much the same. If you pull up a copy of Netscape Navigator 4.0 you'll find that most things are still identical to today's browsers.

    Just to give one example, look at bookmarks, they rarely have even basic search capabilities (e.g. title) and never have more sophisticated searches (e.g. content). Organisation is horribly difficult and finding anything often takes longer than googling it.

    To give another example, history, it is a basic list of websites you've visited but often containing random javascript pages and giving no visual representation of what you visited (visual memory is useful). Search is bad here too.

    I could list more and more examples but I think you get my point.

  • Group by site? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by meringuoid (568297) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:46AM (#27994199)
    Whenever I run into massive multiplication of tabs, it's rarely dozens of entirely separate sites. I'll have three or four /. stories open, and I'll have opened a few subthreads in each one to follow them separately. I'll have several Wikipedia pages open. I'll have the BBC writeups of all football matches of interest from the previous day. So, dozens of tabs in all, but mostly from the same few domains.

    Obvious solution, group them together by site. Instead of a dozen separate tabs which say 'Slashdot Co...' have one tab saying 'slashdot.org' and when I click on that it can show me everything I have open. In fact this is too obvious to be a new idea: surely someone's already programmed an extension that makes this happen?

    • Re:Group by site? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nedlohs (1335013) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:07AM (#27994525)

      Except that when I have that grouping by site makes little sense.

      There's a slashdot article, the link from the article (no, seriously), maybe some additional links open, maybe a wikipedia page if something was interesting enough, a google search page and maybe a couple of result pages open if it was *really* interesting.

      Then there's a google maps page, a google search page, some real estate lising pages.

      Then a bugzilla page, a calendar, some task pages, a google search page, some search result pages, maybe some mailing list archive pages, and the damn documentation for the obscure library function I actually was looking for.

      The groupings are not by site, they're by activity with multiple overlapping sites in each activity. Of course at some point multiple browser *windows* makes sense...

  • by Viol8 (599362) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:48AM (#27994233)

    "the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application"

    Err no, it isn't. Its not even close to being an OS. A data display application with some built in interpreters is ALL it is and hopefully is all it will be since most browsers are bloated enough already.

    "we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive"

    Speak for yourself pal - not all of us want to manage our private files or even lives online. Just because you do doesn't make it so for everyone.

    • by Fzz (153115) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:23AM (#27994813)
      Well, a traditional operating system is essentially an abstraction layer between user applications and the hardware. It manages storage, performs task scheduling, handles I/O in a standard way for applications, maintainss user sessions, provides isolation between applications for security, and provides programming APIs that expose all this functionality in a unified way.

      A browser is becoming similar, what with browser plugins (PDF, Flash) and Javascript. It does limited storage management (mostly cookies, cache and bookmarks), performs internal scheduling, handles some I/O (display, mouse, etc) in a standard way for "browser applications", maintains separate sessions (tabs), provides (limited) isolation between tabs (could be better though), and provides programming APIs that expose much of this functionality in a unified way (especially for javascript).

      It's not completely there as an OS, but it's certainly got many of the properties of an OS.

  • First, the browser isn't an OS. (It's a browser, stupid!)

    Second, someone's pissed about chrome's separate processes per tab. (now, just close the process on that tab and no more crashes.)

    Third, to make firefox useful, you must bloat it up with addons. (evidenced by the 12+ addons I have loaded right now)

    Fourth, someone's also pissed about chrome being so fast. (let's not argue, it's just way faster.)

    Fifth, If I could load addons into chrome, I'd be a fanboy. (specifically adblock)

    Sixth, make firefox able to use different javascript engines and perhaps different rendering engines, then we'll talk about tabs. (which, if you think about it is the main appeal of firefox. It's why people started switching in the first place.)

  • by rolfwind (528248) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:50AM (#27994275)

    That's what bothers me more, that my browsing experiences hangs with one page. Perhaps every tabs should be it's own thread/process/whatever.

    I don't know about alternatives to tabs, but whatever they come up with (like Google's Chromium), I'm pretty sure it will be still tabs but just an alternative presentation adding up to the same thing - even if becomes like the mulitple desktops Linuxes have. I don't think anyone wants to go to the pre-tab days of having 20 browser apps crowding out the other apps.

