Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

I couldn't agree more on the Go menu. I have used Firefox as my default browser since it was called Phoenix and I've never touched the Go menu.

I personally really like the location and behavior of the Find toolbar. I think your reasoning about the content moving down being jarring is spot on, and is why I have both Firefox and Safari set to always show the tab bar.

Hide the Go menu with userChrome.css in the profile directory.

menu[label="Go"]{display: none !important;}

:D

Correct, the Go-menu is the most usefull thing ever created.

Funny you mention Download Statusbar. I also think it's a great extension, but I'm not using it since upgrading to 1.5. It was disabled for incompatibility.
Now that you've mentioned it, I clicked "Find updates" in the extensions window, and got "no updates were found for download statusbar".
I thought "oh well, no update yet" - but then I clicked the link you supplied, which is to a newer, "Deer Park" version of the extension.

I don't know why the update mechanism doesn't work, but it doesn't..

Noam.

The only valuable thing in the Go menu is the "History" menu-item, but other than that, the Go menu should really go, because nobody cares.

After posting the comment, I tried installing this update, and it doesn't work. I guess this is why the update didn't want to get it (?).
Anyway:
1. Download Statusbar does not work on FF 1.5.
2. addons.mozilla.org says it does (it says, "Deer Park").

Noam.

There's some good comments over at the blog so I'll be brief.

Find toolbar - kinda good on bottom as when your browsing find results its going down, hence moving the mouse down rather than up, it just logical and easier. Improvements could be made, I suggested Scott try the All in One Search Bar extension which allows the search bar to be the find bar too, which I think would be good if Mofo can develop but simpler maybe.

Tabs not inheriting previous tab history - good point, its session history really is it not, I kinda agree here, but in a sense its simpler now. No major complaints so prob just leave it as is, nice and simple.

Go Menu - this was mentioned here before. It should definitely stay, it was decided to put it in and it was and still is justified. In proper full screen mode it also allows easier navigation, with back, forwards, short history, and a link to full history all still usable. In anycase, it doesnt waste any space anyhow, so there's little reason to just dump it, I'd hate it if Mofo did, it would cause more disruption than any benefit.

Thanks for the response - you folks are cool.

About tabs: I spent more time than I can remember thinking about within browser navigation (moving between bars, panes, whatever). Depending on which group of users you're worrying about, the design conclusions you reach are different. Most of the folks reading this post are at the high end of the expertise scale. The expected behavior for those at the middle of the expertise scale, the majority of people using browsers, is often different. Balancing the needs and expectations is an intense challenge - if you're an expert yourself you can no longer rely alone on your own needs/wants for how it should be, and changes you make to satsify the mainstream crowd often cause the previously friendly experts and early adopters to throw sharp things at you. (tip: you may want to invest in thicker clothing, or make sure your health insurance is up to date).

I'll bet you and a reasonable number of mozilla folks a dinner at the restaurant of your choice that if you do any formal testing with FF with more mainstream users, the current design for both tabs and find will be problematic for people that have never used FF before. One of the secret burdens you have with tabs is designing the feature so that it both teaches people new to tabs how to use it, while still staying smooth and streamlined for those that use it every day.

I'd offer to run a formal study for you myself, but given the bet I just offered I probably should recuse myself. Truthfully, I'd love to run a well designed comparative usability study (IE/FF/Opera) and publish the results. Sadly there doesn't seem to be an open usability community of people volunteering to run usability studies (maybe I just put my foot in my mouth to start one).

Note: this isn't to say that my off the cuff recommendations are right. I think the design challenges for both tabs and the find UI are subtle and I can imagine some % of people having problems no matter how you design them.

There's always going to be a learning curve with new software, and its been made seriously more easier on Firefox than on any other browser, of software. So things cant just be changed to work like IE. It all has been studied hard and tested, and there's been no real complaints even from basic users. Specifically on the find toolbar and tabs, I think the find toolbar is far easer and intuitive than IE's or any other browsers, my mum can understand it, but even more advanced users have never gotten used to IE's find feature.

