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)."
I can see it now (Score:5, Funny)
We need a ribbon!
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Funny)
Can we call it the awesome ribbon?
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Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Funny)
that gives me a horrible crick in my neck though.
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.
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: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: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!
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Informative)
Tree Style Tab [mozilla.org]
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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 switc
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:Firefox, the laptop killer: 200 CPU hogging bug (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox has over 10,000 open bugs. Stop using it.
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but at least rephrase what you said so that it sounds like some general Microsoft fud. How many of those are untriaged? How many will turn out to be dups? How many bugs were fixed for firefox 3?
Here are some tips to make Firefox use less memory [forevergeek.com]. And for the love of god and all that is holy, I hope Tab Mix Plus isn't the memory leak it used to be.
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The ghost process problem is almost always a result of Adobe's piss-poor Flash implementation. Flashblock ftw.
Firefox should be a little better at sandboxing plugins, but they can't be blamed for Adobe's crap.
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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.
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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.
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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: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.
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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.
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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 ta
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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 si
Re:I can see it now (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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"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.
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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 ho
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"
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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: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 :-)
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while you did admit it. As a point of refrence I load up all my news, and web comics first thing in the morning. I click three buttons and 30 odd tabs begin to load. I read and close each tab.
Given the amount of images,flash and javascript in the average webpage 30 second load and render times with even 15mbs connection isn't abnormal. By loading many tabs at the same time I can read the webpage instead of waiting for it
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple fix: Adopt video-only policy for porn.
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.
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.
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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 spa
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It's gotta be porn.
Really, porn needs its own dedicated browser to deal with these things. Pornofox, or something.
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:We need a taskbar (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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: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.
Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:2)
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.
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Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scrap is the wrong word here (Score:4, Informative)
Also, the All-In-One Gestures [mozilla.org] and FireGestures [mozilla.org] addons will do this for Firefox.
Default behavior for these is that an initial down-roll opens the tab's history, and up-roll opens the tab list.
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.
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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.
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.
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Uhhgg...
No, no, you can't do this... you're underestimating the ignorance of typical users. They will go crazy thinking they've "lost" the page they were on when they don't see it anymore; trust me, I've seen it happen all too often standing behind users who were using my computer that was actually configured that way (open new tabs instead of windows).
Yes, most users really seem to be that ignorant.
20+ (Score:2)
I'm rather intrigued what will come out of this design contest...
Personally i don't think the sidebar is that good of an idea. Eats away too much space of my screen.
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Now get off my lawn you long-haired no-gooder!
Not quite right (Score:4, Interesting)
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You can already do this.
I use the "tree style tab" extension on the side on my widescreen desktop, and it works well.
On my smaller laptop screen I use the normal tabs on the top.
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.
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If I manage my life using Notepad and text files, is Notepad my new OS?
Yes, if by 'Notepad' you mean 'Emacs' :D
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Have you checked out Opera's dev tool, Dragonfly? It's still an alpha, but...
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.
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.
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
That's clearly an artifact of lazy mock up screenshot generation. Screenshot of browser, move the web page part across a bit and stick in the new "frame". Note, no scrollbar at the bottom.
There is a minimum width gmail requires to not scroll horizontally, but that's google's fault (since it's bigger than what is actually needed).
It is too wide in that mock up, but usually there's more space across than up/down - though my browser is in a pane that is 837x1028...
Re: (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 tex
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you're just about 100% wrong on that point. Studies on human reading have demonstrated that it is much easier on the reader's eyes if text width is thinner rather than wider:
On the web, vertical space is used for skimming text and scrolling content, and is hence much more important.
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: (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.
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you should try Chrome
imho it solves the points you brought up nicely
and the browser is quite "different" in a good clean UI kinda way from the rest
Re:Innovation is lacking in the browser market... (Score:5, Informative)
The 'awesome bar' in firefox automagically searches your bookmarks.
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.
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Hardly. The atrocious CSS support in Netscape Navigator 4 was based around transcoding to JSSS - it was a last-minute bolt-on. There's virtually nothing in common with today's browsers, rendering-wise. Same goes for the DOM - back then, there were essentially two incompatible APIs, now we have standardised ECMAScript and a DOM that is mostly compatible, not counting events. The method
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!).
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safari 4 has coverflow for browsing history and its bookmarks and history are all really searchable now.
I like tabs (Score:2)
I routinely deal with more than 20 open tabs, and upwards of 60-80 open tabs at times. It isn't a problem, from a performance perspective.
What is an issue is managing all those open tabs, and being able to find the one I want. I use a number of extensions which help with this, but it can still get burdensome at times. Still, I don't think it's a huge problem, and it doesn't really bother me.
Re: (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
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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.
moving tabs down the side of the browser ... (Score:2)
CC.
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: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...
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Re: (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?
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.
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.
a browser is not an operating system (Score:2)
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.)
Re: (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.
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.
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.
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.
We don't need no stinkin' groupin'. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Book Metaphor? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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!
And how about... (Score:4, Informative)
...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.
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.
Fix the "Back" button (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
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...).