    I wish they would concentrate on making the browser better at sorting information, an update to the dated bookmark concept, maybe with a profile that automatically transfers (if you want it too) to your other computers, making your experience more seamless. Or just being able to save a webpage as a PDF (take a hint from OS X) without using add-ons.

  • Please... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Betonschaar (178617) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:55AM (#27994347)

    "Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless."

    Sure, maybe the Mozilla folks like their browser so much they use it as an OS and open up 20+ tabs at once with it, but I'm pretty confident the average user just browses the web with it, and doesn't open more than 3 or 4 tabs at once. At least I don't (or anyone I know, for that matter) and I even consider myself a power user, I spend about 2 hours a day in my browser.

    Maybe the Mozilla devs should consider gathering some statistics to back up their assumptions about browser use because this really sounds like they don't really get the difference between the 1% power users and the 99% casual users that just visit the same few websites they visit everyday.

    Until that, just keep the tabs please.

  • by hal2814 (725639) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:56AM (#27994353)

    Tabs and new windows are not mutually exclusive. I group my tabs just fine by having a separate window for each set of tabs. To me it makes a lot of sense since I can ALT-tab between subjects and CTRL-tab between tabs in that subject. I don't see their sidebar solution as being any better.

  • by bytesex (112972) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:59AM (#27994401) Homepage

    Grouping tabs wouldn't work. All those hundreds of tabs would still end up in the same group: porn. And I'd be just as lost.

  • by arikol (728226) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:23AM (#27994811) Journal

    This sounds brilliant to me.

    If the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd had their way we would all be using carrier pigeons..

    Seriously, Netscape stopped innovating and died. IE stopped improving and lost an amazing amount of market share. Firefox HAS to keep awake and on top of the game if they want to stay relevant.

    And improving the web using experience at home is an excellent idea. Just test lots of cool ideas until we find one that works well. Then try to figure out something better.

    Now I usually don't have more than 5-20 broswer tabs max, often split across 2 or three workspaces. That still doesn't mean that the system can't be improved!

  • And how about... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Hurricane78 (562437) <navid.zamani@NOspaM.googlemail.com> on Monday May 18 2009, @08:33AM (#27995021)

    ...not having 500 tabs open, just because you want to read them in the next 3 years or something? ^^

    You know, there is a feature called "bookmarks" for this.

    Basically, the only point where I can imagine that it makes sense to open enough tabs to fill the whole bar, is when you open many images, or search results. They could be displayed in a gallery-like manner.

    But I have a problem with sidebars: They take away too much space. And still you got no overview.
    You basically either create one line per tab, which would usually cut off the most important part of the page title (Making 10 tabs say "Slashdot Comments | Mo..."). And below, you still got 80% of the tab empty.
    Or you add line-breaks, and more, and got some huge rows that take away most of the place, while still only allowing some 8 tabs to be visible. Again: Lost space. Filled but still lost.

    But the concept of grouping tasks/tabs is not bad. Just please do not implement it in that incredibly disturbing and useless manner that it's implemented in XP.
    I would recommend adding a second "level" of tabs. For usability and overview, I would by default (but changable) force the number of tabs per set to 10 max. (average = 7). So you could have one level showing the topics, which would for example contain one topic for each project you are working on, and one for random stuff. And below that, there were the tabs, just like now.

    Oh, and I would create a function in the right-click menu of the tabs, that would show a window with the exact details on the memory and CPU usage of that tab. So people could finally see, that most memory eating in Firefox comes from Flash, and huge, html-downscaled pics and animated gifs. Seriously. Flash is the guilty one here.

  • To me... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by (arg!)Styopa (232550) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:45AM (#27995307) Journal

    ...this just shows that they don't know what (some) people use tabs for.

    Personally, when I tend to browse forums or a website, etc, I use tabs like footnotes.

    1) Efficiency: I continue reading the current thread or page, and 'open new tab' on any interesting link. This allows THAT page to load in the background while I continue to read uninterrupted. So while I have "broadband" some pages STILL take a not-irrelevant time to load.