On tabs, in some area's maybe, but again its been studied and tested well with not serious complaints. When there are theyre taken seriously. But its not been done half heatedly or in a naive sense, it works now, things will improve. To an extent the bets not specific enough as there's always problems to an extent with a minority. If you mean it would be problematic for a majority of users on the other hand - well no serious numbers have problems now or complain, and any novice users I know understand and learn it all very well ;)

Berkun wrote:

Sadly there doesn't seem to be an open usability community of people volunteering to run usability studies

Openusability.org; I believe it was inspired by ESR's essay "The Luxury of Ignorance" (which begat part two, which begat The Art of Unix Usability)

Maybe you'll also find talking to ESR to be rewarding. Maybe....

Scott, what are your thoughts on tab overflow UI? Right now we simply don't (tabs are lost when they exceed the available space). I initially liked IE 7's implementation -- the stubby tabs at each end which behave as a tab and as a scroll mechanism but after using it for about a month, I'm a lot less happy with it. The other options we've considered (and rejected) are scrolling from each end -- with actual scroll arrows, tab oveflow with chevrons and menus at each end, and tab wrapping so that you get another toolbar of tabs when the first fills up. All of these seem to have pretty serious shortcomings when you think about trying to locate a specific tab or what happens to the rest of the tabs when tab switching.

If you've got any suggestions, I'm definitely interested.

- A

I think the rationale for the Go menu is for accessibility: all toolbar icons should have a menu equivalent. IE5 and later makes the Go menu a submenu of the View menu. Opera 8 (I don't have earlier versions to test) seems to have ditched the Go menu completely.

One way to help tab discoverability is to put the new-tab button on the toolbar by default, to the right of the search bar (all the way on the right side of the toolbar). This puts it directly above the close-tab button, making the tab controls "all in one place" and adjacent to the maximized screen (Fitts' Law). The close tab button also needs a tooltip: "Close the current tab." It would also be nice aesthetically, IMHO, if the close-tab button were equal in width to the new-tab button and looked like a red X over a tab (instead of a "hey, what's this X thingie do?").

On tab overflow: I'd start by trying to come up with a profile for who's using 15+ tabs and what they're doing. Is it mostly from people doing "open in tabs" off of a bookmarks folder? Is it from people who do Cntrl-T for most new link clicks? I'd want some idea of the common usage patterns that get people into an overflow state. If I had data for this great, if not I'd hypothesize: "The 5 common usage patterns related to tab overflow".

Then I'd be able to make a list of the different UI widgets for overflow management. In the universe of UI there's only 7 or 8 ways to handle this: scroll, dropdown, submenus (magically collapse tabs into tab groups), orient them vertically (might fit more that way), and on and on. I'd riff for awhile on alterantives (preferably in a room with beer, a whiteboard and other designers), and dig into twists on the basic 7 or 8 ways.

But I wouldn't decide which way to go (or prototype) until I applied that hypothesis of usage to the different possible widgets. I should be able to take that hypothesis and imagine which designs would serve which kind of usage best, and in doing that comparison (usage model to widgets) I'll probably find new twists and tweaks I hadn't thought of before. But using the usage model I'd be able to easily see the strengths and weaknesses of each alternative.

I realize I'm telling you how I'd do it, and not doing it, but the former takes less time (although the later wouldn't really take all that long) and at the moment less time is all I have :)

"I personally really like the location and behavior of the Find toolbar. I think your reasoning about the content moving down being jarring is spot on, and is why I have both Firefox and Safari set to always show the tab bar."

My feelings exactly.

Granted that the Go menu is a little peculiar (and therefore maybe not optimum), it does serve an almost essential role at present. Did you ever close a tab by mistake? Yes, I can find the last site from the History, but many users will have a hard time thinking of that and setting the view correctly. On the Go menu it's right there (i.e. discoverable).

When you figure out how to undo closing of the last tab, then maybe the Go menu could go. You could put the history in the View menu.

Even before reading the above comments I was going to say I would agree with Scott on the Tabs behavior in particular. Things like the Go menu's existence I've not thought of consciously - it's not bugged me. But a new tab (created by middle/ctrl/right clicking a link) inheriting the initial tab's history has always seemed intuitively useful to me (this also counts for new windows). I've found myself scratching my head at times over the years wondering why that behavior still has not arrived.
I believe such behavior would only affect usability positively.

@Greg, I agree on the tooltip, I never realised the tab close button didnt have one and see no reason why it shouldnt tomorrow, the tooltip of close current tab is perfect too . Asa, comments?

