
Why Tabs are on Top in Firefox 4 - mbrubeck
http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/06/24/why-tabs-are-on-top-in-firefox-4/
======
frossie
Good on them for coming out and explaining their reasoning.

Personally I use the totally fabulous Tree Style Tab extension and have the
tabs on the left. Given the prevalence of widescreen displays, it makes a lot
more sense to have them on the side and use up the wider screen real estate,
even if you are not using the Tree Style Tab functionality (which is
essentially a collapsible hierarchical tab structure).

~~~
thorax
When I saw the title of the blog I misread and was so excited-- thinking they
finally came to their senses and were building in something like Tree-Style
Tabs. It makes me so much more productive and able to coordinate so many
different tabs.

I have 47 tabs open in Firefox currently, with trees of different research.
That may seem like a lot, but it's really quite natural to manage that many
with that extension. With tabs at the top, when you start getting to 15 tabs ,
you can't read titles and it becomes so much messier. You close stuff down
just to make the current tasks simpler.

That extension is the primary reason I don't use Chrome for anything but a few
Google services. It's so much more natural to coordinate them in FF until some
other browser catches on and adds support.

~~~
mbrubeck
Yes, the Firefox UX team is working on more radical solutions for dealing with
lots of tabs, too.

One such experiment is <http://azarask.in/projects/tabcandy/> \- but be
warned, this is a rough sketch. It's not clear what shape it will ultimately
take, or when it will be ready for production. (That's why we haven't been
publicizing it.) The current concept/demo isn't something we are planning to
ship yet, but I wanted to point it out anyway because it's so relevant to your
comment. Hopefully with this disclaimer Aza won't be too mad at me for linking
to his work before it's ready. :)

~~~
thorax
A friend of mine who works at Mozilla showed me this some time ago. While I
like to see the innovation and spirit (as always with Aza's work), Here I
think they overshot and made the problem somewhat more complicated than it
needs to be. I don't understand why it would be considered an improvement to
have to go to a different screen to manage tabs. Scanning a chessboard of
icons/pics versus a bullet list seems like a small step backwards. I tend to
believe that simplicity wins over prettiness.

I'd love to find out if Aza has done user testing with the tree-style tab
approach and what feedback he got back. There simply has to be a reason why
Mozilla hasn't considered that approach.

My perfect browser would do this to bridge the two worlds:

* Start out with tabs across the top.

* As soon as the tab count increases to make titles less than five-six characters, offer a popup that says "For managing lots of tabs, we recommend using the tab tree sidebar" and points to the button.

* User presses the button and they get the behavior of the Tree Style Tab extension instead of tabs at top

or it asks the same question when you start rather than waiting, so power
users can put tabs on the side if needed.

------
lotharbot
tl;dw summary:

0) this is the new default, but it's configurable 1) visually separates
controls that affect the current tab (back, forward) from controls that affect
the whole browser (close, minimize) 2) saves space and reduces clutter in tabs
that don't need certain controls 3) FF is moving certain sidebars (like the
bookmarks sidebar) inside of tabs, and tabs on top will look/feel more
consistent with this 4) allows notification pop-ups to be attached directly to
the address bar without covering up the tab area

downsides: 1) mouse distance increases

~~~
edanm
Another point I found important is the "App tabs" feature. They'll be letting
you designate certain tabs as Apps, which will keep them permanently on the
left of all the tabs, turn them into small icons (instead of normal sized
tabs), and make them permanent (can't close or navigate away from them).

I love this, since I already do this with a lot of applications (I have Gmail,
Google Calendar, Wave and Facebook always open).

~~~
brianwillis
Google Chrome already allows you to do this by right-clicking a tab and
clicking "pin tab". It's kind of pointless in its current form, like a awkward
hybrid of bookmarks and tabs.

I'd like to see some sort of notification system added to the icons of pinned
tabs (like icon badges in Mac OS X) so you could see how many unread items you
have in Gmail, Google Reader, etc.

No idea how you'd go about implementing such an idea though.

~~~
CoryMathews
Chrome took the pin tab from opera.. (like everything else)

However the dev of chrome (not sure if its in stable yet) allows you to have
these custom apps already. When you install them they also give the app extra
permissions such as display tray notices and geo location. This way the app
does not have to ask for them every time.

------
mhd
It's a nice video, with good mockups and sound reasoning. But alas, it's not
exactly an innovation. So it kinda looks like an ex post facto justification
why they're doing it like Chrome and Opera…

Let's see whether they keep their lead regarding extensions. There are some
nice goodies for Firefox that I haven't yet seen in Chrome, Opera or Safari.
Some of them even pertaining to tabs (forgot what that color-coded, collapsing
mega-tab add-on is called). But the other browsers are catching up quickly,
mostly because they make it easier to write extensions. For Chrome and Safari
it's basically HTML5 and JavaScript, nobody's royally rogered by XUL.

