

Redesigning the browser window - Oestrogen
http://blogg.antrop.se/interaktionsdesign/redesigning-the-browser-window/

======
derefr
Regarding the use of horizontal space: This is what the Reading List feature
of Safari 5 is for. (Example for comparison: <http://i.imgur.com/x2tkl.png>)

Tabs are really only supposed to be used for things you're actually looking at
_simultaneously_ ; any time you're just middle-clicking everything on a page
(e.g. the HN frontpage), in order to queue those pages up for reading after
you close the index page, you should be putting them in the reading list
instead. It's kind of sad that Apple hasn't made a larger push to get people
to notice it; it's a much better solution for the bottom-80% of what people
use tabs for today.

Things you might not know about the Reading List:

1\. It has quite a bit of accelerator support (you can put any link into the
reading list by Shift+Clicking it; you can put the page you're on into the
reading list with Command+Shift+D; and Command+Alt+Down is "I'm done reading
this; advance to the next thing in the list.")

2\. The reading list (as part of your bookmarks menu) gets iCloud-synced. Your
open tabs don't. That alone was worth consciously forcing myself to re-learn
my "eh, later" behaviour, because now I can just forget what I had "open" and
read the rest on my iPad/iPhone/etc. (I suppose this might be why it hasn't
been advertised much as a feature; they might be waiting to use it as part of
the iCloud release pitch.)

\---

On a separate note/rant, regarding the use of "tab groups": it seems like the
author simply wants to re-invent the Springboard/Launchpad-style application
management paradigm within the browser. Why bother? I don't want to have two
different ways of managing my applications, depending on whether they're "web"
applications or not. I want my applications in Launchpad, and my running
applications in the Dock, with notification badges on them. It shouldn't
matter that Gmail requires Webkit-et-al, just like it shouldn't matter that an
app requires Java.

Safari, just like Mobile Safari, should simply have an "Add To Home Screen"
button and be done with it. Apps that have been added as such should perhaps
be able to access extra resources. (Their HTML5 offline-browsing manifests
should be automatically downloaded, for one; they should have accelerated
WebGL enabled, with shader support, for another; and this would also be an
obvious place to adopt something like Google's NaCl.) I'm guessing, though,
that we sadly won't see any of this support, because anything that integrates
with the OS well-enough as a web-app is something that doesn't have to make a
Mac App Store app instead.

~~~
albertzeyer
This sounds interesting. I use Chrome. Does somebody know if there is a
similar feature there?

~~~
inconditus
Interestingly enough, Chrome had this option in the developers page, but they
removed it. I believe it was called horizontal side tabs.

~~~
WesleyJohnson
I have this option with Chrome 13.0.782.109 beta-m. If you right click a tab,
the context menu option is "Use Side Tabs". I just can't remember what I did
to get that option to appear in the context menu. I thought I used
"about:labs", but that is no longer showing anything. Maybe the feature is
baked into this build?

~~~
elxx
It's the first item in "about:flags".

------
natesm
I don't get it. Is a single huge browser window seriously considered "good"
now? I thought that the _whole point_ of the "useless" green button in Mac OS
X was that you should _never_ maximize anything. Two browser windows side-by-
side are much more useful than one of twice the size. Are we really moving
away from multitasking on the desktop?

~~~
ja2ke
I think most people moved away from it before they knew they had it, when
their copy of Microsoft Works for Windows 3.1 opened up in a maximized window.

Apple is heavily promoting use of gestures, multiple desktops, and other OS
features to promote fast switching and passing of data between running full
screen apps. It's different than the pile-of-windows approach of the last few
decades but the intent is still to have a ton of user-opened programs running
and interacting. I think casual users genuinely prefer full screen apps, even
after 20 years of pro users trying to lecture them and slap their wrists over
the potential they're ignoring. Lion seems to be trying to give them their
full screen, while also teaching a "safe" feeling way to multitasking and
present a bunch of apps.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I'm not sure gestures are ever going to be more than a power-user feature.
They are the keyboard shortcut of touch devices. My girlfriend still uses the
browser scrollbar even though I've showed her the awesomeness of two finger
scroll many a time.

~~~
Joeri
The ipad disproves your claim about gestures. Gestures work just fine, as long
as you do them on the screen itself and make them tightly correspond to real-
world behavior. The usability problem occurs when the display and the touch
interface are decoupled. The intuitive aspect of direct manipulation hinges on
the manipulation actually being direct.

