Ones and Zeros: Tabbed Browsing

Tabbed Browsing

March 27, 2003	Computers and Software
Dave Hyatt posted this entry to his Surfin' Safari blog to tell those of us following along at home that he'd dome some serious work getting font handling and anti-aliasing to be consistent with the standards used by other apps. That's good. What is even better is the discussion in the comments section about tabbed browsing. It may all have been said before, but here's my two cents... Tabbed browsing is suppsed to be coming in a future release of Safari. It's been in several leaked betas, but hasn't made it into the public betas yet. It's not really a surprise since Hyatt was primarily responsible for tabbed browsing in Mozilla/Chimera. I've used it in other browsers in the past. It's...OK. It's not bad. It's not a must-have feature. It's OK. Tabbed browsing seems to me to be a very minor variant on one way to use the Multiple Document Interface. MDI is pretty common on Windows. Inside an application window you have multiple document windows, of which one is active. You can have as many of these as the application will support and you can do whatever you want to the document windows: tile, stack, minimize, close, maximize. Maximized MDI is functionally equivalent to the current tabbed browsing paradigm. Substitute a Document Menu for the tab bar and you're there. So, what will make tabs a worthwhile innovation? Features that improve the browsing experience by making tasks that the user performs more convenient. If Tabbed Browsing can provide this ease of use, then it will be valuable. If it doesn't provide usability enhancements over other browser paradigms, then I don't care. Based on some use cases that I came up with, the primary advantage to Tabbed Browsing will (for me) be in instances where it allows me to act on multiple pages at once. I don't want Safari to open the comments thread on a blog entry in a tab, because if I'm making a comment I want to refer to the original message. I want to be able to open a group of bookmarks all at once. I want to be able to save a group of open pages to be restored at a single command. I want to find a word in any open page. I want to be able to view more than one page at the same time. I want to be able to drag a window or a document icon to the tab bar and have it open up in new tabs. I want to be able to drag a tab (or group of tabs) to the desktop and have it create a new window for them I want to be able to save a link to the desktop that opens a set of tabs I want a way to view the source of a document and the page side by side. I want to be able to select something in either the document or the source and have it be highlighted in the other window/pane/tab I want Snapback to be tab aware I want the Window Menu to cascade to select tabs I have no idea how the Back/History function should work... I want smart tab contextual menus that work on closed tabs Close tab Close other tabs Bookmark tab Close all tabs to the left Close all tabs to the right Duplicate Tab Open in new Window Reload Tab I want professional UI experts to stare at it until their foreheads bleed, asking themselves "how can we make it better?" over and over again... And while we're on the subject of usability, I want forms to have a dirty bit and ask me if they should be submitted before I close them. I'm tired of losing half-composed blog entries. This becomes a lot more important in a tabbed environment, where you may not see opened pages when you're quitting.
.:Posted by Michael on March 27, 2003 11:02 AM:.