I also think it needs to be easier to close an un-current tab. Right clicking any tab, the close tab button should be at the top of the list rather than the bottom, or at least just more obvious. Its not obvious now, meaning people click on a tab, then click the close current tab button, then return to they're previous tab they were on - very long winded and un-necessary.

A add tab close button to all tabs is a sensible option to consider too rather than just in an extension. This does make tabs even more intuitive, easier to understand and use, as the user can see the close for that page, so know if they click its close button, it will close that page/tab - as with Opera.

Open a new tab button by the search bar though, no way. That would be really ugly and confusing looking. Right clicking a current tab has add a new tab button, and of course in file menu which is fine. User can also very quickly and easily add the new tab button to the navigation bar, so it doesnt look seperate, isolated, and yet another thing to learn. I have open a new tab button next to the home button, aswell as print!

As for tab overflow:
How about grouping tabs from the same domain into one tab like Windows XP does with multiple instances of a program in the taskbar. It's not an infalable solution but it can lessen the occurance of the problem. But then there are two things that need to be decided:
1) How do you know a tab is a group holder? I'd say the least you can do is show the domian and the number of pages in the group. e.g. mozilla.org - [5] And mabye show a down arrow on the favicon like was done in the search bar.
2) How do you access the pages in that group? I'd say you left click on the tab and get a drop down menu of the pages in the group. Focusing the current tab is what happens if you left click on the current tab in 1.5. That behavior can be done instead on double click. Or you only get the drop down menu by clicking on the favicon.

Regarding the Go menu, instead of removing that piece of code altogether it could be used elsewhere (I mean, _somebody_ must use it after all this time, right?).

The Go menu could instead be popped up when you right-click on the Go button next to the location box. The location box doesn't seem to sort by last-visited so the Go menu would be handy to have lying around. This would be consistent with the lists that pop up when you right-click the Back and Forward buttons. Just an idea. Hope this is an appropriate place to air it.

The Go menu still does show a handy recent history, but the Go menu in Thunderbird is completely pointless. It has three items: Mail Start Page, Next, Previous. I think people can navigate their messages with arrow keys, and why would anyone want to go back to the Thunderbird start page?

I had never realized that the Go menu could be used as an "unclose tab" feature (thanks, AnotherGuest!); here is yet another reason to keep Firefox's Go menu.

Overall, there are very few changes I would make to the Firefox UI (and the little pet peeves I have can mostly be resolved with extensions). It's the Thunderbird UI that needs work.

It's also nice to see a good What I Like And Dislike review of Firefox that isn't from an Opera fan, or a Maxthon fan. It's from someone with some sense. He makes good points...if only Mozilla would listen more to my bugs and requests (I know, I know, you get a ton), I'd be happy ;-)

regarding tab history, it's be interesting to test out implementing the 'back' operation when there's no history in the current tab, to swithc tabs back tot he tab that was used to open the current tab (if one exists).

For example, I just tabs a ton when I open up a news site with 10 stories I want to read, I just middle-click each story link. If 'back' in those new tabs took me back to my original tab (if it was still open) that might be interesting.

On the other hand, I can see this causing me to have a ton of useless tabs open if I go back to the main tab instead of closing my current tab.

I like the Find Toolbar on bottom. I think it's slightly disorienting for new users as it's kind of in your peripheral vision, but that also makes it unobstrusive once you get used to it. If it were at the top it would either shift content (definately jarring!) or obscure the top portion of the page where I'm likely to be looking at something. I'm almost certainly *not* looking at the bottom 20 pixels of the window. The most important thing, though, is that the toolbar is not a floating dialog that obscures part of the thing I'm searching!

I agree that it would be very nice if opening a link in a new tab copied the history.

@Noam: The download statusbar extension works in 1.5 beta: I know because it is active in my list. You can check for updates by opening up the extensions window and click on "find updates".

I kind of agree that the Go menu is kind of pointless, though it is needed for accessibility purposes. It wouldn't be a bad idea to move it all under the View menu, since you are, in fact, viewing pages or recent history.

Regarding tab overflow:

I regularly work with many tabs open simultaneously (10+, often 20 or more). I'd call the usage pattern "working set" -- they're the pages (web email, news sites, etc.) I find handy to have readily available, either because they change frequently or because I'm not able to digest their contents in one browser session. (The SessionSaver extension is a great tool for this usage scenario, since I don't have to worry about losing state on all my tabs if I have to close the browser or if a new FF update comes along and requires a restart.)

