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)."
Re:I can see it now (Score:1, Interesting)
Not quite right (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Group by site? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I like tabs (Score:3, Interesting)
For academic purposes it can get a bit out of hand when I have 20-30 tabs open, each one containing a journal paper. Trying to juggle them, find the one that I need to look at right now, then another that I need to quote etc. can be difficult. An intelligent way of managing this would be a godsend. TFA is quite correct when it says that browsers are becoming less and less about pure data display - they're a portal to what has become a major part of everyday life - the Internet.
well let's stop right there. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Poll! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:20+ (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Interesting)
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"
Favicons Help (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:5, Interesting)
So what about a graph of sites you visited, instead of a list?
You mean like IBM Web Explorer did in 1994?
It arranged the session history into a tree according to the path you traversed. It did not arbitrarily truncate the tree into a linear sequence the way almost all browsers do now.
Re:Group by site? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you remove tabs, you had better be right (Score:3, Interesting)
Removing tabs would be a big deal, and if you do it. You had damn well better be right.
Coke thought the people wanted something new with "New Coke". That didn't go over well and the backlash damaged Coke as many Coke drinkers, went with other products and some didn't come back with Coke Classic came out.
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Interesting)
That's find for the Winderz people who freak out with anything but full-screen zoom. Those of us who have been using Macs for years and know window management don't want that. It takes up more screen area than tabs, especially when all you're doing is popping a dozen threads in a message board to read sequentially. I hate sidebar things, because they mean I have to make my window wider and cover up more windows with mostly unused space.
For a comparison, how many people move their Windows task bar to the side of the screen, even with a wide moitor? Not many.
Re:Stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
just look at the screenshot of the proof of concept. 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.
Agreed. This is a horrible starting point for a design. The designer says:
"On the side. Our screens are wider than they are tall; vertical height is the scarce resource."
There's a reason our screens are wider than they are tall, though: we need horizontal space more, because we read from side to side. This means things with text in them generally need to be (much) wider than they are tall.
In his mockup, the new bar takes up 208x530px == 110,240 pixels. This quick re-organization [photobucket.com] I've just designed uses 1022x49 = 50,078 or less than half as many pixels. Sure, vertical pixels are more important than horizontal pixels, but my design uses less than a quarter as many vertical pixels as his does horizontal pixels, and includes all the same information. Vertical pixels are less than twice as valuable as horizontal pixels, given his arguments for why this makes sense, so this appears to be a much less costly design using his model of what's important.
Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Please... (Score:1, Interesting)
and I even consider myself a power user, I spend about 2 hours a day in my browser.
This is most likely targeted to 'more powerful' power users, who spend no less than 8 hours a day in their browser.
I'm real sorry if that comes off like a flame, but I don't know how else to say it. What ever you want to consider yourself, this is most likely only going to benefit users with way way heavier usage patterns than 2 hours a day.
But yes, as long as any changes are made optional (and I think firefox has a semi-decent history here on that) then people in your category won't need to enable more bloat, but people in the target category can, then it should be a very welcome option.
I still think this type of thing should be moved into an extension API...
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Interesting)
You're not comparing like with like. When you have 5-6 tabs open it is as you describe. But these proposals are aimed at users with 50-60 tabs. If you fire open that many tabs then how wide is each one? 20 pixels? So a fairer comparison would be which dimension do you want to lose 20 pixels from.
If you have a 16:9 screen then this is an easy choice. For 4:3 it is somewhat harder, but most websites are mostly text, and text flows better in narrow columns than in wide ones.
Re:I can see it now (Score:4, Interesting)
Thirded. I get to see far more tabs than I would across the top, and they're arranged in a hierarchy. Opening a new tab by, say, middle-clicking a link opens it as a child of the current tab. For me, this style works much better than the across-the-top non-hierarchical tabs.
Firefox, the laptop killer: 200 CPU hogging bugs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Group by site? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does it
1) not mess with other extensions
2) not use up loads of memory (some leaks, some due to features)
yet?
Re:Poll! (Score:4, Interesting)
A similar poll was already run:
How many browser tabs do you have open right now? [slashdot.org]
Surprisingly, the most popular answer was "2 to 5". I would have thought "power users" like Slashdotters would have more tabs open on average...
But of course that poll may have a systematic bias (e.g. maybe lots of people tend to read Slashdot in the morning, and answered the poll before having opened tons of tabs for the day's work...).
Re:We need a taskbar (Score:5, Interesting)
This provides tree-style tab bar, like a folder tree of Windows Explorer. You can collapse/expand sub trees, etc.. Very nice.
Re:I can see it now (Score:1, Interesting)
I keep dozens tabs open frequently. I'm a software developer and having several tabs open for displaying different classes on the MSDN for example. Bookmarks are nice, but tabs are a more temporary solution. When I'm done with a module I can close them and not have to worry about cluttering up my bookmarks (which is already a mess with 200+ bookmarks at work and 400+ at home).
I also keep a "news" browser session running. I use tabs to create a little reading queue for myself to glance at whenever I get a few minutes. Sure I don't need to have 10 news articles open to read at the same time, but it's convenient when you know you want to read something but can't do it right away.
Fix the "Back" button (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Firefox, the laptop killer: 200 CPU hogging bug (Score:2, Interesting)
> Firefox should be a little better at sandboxing plugins, but they can't be blamed for Adobe's crap.
Yes they can. They should do whatever is necessary to avoid leaving a ghost process that have to be manually killed. I had to explain to my 9 year old why he couldn't launch a browser on his ubuntu eeepc. It seems clear to him that the windows machine he uses for games is less buggy than his linux machine.
And I can't blame him.
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Interesting)
mod parent way up!! This is EXACTLY what we need! It would definitely fix my biggest problem with browsing!
Re:I can see it now (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
How about if it is broken, they do fix it?
I've been waiting for searched bookmarks to display their location for a long time now! Like lets say I'm stashing away dozens of bookmarks related to various programming languages. They're all stored under Coding/Language/Topic/[Simple, Detailed, Reference]
Some articles don't fit; they might cover multiple topics or multiple languages. Firefox doesn't want you to duplicate bookmarks in different locations, so what's your alternative? Stick it in one location and hope you can find it later!
If I remember the name of the bookmark, I can search it out (hasn't been a problem so far), but I still can't find it in my way-too-huge list, to put other related bookmarks beside it.