

Mozilla Challenge: Reinvent Tabs in the Browser - danw
http://design-challenge.mozilla.com/summer09/

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TomOfTTB
I think the idea behind this is great and I'm happy Mozilla is doing it. I
just wish someone would put a little more thought into how this could be done
in a collabrative way and not as a contest. Anyone who has designed anything
with a team knows that a single idea from someone else can have a huge impact
on what you're thinking.

I'm man enough to admit I've had whole trains of thought de-railed by someone
pointing out a flaw in my logic that I just couldn't see without their help.
This contest is like everyone showing up with their "first day of design"
ideas and then leaving with no discussion. Still a cool idea but limited.

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neilk
Rather than reinvent tabs in the browser what we really need is a better way
to think about multiple tasks on our computer. There is no significant
difference any more (and the write up sort of hints in that direction).

From the 80s and 90s, we have things like dialog boxes (task flow), multiple
document windows, and application switchers. Mac OS X brought us the dock,
which marries launcher and switcher in a pretty bad way if you ask me.

The browser has subsumed all of the above into tabs or multiple windows.
("Launcher" is our start page / bookmarks / google "navigational" queries.)

And it adds some more complications: queueing up tangential things to read,
view, or listen to, and special versions of the document, for things like
printing.

When I open up a bunch of tabs from Hacker News, it is more like a queue of
unrelated topics, and it might even survive between sessions. Other times I am
doing an exhaustive research of some topic, from links on Google, and I might
even want to keep a complete history of how I navigated. But "here's your
e-ticket for the movie tonight, now print it" is very different; it's only
good for right now and it needs attention immediately.

Maybe we have to start annotating these tabs and windows differently, either
the page authors do so in HTML or JS or we the readers somehow indicate our
intention as we open them. That way the browser-tab-operating-system-thingy
can start grouping them more sensibly.

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ZeroGravitas
Good. Tabs still suck. I remember when content from one would bleed into the
other and all the other misc problems caused by re-inventing windowing within
apps.

It's gotten better, bit by bit. But I still lose web pages in tabs and while
Safari has a Window menu that lists each window, it only lists the frontmost
tab of each.

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lucumo
I really wonder what they'll come up with. Unlike you, I really enjoy my tabs.
They work perfectly for me. They give easy access to and a quick overview of
open pages. At a cost of almost no display space.

I've been hooked on tabs since before they were called "tabs" (Opera's MDI
taskbar). They haven't changed a lot in those years and I generally love these
things. Any replacement that comes at a price of losing one of the features
mentioned above, will surely be hated by me.

So yeah, I'm curious what they'll come up with. I'm also sceptical they will
find a replacement. But we'll see.

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nileshk
I personally really like Opera's MDI interface in general (note that they no
longer have it in OS X, but the Windows and Linux versions still have it).
Being able to tile pages is nice, especially tiling vertically, what with the
huge widescreen monitors we have these days and the way so many web pages have
a small fix width. Yes, I know that you can achieve the same by opening up
multiple windows and arrange them side by side, but if your operating system /
window manager doesn't have good tiling abilities, this can be a chore,
especially if you want to quickly switch back and forth between layouts.

I wouldn't say that straight MDI is really ideal, I'd like to see some sort of
split-pane type thing. Like Emacs, where you can arbitrarily split a pane
horizontally or vertically and change what buffer you are viewing in each one.
The buffers in this case being all web pages that are open. For extra points,
because its probably technically difficult, being able to show the same web
page in multiple panes would be cool; especially if you could do something
like "Follow mode" in Emacs.

This is probably not something with mainstream appeal, though.

~~~
nileshk
Apparently there is a Firefox plugin to do split panes:

<http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_splitbrowser.html.en>

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HalcyonMuse
A queue would be cool, a la instapaper.com, but supported by the browser. I
notice most of my tabs are "waiting to be read" things opened from Hacker
News.

