IE7 Will Have Tabbed Browsing 748
loconet writes that early yesterday morning, "Dean Hachamovitch, IE product unit manager, confirmed that IE7, like Opera and Firefox first did years ago, will have tabbed browsing as one of its new features. Asa Dotzler,from Mozilla, points out that Dean reminds IE users who have not upgraded to XP that tabbed browsing can be added to IE through 3rd-party add-ons." cryptoz adds a link to this InformationWeek story which says that the tabs will be very "'basic' due to fears from Microsoft that tabbed browsing might scare off too many users. The feature is only being included because IE is slipping in the browser share market."
Office next? (Score:5, Interesting)
How soon until MS Office gets tabs? I for one often have up to a dozen Word and Excel documents open and having them all in the task bar is a pain in the UI.
Re:I am just so floored... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I would have been very surprised if they had NOT included tabbed browsing.
Re:Office next? (Score:5, Interesting)
In Word, clicking the outermost "close" button closes the document you're working on, but leaves other documents unaffected. In Excel, doing the same action closes all documents. Some of the apps treat indiviual documements completely independantly, and some of them treat them as cascaded windows inside the same instance of the application.
I would LOVE to see a robust tabbed implementation in Office, especially if (like Firefox) you could run multiple instances of a tabbed application.
-David Barak
Re:Scared? (Score:1, Interesting)
Show me one browser, any browser, that actually exposes a mechanism for navigating through 20 tabs in, say, 3 windows. The only one I've seen that comes close is Opera, but of course Opera exists in its own UI paradigm by itself.
Re:Allow users to uninstall and reinstall as neede (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you think the "Average Joe" cares whether the back-end http proto handlers are reused by every app or not? Heck, even if it is, the morons behind IE should have had the tiniest sense to ask themselves whether it should be that way...
And if you had any experience with some of these Browser Hijackers, you would know that spyware removal tools dont do shit. Both spybot and lavasoft did nada.
And searching and nuking registry entries is as painful as pulling nails out.. Why would anyone be subjected to that, when they can use an alternate browser??
I am not saying Firefox is the solution to everything and neither am I stating that IE is the worst. But the whole thinking behind the browser and how it has its roots in the OS is just poor/lame/immature design at best.
My non-technical Father LOVES Tabs! (Score:5, Interesting)
Lucky you! (Score:5, Interesting)
If I ever tried to remove MSN Messenger, delete the files and everything, like dark fucking magic everything would reappear and launch if I ever visited a MSN-site with MSIE.
I had to insert dummy-executables in the MSN Messenger directory to get rid of it. However, editing the registry to tell Windows that MSN Messenger wasn't there would also magically cause a reinstall just out of nowhere.
So I let Windows believe the dummy executables were MSN Messenger which were still techincally "installed". That and only that did it for me.
Seems like you got off easy, you lucky bastard!
The way windows constantly tries to battle the user, if he actually dares to defy the devine intensions of Redmond... *shudder* It's really all you need to know about the OS and the vendor.
Re:Allow users to uninstall and reinstall as neede (Score:5, Interesting)
Why then can Solaris,Linux,BeOS, QNX access the internet without a integrated browser installed? Why could you uninstall IE 3 without serious harm?
You mean, you tried to remove some spyware app, but because you couldn't it's therefore IE's fault.
Well since ActiveX component technology is what allows these programs to become part of IE, I say hell yeah it's IE's fault, to an extent. A burglar is not the homeowners fault per say. But if you place a note on the door saying "no one is at home the key is under the mat", your doing everything short of asking known robbers to steal from you. The back-end http protocol handlers are reused by every application (well, those that don't want to reinvent the wheel)
A shared library is not a program! A DLL that cannot be changed or written over by any program would not allow a virus or malware and still provide your code reuse.
Re:Office next? (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, if someone with a superior knowledge of the Windows messaging system and the API is willing to share some insights on that previous claim, I'd be happy to read (and learn).
Re:Allow users to uninstall and reinstall as neede (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a lame excuse for a company who didn't even see fit to include a TCP/IP stack until around '94. Now that they have one, it's easy for every malware writer and his brother to hijack it, but nearly impossible for the rightful owner to upgrade it with something better.
This has nothing to do with efficient reuse of code. It has everything to do with Gates being a greedy sob who would fuck his dead mother's corpse if there was a buck to be made.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Would someone please try to explain what's the difference, and what's the big deal?
You can use tabs to add a layer of hierarchy to organise a large number of open pages.
For example, I might open a new browser window to view Slashdot, but then that will be my "Slashdot window", and any links within Slashdot I'll open in new tabs.
