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).
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.
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. :)
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.
That's the best browsing innovation I've seen in years -- and not uncoincidentally similar to some ideas I've had but haven't quite gotten around to implementing. The meta groups mentioned at the end definitely seems like the right track.
good lord thanks for telling me about tree-style tabs, it seems great for researching a bunch of code frameworks
Well, since I'm sharing the love... Tree Style Tabs in combination with Selection Links is a killer combo. Say somebody points you to a page (or sends you an email which you read through a web interface) with a bunch of links in it. So you select the text and use a one click Selection Links function to open all the links in the selected text. With Tree Style, that loads all the links as children of your original tab. Then if you want to monitor the content of those links (say each link shows the status of some activity), you use Tree Style Tab's "Reload children" to get firefox to reload only that part of the hierarchy.
Another reason for choosing sidebar like functionality is that the number of tabs is effectively unlimited. I never understand why developers chose to use tabs for grouping lists of things that can grow unbounded. Eventually you get to a point where you are forced to:
- shrink the tabs ever smaller
- implement scrolling of tabs(!)
- limit creation of new tabs
- auto close them
Sidebars have none of these problems. Tabs should only be used when the number of items you have is known, limited, and ideally a small number.
True but you can easily have 30-40 items in a list, all readable without having to scroll. Text labels are a small fixed height, but a long and widely variable width, so it makes sense to stack them rather than put them end-to-end.
Also a scrolling pane is a standard UI element that is well accepted by users.
Add my thanks too for mentioning the tree style tab extension. I've been using tabmix plus and arranging all my tabs in rows, but a tree view makes so much more sense.
Add my thanks too for mentioning the tree style tab extension. I've been using tabmix plus and arranging all my tabs in rows, but a tree view makes so much more sense.
Hey, you're welcome - somebody pointed it out to me, so I am just paying it forward :-) Anyway, if you use Tree Style Tab, you might want to disable Tabmix Plus. They don't seem to play well together - it seems to interfere with the Tree Style tab drag and drop. It's not like you'll need it, anyway.
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).