A a slight tangent: For the last couple of months, I've been using Safari at
home without tabs. Expose is great, and it forces me to single-task a bit
more. I tend to factor out the "read that later" pages to Instapaper, Evernote
and Delicious anyway. Jamie Zawinski ain't that wrong. (On dual screens or
without Expose it doesn't work as well, which is why my Linux setup at work is
Chrome.)

~~~
mbrubeck
In my opinion Chrome did Firefox a big favor here.

 _[Note: I work for Mozilla but I am not on the Firefox UX team and was not
involved in this change; these are just my own thoughts.]_

If Mozilla 1.0 or even Firefox 1.0 had tabs above the address bar from the
beginning, we wouldn't have this problem. But we've spent the last eight years
training half a billion people (literally) to use tabs below the address bar.
Now most of them have internalized that model and think of as natural, or
(much more likely) don't think about it at all but are used to it anyways and
will be annoyed if it changes.

 _(Remember the story about Stuart Feldman in the 1970s when someone asked him
to fix annoyances with Makefile parsing? He said it was too late to change the
syntax, because Make already had more than a dozen users!)_

Mozilla has been debating this for so long because there are good reasons not
to change an existing product. Upgrading is more hassle for users when more
has changed. Changes to the main UI are the worst.

But users are much more forgiving when adopting a new product like Chrome (not
least because the change is less likely to be forced on them). And now that
Chrome is so popular, we can point to it as strong evidence that tabs-on-top
is a reasonable default that people will be happy to use.

Of course, Firefox still couldn't get away with it without the option to
switch back to the old style...

------
rflrob
The mouse distance issue doesn't really bother me. Something well over 90% of
the time, I switch tabs using keyboard shortcuts (actually, most of what I do
in the browser is now keyboard based, thanks to Vimperator
<http://code.google.com/p/vimperator-labs/> ).

One thing I'm curious about for the mac is whether full titles on the very top
will still be displayed if the tabs are on top. In Chrome, if I go to a page
that has a long title (including this comment page), I have to hover over the
tab to get the full title. Otherwise, it just shows up as "Hacker News | Why
Tabs a...".

~~~
mbrubeck
Mouse targeting / Fitt's law is even improved with tabs-on-top in certain
situations. Run Chrome or Firefox 4 maximized on Windows (or in a tiling
window manager like XMonad on X11, with no border) and you can just run the
mouse along the top of the screen to reach your tabs. They have "infinite"
vertical target size, just like the Mac menubar.

~~~
msmith
In the mockups shown, the tab doesn't extend fully to the edge of the window,
which unfortunately means you don't get the "infinite pixels" advantage. The
same is true for Chrome on OSX and Windows.

~~~
mbrubeck
When you maximize Chrome on Windows, the tabs extend to the top of the screen.
The plan is to do the same for Firefox 4.

------
vl
Interestingly, bookmarks toolbar is completely missing from the discussion.
Are they implying users should not use it anymore?

Right now my bookmarks in one line with buttons, address bar and search bar to
reduce vertical space. With tabs on top it would definitely feel quite strange
(I usually middle-click bookmarks to open them in new tabs, so action is not
tab-local).

~~~
DaveChild
The primary action of that button is tab-local. It's the secondary (or even
tertiary) that isn't tab-local.

------
Groxx
Sweet. This is one thing I really missed from the Safari betas, and really
like about Chrome.

Will watch the video some time, but the two "conceptual model" images hit my
reasoning too. It seems to be how non-geeks think about browsing too, as many
I've seen have trouble with the address bar + tabs in anything but Chrome.

------
Jach
I like their reasoning, even though I don't personally like tabs on top, and I
really appreciate an _explanation_. Yes, I'm pointing at you Ubuntu...

~~~
brianwillis
Ah yes, the "lets put window close button on the left" debacle. That old
chestnut.

------
jasonkester
Did you notice the part where they go out of their way to tell you that tabs-
on-top is a _preference_ that can be set by the user?

That right there is the reason that Firefox is headed downhill.

That's the reason Firefox takes 30 seconds to open where Chrome takes 3. Every
time you fire it up, it pulls in extra bloat so that it can perform all these
little user customizations that don't really matter (or that in this case have
a "right way" that can be defended for a full seven minute video), but that
are needed to keep 10,000 nerds from writing angry blog posts.

Google, on the other hand, made some decisions about what they wanted the
browser to look like and do, and implemented them. Want something different?
Get a different browser. Want to check your gmail in the next few seconds?
Chrome can do that.