I'll generally leave the leftmost tab as the front page, and drag "read more" links to the 2nd tab. I'll drag comment links to tabs further to the right, opening, closing and reusing tabs to explore the discussion without losing key branch points. When I'm done with Slashdot, I only have one window to close.
The same approach works with Google results -- leave Google in the leftmost tab, drag results to tabs to see them. Firefox doesn't switch to the new tab automatically (unless you change preferences), so you can continue to drag possible good pages to new tabs, while the first ones are loading.
Good for The Hun too...
Ease of use and hiding of complexity (Score:3, Interesting)
Years ago, MS told us that the multiple-document interface was bad because users supposedly weren't able to deal with it. Then they stepped back and reintroduced it in their next office update. Now IE is going to get MDI in the only way that really is usable: with tabs.
But that's not the point that I'm not getting. Pondering the best, most usable solution is a good thing. Even if it takes a couple of years. Even if it's done by Microsoft. No. What I don't get is the apparent hypocrisy.
Whether a browser is safe and usable isn't only determined by such in-your-face features as boring ol' tabs. Have you ever tried to tweak IE's options? Whether you are a complete noob or somebody that has been admining Windows machines for the last ten years, the options dialog is one part of IE that makes you run away screaming for you mommy.
Options with labels that are hard to understand (to put it mildly) that are caved into a too small dialog that cannot be resized. I don't know how much of this is due to a very bad localization. But the German version actually features an option that you could back-translate to "Enable page transitions". Help item: "Determines whether Internet Explorer will blank the current page and display the next page when you leave a page." Huh?
If somebody really thinks that tabs might make IE a substantially better browser, he hasn't used it yet.
Could bite them in the ass (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Scared? (Score:4, Interesting)
From a UI Designer/Nazi standpoint, Tabs are a really bad thing -- they are a totally inconsistant form of window management that is only used in one type of application. They defeat the normal applicaiton switchers (taskbar, dock, expose, alt-tab). They aren't quite SDI and aren't quite MDI, and MDI is supposed to be dead anyway. Firefox tabs in particular are bad because you are locked the Z Order based on how you opened them and have no control over how or where they appear.
That having been said, Tabs are damn useful, and I love them!
I noticed that Apple Safari has tabs but disables them by default. That lends credence to the idea that Tabs really are scary to non-power users.
Microsoft has a Tabbed Browser called ".NET SDK Documentation". Rather than being "basic", you can drag-n-drop the tabs and Z-Order works. In other words, they're more advanced than Firefox tabs and hopefully that's what they'll use for IE7.
[OT] I wouldn't mind switching everyone to Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tabbed brainwash (Score:2, Interesting)
Big lie.
Couldn't agree more. The "Windows experience" is full of tabs. A couple of quick examples:
- Open the "Internet options" in IE. Two rows of tabs!
- Desktop's (or any file's) "Preferences" (just a right click away).
And don't tell me the average user has never opened any of these options windows. Heck, I know a three year old kid that knew how to change screen resolutions!
Re:Cancel button after download (Score:3, Interesting)
We should be hitting the developers of every platform for this problem.
Re:Lucky you! (Score:4, Interesting)
-FlynnMP3
PS. I got this little tip from some reader on this site.
He said he didnt prefer firefox! He's a TROLL! (Score:3, Interesting)
Firefox's tabbed browsing is a set of buttons with a tabbed look which swap the active URL (*I know it's not as simple as just that, no use pointing that out). Opera on the other hand is a full MDI- something which OSS programs seem to all be against for some reason (usually saying "the window manager should handle that"). The MDI allows you to resize individual windows (call the websites which pop-up small windows for logins poorly-designed, but they still exist, and it's helpful to support them), view multiple pages simultaneously under a single window, view pages at multiple resolutions (good for editing), basically it's multiple browser windows contained within another browser window. It really is much better done than Firefox's method (whether or not you prefer one or the other, Opera's you can do more with and you can still use it the way firefox works if you want to).
And just to get this out there: I dont use Opera. I used to, but switched to firefox when Opera starting crashing every five seconds (this is not a problem I've heard anyone else complain of)
I think Opera looks better (well, looked better, they tend to revamp the entire UI every release, it probably looks like a small nobbed ball covered in pulsating yellow fibers by now), and has a much better focus on usability. That's to be expected: It's a product for sale, it's going to have a better UI.
MS stated "tabbed browsing not important" (Score:4, Interesting)
Features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users 11/12/04 [slashdot.org]
Re:Lucky you! (Score:1, Interesting)
-- Paper