When I first heard of tabbed browsing, I couldn't understand the point. I wondered why people made such a fuss when Apple released Safari without it. Then I tried it, and now I can't live without it.
But I struggle to explain the concept. I have a reasonably intelligent friend who insists he can get the same effect by opening multiple windows. Now, I have the idea that there's just so much mental overhead in opening a window that it restrains you from opening as many windows as you would tabs. I'm guessing his typical browsing sessions have a lot less windows open than I do tabs. But I'm having trouble quantifying that in a convincing way.
Can anyone explain concretely, to an engineer, what he will get out of tabs that he cannot get with windows?
Why bother with directories on a hard drive? Just dump everything into one directory. Why bother with a filing cabinet? Just pile everything onto a desk.
Personally, I've always hated applications that force me to open multiple windows (GIMP is really annoying about this.) If I have a few of them open, things quickly become a disorganized mess.
Re:tabs
da on 2005-01-14T20:52:34
Hrm; re-reading your entry, for your engineer friend, I suppose it might be the difference between how many tasks he want to be working on at the same time. I keep tons of windows and tabs open, in order to remind me what I'm working on.Re:tabs
jdavidb on 2005-01-14T21:57:55
I actually rarely have more than one browser window open, but I still feel tabs are indispensible. I think I'm not doing anything that couldn't be done with windows instead of tabs, but it still seems infinitely more valuable. I'm trying to figure out why I have that perception so I can express it and share it.
Re:tabs
da on 2005-01-14T22:02:39
heh. I only open multiple browser windows if I want them to be on different X workspaces. such as 'generic work' vs. 'personal' vs. '5 applications for one project'
Under MS Windows, opening multiple 'documents' in one application window is known as the Multi-Document Interface or MDI. A big problem with MDI is that users can't just Alt-Tab to cycle through all their open documents. They have to Alt-Tab to each application and then switch to Ctrl-Tab (or Ctrl-F6 or whatever) to get to each document within that app. As far as MS Office is concerned, MDI seems to have been a failed experiment - recent versions of Office don't support it.
In theory, a windowing environment allows users to ignore distinctions between document types. They can switch between Word, Acrobat, Excel, Photoshop etc cutting and pasting without having to think "Which app did I open is this document with"?
The alternative to multiple browser tabs is multiple browser windows. This leads to a more consistent user experience for switching between open documents, but it also leads to screen clutter. Of course the typical Windows user always runs all apps maximised all the time so they don't have screen clutter so much as taskbar clutter. I haven't seen a good solution to taskbar clutter - collapsing all windows for a given app into one taskbar button is just MDI in disguise.
I now use Linux as my primary desktop at home and at work. The virtual desktop facility available under X allows me to organise windows the way I want, rather than the way some application designer wants me to. In this environment, I haven't found tabbed browsing to be a win.
Re:I hate taskbars
schwern on 2005-01-16T11:41:07
I do not want to have a task bar taking up space and telling me that I indeed have 10 terminals, a couple of kghostviews, some gimp windows and five openoffice.org documents open.Any good taskbar will autohide to save space. OS X's dock and Window's task bar both do.
Re:I hate taskbars
Juerd on 2005-01-16T13:16:00
Things that appear when I move the mouse to a certain border suck. The borders of a screen are the most important space. I want to be able to move my mouse in that direction and then aim and click. Auto hiding stuff interferes with that. I don't want docks/taskbars to auto hide, I don't want automatic virtual desktop switching.
The top side of the screen is where title bars are. The right side is where scroll bars are. The bottom is where status bars are. And the left side, which used to be the only solution, is now taken by all kinds of sidebars.
This said, I do have a taskbar. KDE's "kasbar". It's auto-hiding and lives centered at the top. But obviously, it's a mess, because I keep windows open. Top center is doable, but it still sucks. I wish there was a good way to do without. Tabs in gimp and oowriter would certainly help, because that's where the taskbar is necessary.
I love MDI, just not the way Unixish things handle it. Windows got it right. Ctrl+button instead of Alt+button has always made sense to me. Only a taskbar inside the application was missing. Tabs fix that, and are a lame excuse for not having to manage windows in the bigger window. Opera did it right and had the most useful solution. I still don't understand why the taskbar is *outside* the tabs in Firefox and Mozilla. And I'd love to be able to tile documents without using a second window.
But no, some people decided that MDI was bad. Then, others thought it was good. But they couldn't just reintroduce it, because of the taboo. Tabs were invented, and now we have two incomplete solutions to choose from: MDI, tabs. But please, no forced SDI.
The big benefit is on return - the higher level pages are still loaded, still at the same place (or perhaps further along - if the site is slow, I can often read a fair way beyond the point where I linked down while waiting for lower pages to load).