The trouble with mice is that they are a double proxy. You move the mouse in
absolute terms, the mouse moves relative to a surface, and that relative
movement is translated to the screen. The mind after a while abstracts away
the mouse into a piece of your hand, so touchpads aren't really an improvement
over mice, because you're just making relative movements on a proxied surface
in both cases. In my experience the big usability issue with touchpads vs mice
is that the area for relative movement is too small, requiring frequent
repositioning. Apple gets it right by making the touchpad surface huge, so
that you reposition your fingers less.

I expect that the current form factor is just an in-between until most
computing devices look like ipads with external keyboards, with the mouse
reserved for precision work (or perhaps we'll have dual finger/pen
touchscreens).

------
beaumartinez
The real problem isn't the browser. It's the screen. Large horizontal 16:9
screens are great for video but poor for text and pages.

In similar iOS style, screens should be rotatable and shift their content
accordingly.

Watching a video? Great, put the screen to horizontal. Browsing the web?
Writing a letter? Coding? Put the screen to vertical.

~~~
tryp
Except now your fonts are rendered like trash because the subpixel rendering
and hinting assumes each RGB pixel triplet is in a horizontal line.

~~~
natesm
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts?action=AttachFile&do=get&#...</a><p>See "VRGB".

------
notatoad
it's like this article was written just to prove the relevance of the title
text in xkcd.com/934:

"It's fun to watch browsers fumblingly recapitulate the history of window
management. Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension."

seriously, just about everything mentioned in here should be the
responsibility of the window manager. why not let the window manager do its
job? i can see why chrome wants to implement it's own window manager, because
it actually is trying to be an OS. but apple has built a good WM, why aren't
they using it?

------
skrebbel
Opera allows you to set the tab bar on your left (with little page
screenshots) for years already. Works pretty well on large, wide screens.

~~~
Tomek_
It's quite buggy though, e.g. with many tabs opened the "open new tab" button
disappears or that you can't switch easily between thumbnails/no-thumbnails
view, etc. Hope the good guys and girls at Opera will take notice of the OP
and will work on some improvements in this area.

PS. also worth noting that Opera allows for easily grouping of tabs in the
manner similar to the one described in OP (no naming though, fortunately (in
my opinion at least)).

~~~
mtogo
> with many tabs opened the "open new tab" button disappear

I just tried it and it seems that there's a sweet spot around 5-6 tabs where
the button is partially hidden, but after that thumbnails are removed and you
can see it again. A slight problem, but nothing to worry about.

> or that you can't switch easily between thumbnails/no-thumbnails view

Right click -> Customize -> Enable thumbnails in tabs.

~~~
Tomek_
Yeah, I know about the "Right click" way, but it's not the easy one (comparing
to the simple middle click on the edge of the tab bar when it's on the top of
the window). Don't know hot can they solve it though, quite a challenging
issue.

Edit: just checked it again (placing tab bar on the left) and now thumbnails
turing on/off doesn't work at all - like I wrote: "buggy" :)

------
adimitrov
I'm already doing this with Opera, and I think Opera has it figured out a bit
better, too. The curious thing here is, I guess, that I not only don't have an
Apple Cinema display, I don't have a wide-screen display at all, and I even
pivot my monitor by 90 degrees (the one I browse the web on.) I've made the
experience that having a tall browser window is _much_ more useful than having
a wide browser window.

See the screenshot: <http://imgur.com/3lFAN>

I like the big pictures on the tab buttons — gives me a visual idea of what
I'm clicking on. I also like the tab stacks Opera implemented a while ago,
even though I still have a couple of peeves with 'em.

One thing he's totally right about, though: address bars are largely wasted
screen space. I'd like to only see them on newly opened tabs or so…