One possible approach to the tab overflow problem is to mimic the behavior of the Mac OS X Dashboard widget: the input device (mouse or keyboard) identifies a coordinate along the axis that the tabs are aligned upon, and in this region the tabs are given enough separation/magnification to be able to distinguish their titles. Outside that range, the tabs could crowd together as much as is necessary. Sliding the "uncrowd range" along the line of tabs would enable the user to locate the desired tab quite quickly, I think.

"Sadly there doesn't seem to be an open usability community of people volunteering to run usability studies (maybe I just put my foot in my mouth to start one)."

I haven't really looked at it but what about http://www.openusability.org ? Seems to be just what you are describing.

I disagree on your comment about tabs, Scott. Every "mainstream" person I have switched to Firefox raves about the tabs. They are very discoverable and well-implemented.

And these are not geeks in any sense of the word. They are people who think the internet and that blue "e" are synonymous. They sometimes have a bit of a learning curve with various of FF's features, but tabs isn't one of them.

Gah, points number 2 and 3 I've talked about twice on this blog, once on Blake's and on the wiki too. I'm not typing it up once more for an idea I've had for a year.

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Firefox:3.0_Tabbed_Browsing#Why_not_use_the_back_button.3F

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:1.5_Download_Manager

Please Read x_x

Tab overflow:

Just from my own experience. Do not do anything different. I usually avoid getting tab overflow problem by "grouping" related tabsets into separate windows. So I have for example a set of tabs woth mozilla-related blogs and stuff in one and Eclipse related things in a different window and news entirely in a separate window. This means I do not arbitarily just create tabs but instead I try to minimize the clutter and organize my tabs by topic.
I agree that this is not the ideal solution for everybody - more like a workaround but if that forces me to better organize my browsing, I am not complaining.
One thing though that I've missed - sometimes I open a tab and wish to "detach" it into a new browser window - session and all... In 1.5 I can drag tabs to reorder them - wouldn't it be nice if I could also drag them out of the browser window to form a new one.

On the other hand - I am using Eclipse in my everyday work and they have a nice feature - they have a chevron menu for tabs that overflow and a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+E on Windows) that opens up the menu for the chevron showing a list of all tabs (titles). You can then either navigate to the desired tab with arrow keys or you can start typing the title of the tab and it will automagically filter the list according to the text you've typed.

This is by far the best tab overflow solution I've seen so far, as it presents all available tabs in a single list, so if you just want to go to that tab having "Python" in the title - you can just type "Python"[]
and you are there... also - if the titles of the tabs are squeezed together to the site icon size - through that chevron You will still be able to navigate the list of tabs with full (or at least recognizable portion) of the tab title.

just my few cents

Asa, I wonder if the question we should be asking wrt tab overflow is not "What's a way to make an obscene number of tabs a joy to use?" -- which may well have no really good answer -- but rather, "Is not the current non-solution of the ui looking broken on tab overflow worse than any of the suggested minimal overflow solutions?" (minimal as in not changing the behavior of the non-overflowing case).

Also, tab grouping by e.g. domain, while useful to reduce tab crowding, is actually not at all a tab overflow solution.

I think the search bar is ok where it is. I would like to point out though that it currently doesn't cause the page to jar upwards when opened, so I don't see why it can't go at the top of the page and not jar the page downwards, which is the main worry put forward to justify why it should stay at the bottom. What would be nice to see is a button for find. Clicking it once should open the find bar, clicking it again should close it (not all buttons act this way, like the download button for instance). As it is the only way to access it is through the edit menu or by pressing CTRL-F (which pressing again does not close the bar).

You know what ? You're right ! Firefox _has_ a Go menu ! I never noticed it before !

About the Find menu:
I don't really care position. But there is one thing that I feel really annoying: when you press "Find Next" or "Find Previous", the text found is always at the top or bottom line. It's not very convenient, as often I have to know the 2-3 lines up or down to know if it's what I'm looking for...
I strongly suggest that you left a gap of 2-3 lines between the matched text and the top/bottom.

With regards.

I'd love to see that some of the more popular extensions eventually get integrated into the firefox build. Extensions are great, but your general user isn't going to go looking for them.

Some of the first I'd recommend for inclusion in Firefox proper: tabbrowser preferences, download statusbar, and go up.

