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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

by frossie 16y ago

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).

po 16y ago
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.
- nooneelse 16y ago
  Well, even in the sidebar, with enough things, you can still have to scroll. It just looks nicer when you do.
  - po 16y ago
    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.
    - nooneelse 16y ago
      All agreed. That last comment of mine was a bout of pedantic-ness.
thorax 16y ago
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.
- seltzered 16y ago
  good lord thanks for telling me about tree-style tabs, it seems great for researching a bunch of code frameworks
  - frossie 16y ago
    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. I love it.
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    Another Firefox addon I've found ridiculously helpful is Vimperator. You can do everything from the keyboard except deal with Flash, pretty much.
- mbrubeck 16y ago
  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/ 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. :)
Jach 16y ago
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.
- frossie 16y ago
  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.
nooneelse 16y ago
Looks like Chrome has someone trying to do something perhaps similar... "Tabs Manager by malexan".
- mcobrien 16y ago
  https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ioigddmjfpphkbamgbaolfkpifddnaje https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ioigddmjfpphkbam...
msg 16y ago
I do the same thing with Tabkit and Ctrl-Tab. They're indispensable.

by frossie 16y ago

po 16y ago

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.

nooneelse 16y ago
Well, even in the sidebar, with enough things, you can still have to scroll. It just looks nicer when you do.
- po 16y ago
  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.
  - nooneelse 16y ago
    All agreed. That last comment of mine was a bout of pedantic-ness.

thorax 16y ago

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.

seltzered 16y ago
good lord thanks for telling me about tree-style tabs, it seems great for researching a bunch of code frameworks
- frossie 16y ago
  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. I love it.
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  Another Firefox addon I've found ridiculously helpful is Vimperator. You can do everything from the keyboard except deal with Flash, pretty much.
mbrubeck 16y ago
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/ 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. :)

Jach 16y ago

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.

frossie 16y ago
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.

nooneelse 16y ago

Looks like Chrome has someone trying to do something perhaps similar... "Tabs Manager by malexan".

mcobrien 16y ago
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ioigddmjfpphkbamgbaolfkpifddnaje https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ioigddmjfpphkbam...

msg 16y ago

I do the same thing with Tabkit and Ctrl-Tab. They're indispensable.