~~~
justinschuh
The address bar is the only security indicator you have in the browser. Hiding
it to the extent you're suggesting leaves you pretty much defenseless against
phishing attacks.

~~~
adimitrov
One could imagine some sort of indicator on the tabs. Or some sort of
indicator around input/form fields, etc.

------
blahedo
I don't know the future prognosis of OmniWeb---it's been a while since they've
released anything but bug fixes---but they've had side-tabs since they
introduced tabs close to a decade ago. The advantages of this are many: they
take up no vertical space, they can spread out vertically and show you
thumbnails (of the actual page, not a favicon), and they can be in a
scrollable pane. After years and years of using this, it's downright painful
to use the top-tabs found in any other browser, which are cramped and
information-light, and as you get many tabs going, not only are most of them
not visible on-screen but the ones that are have just one or two letters and a
favicon, making them indistinguishable as well.

All of which is to say, yes yes yes to side-tabs.

------
lloeki
I like this very much. Safari 5.x suddenly feels aged compared to those
screenshots. It also goes a long way showing how the iOS tabbed Safari is
awful on the iPad.

In Firefox realm there has been Tree Style Tab, which I personally loathe, but
for a take strikingly similar to the article description, there's apparently
Vertical Tabs[0] available.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-
tabs...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs/)

------
tjoff
You don't run applications maximized. You just don't.

Sure there are exceptions, such as photoshop and similar but for browsing
there is a reason for why the only thing you might miss with a width of no
more than 1024 pixels (or even less) are commercials, and for why we have
columns in newspapers...

Thats why, even with widescreens, the horizontal real estate is very important
and why you can't waste it. Sure, the vertical real estate is _very_ important
as well (and boy is it neglected) and sure that has become a real problem with
16:9 but not enough to start wasting real estate just for the sake of it. Buy
a 16:10 monitor (or 4:3) and you basically get that adress-bar, tab space and
other goodies for free.

Even on a widescreen the browser-window really shouldn't be wider than it's
height.

Or maybe it's just me...

~~~
crazygringo
Maybe it's you and large monitors. On my laptop, I run _everything_ maximized,
and Alt+Tab is my best friend. My biggest gripe about OSX is that it's not
built for this -- I literally need to define a separate space for _every_
application I use, just so I don't have a horrible jumble of windows. And
unfortunately _still_ can't Alt+Tab between windows of the same app... :(

~~~
a5huynh
I'm sure if you're talking about Windows or OSX ( due to the Alt+Tab ambiguity
) but in OSX you can do Cmd + ` to tab between windows of the same app.

~~~
crazygringo
Thank you!

------
nhoss2
I don't see how most computer screens - even the large widescreen ones are a
problem when reading webpages. I sort of like scrolling... It would be weird
for me to read from the top of the screen, move down to the middle and then
make my way to the bottom. What I usually do when reading is keep my eyes in a
relatively fixed position and I just scroll down very slowly. This thing is
pretty cool, but it might be a little annoying to have tabs on the side just
to save 10-20 pixels of vertical screen.

And while I don't find it difficult to click on tabs (keyboard shortcuts!) I
really like the idea of having the url inside tabs - adding that
firefox/chrome and then getting rid of the url bar would be pretty cool.

~~~
mindhunter
it's not about saving 10-20 pixels vertical screen. way more space is needed
to make the adressbar readable on bigger screens.

------
matmann2001
Opera has already implemented the ability to dock your tabs on the left or
right of the page, as well as the ability to stack tabs into groups. Sure, it
may not be all Apple-fied like your design, but it works really well.

------
kragen
I've thought for a while that we need to switch to multicolumn views for web
browsing:

[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2006-Novembe...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2006-November/000839.html), "multicolumn web browsers":

> So the solution generally adopted --- in newspapers, dictionaries, and
> research papers --- is to lay out the text in multiple columns.

> With Apple's 30-inch-diagonal 100dpi display widely available and >
> multiple-screen solutions becoming common, it's well past time to > adopt
> this solution for web browsers as well.

[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2000-August/...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2000-August/000626.html), "Phone browsers suck":

> On the other front, ever-growing screens on PCs present the opposite problem
> --- how to usefully use a screen the size of two sheets of A4 paper side by
> side? Interface idioms that worked well on smaller screens --- a menubar
> along the top, single-column text filling the screen, icons sized by pixels
> --- become clumsy.

I agree that moving tabs to the left side of the screen is a good idea, too.
--enable-vertical-tabs doesn't seem to work for me in Chromium. Tree Style
Tabs in Firefox gives you both tabs on the left and tab groups.

~~~
etcet
I'm going to use this opportunity to shamelessly plug a hack of Readability
that I call Horizontability[0]. It just displays the usual Readability output
in multicolumns with some javascript hooks to help navigation. For whatever
reason, I can't seem to drag the bookmarklet in Chrome anymore[1].

Chrome's side tab implementation really needs some help. I appreciate being
able to read more of the tab title, but they really don't save much space (the
window bar is still present but it shrinks by like 2 pixels). I'm surprised it
still doesn't work on Linux[2]. I checked out the source earlier and it's easy
enough to understand but there's no way I can get chromium to build on my box.

