Mozilla Preparing To Scrap Tabbed Browsing? 554
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)."
Bah (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
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.
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.
Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know - to see what a bad idea it would be, just look at the screenshot of the proof of concept [azarask.in]. Notice how you have to scroll to the side in gmail just to see you mail subject lines. Hardly a good use of screen real-estate.
To be honest, the sidebar is very Windows Explorer Active Desktop-ish. And the first thing many people do is turn off the sidebar.
More of an operting system? Err , what? (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Is the entire browser singlethreaded? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Please... (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Is New Window considered harmful? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:3, Insightful)
perhaps a default to open new application requests as a tab. Then all the power users need to do is turn it off.
I know when I want a new browser (to seperate out one set of work from another) but grandma doesn't configure her web experience like that.
I suggest... (Score:3, Insightful)
As others have said, the first thing I do in Windows is turn off window grouping, and in firefox is turn off all the extraneous, real estate-sucking bars they haven enabled.
I suggest that they implement whichever solution(s) they like as an extension, and let people vote with their downloads which one they like best before drastically changing the browser. Let the users decide.
Re:I like tabs (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell yeah. They can have my tabs when they pry them from my cold dead hands. My browsing habit is basically to google something, middle click a bunch of likely looking links and then go look at them - hopefully they've loaded up by then.
Still... if they can come up with something better i'm willing to give it a go.
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
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, Insightful)
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 :-)
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple fix: Adopt video-only policy for porn.
Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:2, Insightful)
Suggest the default for clicking a URL shortcut should be to open a new tab (if browser already opened)
Re:I can see it now (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Book Metaphor? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Group by site? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:4, Insightful)
Technical mumbo jumbo was not his point, you are beating strawman out here.
Point is GUI, which was, indeed, nearly identical for past 20 year. We still have legacy buttons like home (WTF!).
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:More of an operting system? Err , what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Absolutely. I am finding more and more, Web developers seem to be trying to come up with new whiz-bang functions and features to appease the Web 2.0 crowd. Of course, that's natural since these folks ARE the Web 2.0 crowd.
I just want a simple, fast browser with NO whacky extra functions. That's what plug-ins are for! I'm sick of these whacky new functions being floated for mass adoption based solely on the groundswell support in San Francisco.
Re:Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Tabs are fine, improvements are also fine (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re:More of an operting system? Err , what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:well let's stop right there. (Score:3, Insightful)
Third, to make firefox useful, you must bloat it up with addons.
I don't think you quite understand how this works, as evidenced by
Fifth, If I could load addons into chrome, I'd be a fanboy. (specifically adblock)
So you're bashing Firefox for needing addons to make it useful (when in reality you mean more useful), but then you want addons to make Chrome (more) useful? There is no difference. Add-ons in Chrome would be add-ons in Firefox.
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I can see it now (Score:4, Insightful)
evolution in browser UI (Score:2, Insightful)
Honestly guys, let's try and let the users decide. Why not implement add-ons, skins, and multiple alternative Firefoxen? Like Firefox blueflame or something? See which UI is the most popular. Let people swap out UI on demand. Then after a round of beta testing make the most popular the defaults.
The key is to allow change on every level feasible.
Re:Please... (Score:2, Insightful)
2 hours? A power user? Ok...
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
This is a very very insightful comment. Having 80 different *web pages* (e.g. interfaces presenting some data) open at one time is only a waste of [screen space, memory, cpu] resources.
Either GP should simply bookmark his 20+ tabs and open them when she really needs them, or she could use something like Tab Mix Plus to save [Ctrl+F1] a window with all the tabs (and restore it when that "view" is needed) or use Virtual Desktops (VirtuaWin in Windows XP...) to move all the opened windows to different work spaces...
The fact is that of those 60 opened Tabs. GP poster will be focusing at most on 4 of them at one time...
BTW, if you are doing some kind of product comparison, there is no need to have a new tab for each review page, read one and then Scrap (using scrapbook or just copy/paste to Word/Writer) the important information into a new document.
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Insightful)
This Add-on is brilliant. I found the link yesterday when this story came up on another site - after just 24-hours I don't think I could go back to a browser that doesn't work like this.
Some of proposed ideas are nice, the one that I would really like to see would integrate the tab tree with the browser bookmarks to make something like the Dock on OS-X. Pages could be pinned into the tree, if they are not open then they act like a bookmark and launch when you click them. If they are open then clicking switches to that tab.
Come on Mozilla, please clone the Dock...
PS If you change your Google search prefs to open results in a new window, your browser prefs to open new windows in a tab, and use this extension - it is nirvana.
Re:I can see it now (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Great idea! (Score:2, Insightful)
tabs vs. windows (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally think that the difference between arranging by tabs and arranging by multiple windows is nearly irrelevent. It's just a question of how to position the buttons that bring foucs to that content.
The thing that tabbed browsing gets right that matters is that it fetches and renders the page without immediately bringing focus to it.
To me... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I can see it now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:We need a taskbar (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I can see it now (Score:3, Insightful)
This. I love that there are plugins which allow you to select alternate tab topologies. Tab-mix plus does a great job with the "traditional" tabs, and other plugins allow you to organize yourself in other ways. If they want to provide more flexibility, simply look to incorporate some of those plugins into the browser and provide simple configuration for users to pick which style works best for them.
Re:I can see it now (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:4, Insightful)
And flippin' annoying it is too!
As for tabbed browsing, I've never needed more than ten at any one time. In fact that's too many most of the time.
It's all a matter of tidying up the mess and only keeping open those web pages that you absolutely need. For everything else there are bookmarks and page history in the URL entry box (which awesome bar breaks).
One man's manner from heaven is another's deadly plague.
Re:Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:1, Insightful)
The 'awesome bar' in firefox automagically searches your bookmarks.
Too bad it goes through all the rest of them first until I'm 3 characters away from typing the complete URL. Oh, go back and "tag" the 15k bookmarks I've built up over the years? Hell, I don't have time to check if they're all still valid!
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Insightful)
"With all the 16:9 and 16:10 wide format screens now, moving the tabs to the side would make more sense. "
Giving the user CHOICE would make sense.
Re:I can see it now (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Insightful)
An example would be researching a product, browsing a web forum (opening up interesting topics in tabs), or other work where all of the tabs are rather similar in purpose.
If I truly want a separate group of tabs, then I'll open up a fresh browser window and use that window for the next collection of tabs.
Re:I can see it now (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a magical thing about computers these days -- we have resizable windows. Can't read 1600px wide text well? Don't maximize your browser window then!