    2) Organization: tabs allow me to reduce clutter and keep things organized. Right now, for instance, I have outlook, 2 emails I should be working on instead of reading/posting to /., 4 different excel worksheets (work), outlook reminders, adobe (work) and firefox. At least with the tabs all residing within firefox I can keep neatly separated between what I'm doing and what I SHOULD be doing....

    3) resources: ok, this was a far bigger issue with previous hardware and OS's, but it's still my preference not to run/exit/run/exit multiple iterations of any program. To open a new browser for a page I might spend 30 seconds reading seems a waste (and is quite a bit slower than ctrl+t) - on a day of heavy web-browsing, I might open 100+ pages. Perhaps I'm just ignorant and the memory load/memory leakage of multiple tabs is essentially the same for tabs as for multiple iterations, but that's my 'sense' of it - tabs seem less likely to run me out of resources.

    And no, having a host of "context" tabs that I could open doesn't sound terribly useful - if I open my "slashdot" tab, I'm after the individual stories, which the browser can't possibly predict which are worth downloading. On the other side of the coin, how could the browser anticipate/understand that (forum post)(4chan)(algore.com)(goatsce.cx) are all contextually tied (but only for as long as I need to make that forum post and insert the image - and then never, ever again).

    For my style of tab-heavy browsing, I wouldn't mind perhaps the tabs running down the side of the page. That seems more logically useful given the lateral nature of text, and easier to pack 20-30 tabs on a page. However, then it becomes a WASTE of space for people who only open a small number of tabs. With tabs on top, you're losing only the thickness of a text line in screen real estate; with tabs to the side, you lose the WIDTH of a text line - substantially more - even if you only have two tabs open. For that matter, I'd simply be happy with the ability to increase the height of the CURRENT tabline, like you can with the Windows bar in XP, so with 20-30 tabs, I can read more of their (currently-abbreviated) headers, at a small cost in screen area.

    In short, I love tabs and use them intensively. Don't see much of a need to change them.

    • by TeknoHog (164938) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:46AM (#27994197) Homepage Journal

      Even the Redmondites can't throw an ad campaign accusing tabs of being evil after being the final adopter of the technology. . . .

      This is funny as the first place I remember seeing a tabbed interface was MS Office, back before I knew of Linux. For example, the different sheets in a spreadsheet program are exactly like tabs, both in look and feel, and function. It's funny how much hype and 'innovation' it has taken to bring such a common UI element into web browsers.

    • by jellomizer (103300) on Monday May 18 2009, @07:52AM (#27994315)

      Tabbing has taken over the browsing world entirely!
      Except for the fact that only people who are technical seem to use them. All my non technical friends when I watch them browse the Internet it is quite painful. They keep on clicking a new application to open the browser for every page they want open at the same time. Google the URL (which I won't correct them as it is probably safer that way as they don't go to a mistyped URL and get a bunch of junk). When they have a lot of browsers open they Minimize and maximize or move windows around until the find the right one.

      I would say more effort would be to making tab browing easier for the non tech person (Yes it is really easy for the tech person a click of the mouse or a Alt/Ctrl/Command - T) but the non-technical people will not experiment with their computer. When we see a funny little Icon we click on it and see what it does, a non technical person will just leave it alone. And don't even bother trying to get them to go threw the menu.

      • by jollyreaper (513215) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:34AM (#27995041)

        Except for the fact that only people who are technical seem to use them. All my non technical friends when I watch them browse the Internet it is quite painful. They keep on clicking a new application to open the browser for every page they want open at the same time. Google the URL (which I won't correct them as it is probably safer that way as they don't go to a mistyped URL and get a bunch of junk). When they have a lot of browsers open they Minimize and maximize or move windows around until the find the right one.

        What drives me batty is when people open windows explorer windows to get to certain folders, then close them instead of minimize only to have to open them up again a minute later. I have to sit on my hands to keep from ripping the mouse away from them.

      • by dreemernj (859414) on Monday May 18 2009, @08:10AM (#27994593) Homepage Journal
        In Opera, when I have more than a few tabs open I already ignore the tab bar. You can hold the right mouse button and roll the scroll wheel to bring up a list of all the open tabs. I don't think its the solution Mozilla is looking for, but when I have 25-30 tabs open it certainly is an easier way for me to browse through them than trying to flip through the tabs.