[0] <http://etcet.net/projects/horizontal/index.html>

[1] maybe related to
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=12290>

[2] <http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=31763>

------
ejones
That, or use a split-frame browser extension ([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/fox-splitter-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/fox-splitter-formerly-split-br/))
([http://www.chromeplugins.org/plugins/google-chrome-dual-
view...](http://www.chromeplugins.org/plugins/google-chrome-dual-view/))

------
plainOldText
To be honest, I don't like this setup with the tabs on the left side. It is
not a good way to make efficient use of the the real estate on your screen. If
you have opened only a few tabs there is so much more unused real estate below
the tabs, which is just a waste of space IMO.

------
mtogo
> Repor­tedly, Google has been expe­ri­men­ting with this [hideable address
> bar] as well.

FWIW, Firefox and Opera had this _long_ before google started "experimenting"
with it.

~~~
CoryMathews
Both firefox and opera have had it for as long as I remember.

Chrome is making news because they are experimenting with it that way by
default.

~~~
mtogo
That was a rumor.

------
jrockway
2009 called. It wants conkeror and xmonad back:

<http://web.mit.edu/nelhage/Public/conkeror-dir.png>

(In other words, this browsing experience has been available for years. While
that's not a picture of my desktop, that's pretty much what it looks like. No
tab bar, no window chrome. Just the content and a tiny bit of state
information. Emacs has also looked like this for ... 30 years or so.)

------
joeyespo
I was not initially a big fan of vertical tabs. But this article is very
persuasive. I'd very much like to see the contextual grouping and this looks
like a good way to do it.

------
rch
I find myself using the browser in full-screen mode more and more often. If
you want to give me better access to tabs (or other browser ui), how about
being able to open (and transfer focus to) a hierarchically organized list
when I alt+(tab, `)?

Oh, I guess the alt+tab shortcut is Opera only... Give it a try to see what I
mean - it would work.

edit: when I say full-screen, I mean cmd-F, exclusive mode, not just
'maximized'.

------
mwill
I totally dig the osx lion full screen paradigm thing when I'm using my laptop
screen, in fact I switch to safari just for that, but when I have it hooked up
to my main screen, it just feels 'wrong' with safari. The first mockup made me
long for this functionality.

Anyone know of a way to make the reading list load pages in the background, so
selecting a page shows it instantly?

------
fsniper
This left hand side vertical tab bar is how I used my firefox with some
addons. (well my last installation has that addon. I'm not using it now). And
this layout is a real screen saver for widescreen laptops.

------
mdonahoe
I like fullscreen Chrome because, unlike Safari, the tabs are above the url
bar and thus benefit from the hard edge of the top of the screen. (see Fitt's
law)

------
extension
Maybe use Google's index for the tab group names? Use the top keyword common
to all the sites.

------
username3
Application independent HiDPI would be useful in this situation.

------
nazgulnarsil
this looks sort of like treetabs with a nicer GUI. I suppose that's what I
really have been wanting.

------
buro9
I was with you up until Tab Groups.

Then I disagreed strongly.

------
ristretto
i would vouch for a "page-only" browser window with hover controls. like a
video player

~~~
jokermatt999
This is probably possible through some extensions and Firefox. The much loved
TreeStyleTabs already has an option for "autohide the tab bar". If
Pentadactyl/Vimperator don't already have an option for autohiding, it's
probably pretty easy to script something up.

~~~
shapoopy
Pentadactyl/Vimperator do absolutely have that (set showtabline=never).

I use Pentadactyl, and a Shift-B (show buffers) followed by a <tab_number>gt
will get me to wherever I need to go.

This is, of course, not discoverable, and therefore not really suitable for
the demographic whose problems this article is hoping to solve, but for
someone who's willing to put some time into learning a program (or who already
uses vim), it's pretty spot-on. I, for one, love it.

I should add that the problems this article is trying to solve really ought to
be solved through a thorough integration of the browser tab-system with the
window manager. That, of course, necessitates a thorough rethinking of the
window manager, also. But that was the problem tabs alleviated in the first
place, right?

The WIMP model really is the walking dead.

~~~
mun2mun
Pressing b also opens show buffer window and you can select tab by pressing
tab. You can also filter by title which is not possible in shift+b way.

------
Kwpolska
No way I'm gonna use this. I want to stay with my REGULAR browser interface. I
use a 5:4 display and it would suck.

------
4J7z0Fgt63dTZbs
Couldn't be Apple-ier.