Like Roland, I tend to group my tabs into separate windows when it looks like I'll have too many open at a time. More useful than a tabs overflow UI for me would be an addition to the context menu on the tab to be able to move it to a different window.

Close buttons on each tab make sense from a UI perspective as they identify exactly which tab is being closed. However when I've used extensions to get this functionality in the past I've found myself closing tabs I didn't mean to due to sloppy mouse positioning when I click. This becomes even more of an issue with lots of tabs, as the target area to bring a tab to the front shrinks, but the target area for the close button doesn't - increasing the likelihood of hitting a close button by mistake.

Hi all,
in fact, I *do* use the 'Go' menu, for a very simple reason. I occasionnaly close a tab by mystake, and sometimes, the 'Go' menu allows me to re-open it without going through the Session history, which is sorted by alphabetic order and not chronologic order (and sometimes I don't remember the exact title).
What about an 'Undo close' feature ?

Um..... Middle-click is your friend. Middle click to open tabs. Middle click to close tabs. Middle-click-click-click...

For an interesting approach to tab management -- and actually, an interesting approach to a lot of browser UI issues -- it might be worth looking at the OS X browser OmniWeb. It maintains "tabs" as thumbnails of pages in a vertical column on one side of the browser window; you can re-order the thumbnails, drag bookmarks into it to open pages in the background, double-click on a thumbnail to open it in a new window. (And, in that paradigm, a scrollbar down the thumbnail window when you have overflow makes perfect sense.) I'm not sure what lessons might be drawn from it for a more conventional tabbed browsing UI, but it addresses nearly every issue people have with tabs in the most elegant fashion I've seen yet.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/

Regarding tab contexts, how about having a new tab show up with a button that you can click on to retrieve the context of wherever you came from? I rarely want a copy of the previous context, but such a button would be useful for those times when I do.

true about the go menu.
Haven't really noticed it, though I may have used it for the history navigation which thinking of it.

Furthermore, I think in the past it was possible to shrink the file - edit - etc.. menu so it only displayed file and an arrow to see the rest. For those of us who have removed the navigation and bookmarks toolbar and moved all toolbar content to a single toolbar, we could do with the extra space up there again.

and Asa, thanks for always taking the time to participate in discussions on slashdot etc and reading up.. You truely deserve your paycheck.

About tab overflow:

K Desktop Environment has a nice feature that allows you to switch between mutable desktops. My suggestion is to use a similar approach to solve the tab overflow problem. To have a tab that switches between mutable tab groups. You could, of course, move tabs between these groups simply by dragging the over the group tabs. Of course these group tabs would have to be in different colour than the tabs

The downside to this is that this might be a little complicated and confusing to the average user.

Regarding tabs:

every person I've introduced FF to has been confused at first by tabs. It seems the more computer illiterate the person, the less likely they are to understand the behavior. In fact, many people I've introduced FF to shy away from tabs entirely.

I, for one, don't understand some things with tabs either.

For one: The default behavior when multiple tabs are open and you shutdown windows is that you have to deal with the "are you sure you want to close multiple tabs" dialogue box. I can understand this feature when not shutting down a system, but it's really a nuisance at shutdown time. Either make the warning non-default or make shutdown time an exception.

Second: The blank tab opening is lacking. I don't personally care about the history, but it should open a user's home page at the very least. Is there any person out there who would want a new window to open a blank screen rather than their home page? I don't want opening my homepage in a new tab to be a 2 step process. IMHO that's one of the biggest failings of FF.

Um..... Middle-click is your friend. Middle click to open tabs. Middle click to close tabs. Middle-click-click-click...

Agree wholeheartedly. That's the first option I turn on in a new Firefox install - Middle-click opens and closes new Tabs. It's great, and I wouldn't change a thing other than making that the default option (when you click on a link and not in open space - the Autoscroll is great, too).

About the Overflow concept, having a little double-arrow that you click which gives a single-line for each Tab that you have open might be decent. I tend to operate with about 10 Tabs open before it gets confusing. After 10, it's a game of Click, Click, Click before finding the right page again.

Overall, great job on Firefox & Mozilla. I use both all of the time.

Really like the location of find. Please keep it. It is less jarring, and somehow so handy and unobtrusive.

The go menu could die. I didn't realize it was even there entil this came up.

Download statusbar is a good point.

Tab model another good point.