My advice to the FF team is to remove that little check box they're so proud
of that lets you rearrange the way tabs work. Then strip out the 100k lines of
code supporting it. Then ship a noticeably better browser.

~~~
pbiggar
Don't be ridiculous. The idea that you should force your users to adopt your
(well intentioned, well thought-out) preferences with no options is a very
recent idea, and its only adherents are coders and designers. While users
don't necessarily like hunting for options, they don't like when they are
taken away (ask the Pidgin people, for a well documented fork which happened
because of this idea).

The suggestion that this causes the 30 second delay is crap. An empty firefox
takes about 2 seconds to load for me; a new window takes seconds. My
experience (and a cursory chat with firefox devs) is that it is really memory
usage which slows firefox down, and I believe this is being helped in the new
version.

100k lines is total exaggeration. I'd suggest that checking for the flag is
one line, and implementing it the other way is less than 1000 lines (I would
think less than 100, but I'll leave myself some breathing room). It's not like
they can remove the whole about:config thing just because this one button is
gone.

And if you think that removing a checkbox that nobody uses will make a
"noticeably better browser", then you are dreaming.

~~~
jasonkester
This comes up pretty often, and there's plenty of literature available that
explains better than I can why adding choices actually makes users less happy.
Here's one:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html>

As to the level of effort to get that feature in and maintained, there's
plenty of literature out there too documenting the perils of the "you can add
this in 5 minutes" feature. For this one, you'll need:

\- changes to the settings page

\- logic to store the setting

\- two parallel rendering paths for the window chrome

\- checks everywhere that tabs are touched and special case logic for things
that work differently when tabs are in their old location

\- special case handling for all future features going forward (such as their
new popups) to deal with two possible tab placements.

\- unit tests for all the above

\- bug fixing for all the above

\- maintenance for all the above

\- support for all the above

\- documentation for all the above

It's a lot of stuff, measured in man years of effort over the lifetime of a
software project as big as Firefox. And they can eliminate it all with a
simple executive decision.

Tabs are moving to the top of the browser. They've done the research
themselves and come to that conclusion. By both moving and not moving them in
their next release, they're only making things hard for themselves.

~~~
mindcrime

      It's a lot of stuff, measured in man years of effort over 
      the lifetime of a  software project as big as Firefox. 
      And they can eliminate it all with a simple executive 
      decision.
    

They can eliminate 100% of their codebase, 100% of their bugs, and 100% of
their support issues with a "simple executive decision" as well. So what? If
you're going to build and distribute any kind of tool, you have to strike the
right balance between the issues of flexibility, performance, ease of use,
etc. But saying "strip out choices as a wholesale maneuver" is not even
striving for balance.

The only positive thing I can say about this mindset is that, since so much
software is open source these days, at least forks can be created when
products err too far on one side or the other of one of these lines. But is
all that duplicated effort really benefiting the community?

------
Kilimanjaro
Tabs on top is as retarded as moving the stop button to the right of the
address bar: just travel more distance to do common tasks.

Bad UI design.

At least we will have the option to change it back, with the stop button we
are fucked. And every day of my life I damn the "genius" who moved the stop
button.

------
d0m
ok when I click PLAY, it goes to the END of the video. I try to place the
cursor in the middle, i click PLAY, it goes to the END. I repeated this a few
time, then came back here to rage comment on this.

~~~
d0m
Ok, there was an actual youtube version, I listened the video and it was
instructing (even if not really innovating).

------
boredguy8
I'm just happy tabs use the title space in Chrome on Win7. I never ever
understood why all that space was wasted by title bars. (It still wastes a lot
of space in OS X, though not as bad)

~~~
fortybillion
Unless you want to move the window, in which case trying to click on those 15
remaining pixels above the tab bar is very difficult (at least on OS X, not
sure if it's different on Windows).

~~~
boredguy8
You can click anywhere on the 'dark grey' to move the bar, including to the
right of any tabs or beneath the stoplights. Personally, I think those 15
pixels above the tabs need to go away, too.

------
xtacy
There are more downsides. Given their example of how new webapps will
seamlessly integrate into the browser by having their own toolbars and such
(the google maps part), it would be very easy to craft a picture-in-picture
phishing attack.

~~~
seltzered
they're aware of this problem, and they're supposedly addressing that with
Firefox Account Manager (linking to aza's blogpost about it):
[http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-
attac...](http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attack/)

Hell, I'm using a free version of AVG antivirus and it just detected
bgattack.js as a threat!

------
ck2
As long as I can change it back they can hypothesize what's best for everyone
else as much as they like.

I still use a plugin to make Firefox 3.6 look like 2.0

------
rameshnid
I think he missed one other pro for having the tabs on top-

It makes it easy if the tabs are on top for a user using touch tablets.

------
ashishb4u
Because they copied Chrome...

------
younata
I don't use firefox (uses up too much memory for my liking), however, it's
good to know that it's a preference that's easily changed.

Of course, the people who download FF4, don't know about the change, and don't
know how to change the preference (I.E. most older folks) will complain about
how their firefox has changed. On the other hand, most of these people who
would react this way are using IE6, and not firefox.