Second: The blank tab opening is lacking. I don't personally care about the history, but it should open a user's home page at the very least. Is there any person out there who would want a new window to open a blank screen rather than their home page?

NO!!! Leave it be. I'm that 'person out there' that wants a blank page. I typically set my Home Page (at least when I have to use IE) to "about:blank". I could see it being another option in the Preferences, though. I'll typically have my home page open in the first tab, so why would I want it open again?

Here's my stab at the tabs issue: Overlap tabs, but show all of the tab the mouse is curently over - a horizontal rolodex metaphor seems quite simple to understand. This could also be seen as a cleaner version of the 'floating tooltip' that currently shows the full title of a tab, but appears too slowly to be effective when searching through multiple tabs.

An option to show/hide the 'Go' menu would fit nicely in preferences->privacy. I think it should default to 'hide' too.

Why not put the 'find' dialogue where URL bar is? If I want to find something on this page, I don't want to go somewhere else, so I don't need to type a URL right now.

My personal beef with the Find dialogue is one not mentioned so far, It's not toggleable with the keyboard (or if it is, it's not obvious how I do it!). Everywhere else that there is a 'close window' button, I can ctrl-w to close it, the find dialogue breaks this, you lose the current page if (like me) you expect ctrl-w to close the last thing you opened.

My one complaint with the find window is that it doesn't remember that you've clicked "highlight".

I often want to view multiple pages with a certain term highlighted, but I have to re-click "highlight" every single time in spite of the fact that it remembers my search choice.

Good reply to a good article.

I frequently run into the tab-overflow situation. In my case it's no bother at all since I am simply popping 30-100 tabs off links in my current page and then viewing then closing them in that sequence. Roland Tepps mention of a menu that appears next to the close tab button containing a menu of all tabs (but only under an over-flow situation) might come in handy on occasion and is quiet enough to not disturb.

Quick n dirty of what I do: Open 100 links in tabs off current page, ctrl-tab to first new tab, ctrl-w all the way through 99 tabs after digesting page content.

In my case the page titles mean nothing to me and would provide zero information. The page content is the only thing of merit.

For those of you interested in the specific useage, it's stock research.

I like the fact that open new tab brings up a blank page. I use it all the time when I'm entering or pasting a URL. If you want your home page by default when opening a new tab, perhaps there should be a setting for that. You can always middle click the Home icon for that behaviour, FWIW.

Andy_R: The escape key closes the find dialog. Most likely another pull from vi/vim.

The Go menu is one of my initail reasons for swiching although ten backs is rarely enough.

Tabs: I have TabClickingOptions installed and have it cofigured so that when I double click on a tab it closes and have disabled the close tab button.

Also I have my tabs down the left hand side and a scroll bar between them and the page. Works fairly well although the title cannot be displayed and tab dragging breaks horribly on 1.5b. Although this can be fixed if they chould be made to jump out on mouseover (though not on the scroll bar since this whould meen it chould be done acidentily a little jarring. Something to think about for 2.0

For those of you who close tabs by accident -- there's an Undo Close Tab extension -- https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=58 or http://mozilla.dorando.at/ . Much nicer, IMO, than using the Go menu.

I think someone mentioned the ability to detach a tab into a new window. Konqueror has this, and though I don't use it all that often it's a nice feature to have around. Any particular reason why Firefox doesn't do this?

(I expect being able to split several tabs off into a new window could be useful to some people, but I don't have enough tabs to need it)

Just thought I'd point out, since no one else has yet: the "Undo Close Tab" extension is one of my essentials. Solves that problem neatly without worrying about the "Go" menu. Also, the "Go" menu, while rarely of use, takes up so little space that it is really not an issue.

TabMix (or TabMix Plus) looks like it's the answer to most people's complaints about tabs - home page vs. blank new tabs, configurable overflow behavior, available close buttons on tabs (no tooltip though), available list of open tabs, available list of recently closed tabs (one of my favorites!), control over width and appearance of tabs. As for opening and closing - I like the Ctrl-T and Ctrl-W shortcuts myself.

As for the find bar, I use the FindBar Switcher extension - let's me use Ctrl-F to open and close the find bar. Very handy.

Throw in a few other extensions (ok, maybe more than a few - I've got 25 installed right now, probably a few that I don't really need there) to settle other complaints (FlashGot with Free Download Manager handles downloads nicely, Compact Menu to reduce the size of the menubar), and Firefox is a fantastic web browsing platform.

This discussion seems to be focussed on "vanilla" Firefox, but Firefox's greatest strength (IMNSHO) is the extension system, and the community of users and developers that has sprung up around it.

(I'd link to the extensions I've mentioned, but all you really need to do is go to ExtensionsMirror.nl and search for them - great site. Oh, and I'm not a developer of any extensions - just a happy user)

As far as tabs go, have an option to add a second row, just like you can double the windowsXP task bar. i wouldnt mind a double row of tabs.

On Tabs:

I just want Firefox to remember what tab I was viewing before, so that when I close the current tab it jumps back to where I was, no just to an adjacent tab.

Tab overflow:

I'd make it possible to move tabs and to scroll the tab bar via mouse drags. Left-click+drag would move a tab (reordering), right-click+drag would scroll the bar (akin to how you scroll a document in Adobe).

The "move-tab" (left-click+drag) is pretty obvious. "Scroll-tabs" (right-click+drag) is much less obvious and discoverable, but it takes up a lot less screen real estate than the other discussed options. By making both a click+drag event, you're at least tying in two related actions within the same conceptual framework.

I think the find feature is great. When I read Scott's original post about it, it made sense to put in on top, until I read the followup about the lines on the page moving. At any rate, I don't care where it pops up because I RARELY even look at it. I just hit CTRL F and start typing away and I don't even look, and it doesn't have that annoying pop-up. The only time I ever look at it is to find the previous entry when I went a little crazy on the Enter key.

Also, I like the behaviour of opening a new tab. When you open a new page in IE, it delays getting to a new page because you wait for the stupid thing to load a page you've already been to. Granted the wait is minimal, but I hate waiting for things for even a fraction of a second. It totally speeds up my surfing.

Just a quick add to the tab inheriting session history "issue":

Basically, I don´t need the history when pressing ctrl-T.

By doing that, I'm deliberatly choosing to start a blank page (or homepage), to do a new search, to browse another website, whatever.

But opening a new tab using middle click is "slightly" different: I'm following a "path", the page I want to open is linked to the previous one...
In this case, I "need" the tab to inheritate the history:
if I've been closing the "root" page, for example.

Two reason of opening new tabs, then two different tab comportments.

Does it makes any sense, or am I the only one who would enjoy it ?

(by the way, I'm lost in a foreign country and using ie only during work, so if it´s already the way it works, please don't hit too hard...)

One solution to Scott's concerns I haven't seen yet re: new tabs inheriting history would be to have the new tab inherit the history of the previous tab with the blank page on top. This would allow one to open a new tab to a blank page yet still be able to use their back button and history menu. Just a thought.

oh, and this way, you keep the history without loosing time to reload the same page...

Having used Firefox since about 0.3, I'm very happy with most of the design decisions made. I'm more of a power user than most (a system admin), but here are my biggest UI comments:

Find toolbar: fine where it is. It was a little hard to get used to at first, but I'm a FAYT guy so I hardly notice it.

Empty new tabs: Please keep it so, or at least give me an option to keep it so. I've always despised IE's new window behavior, especially back in the dialup days. Use my home page (google) or a blank page. Anything more wastes my bandwidth and time. Especially when hitting ctrl-t from a huge flash-laden page.

Tab closure: I use the Tab X extension so I can have an X on every tab. A single X for all the tabs is not very intuitive.

Tab dragging: It sure would be nice! (yes, I've used the extension) Dragging tabs between windows would be cool, too.

Go menu: At least it's not Search! Oh, the horrors of tech support from that cursed Search button in Mozilla! "I can't get to my site!" Did you click the Search button? "Yes..." Well, don't!

All in all, I love Firefox. It was a refeshing change from IE at 0.3 and continues to be even more so with every release. Thanks!

Find - I love the find feature at the bottom of the Window in Firefox. I find it much much nicer than the way Find works in Mozilla. Please don't change this, or if you do at least leave it as an option.

Tabv and new Windows - I've never understood why when you open a new window in IE it imports not only the history but also the currently displayed page from the window you opened the new window from. To me it just seems plain dumb. If I open a new window it's because I want to do something new, not because I want to wait for the same page I was just looking at to be rendered again, then delete the url in the location field, then type in a new one. The starting a fresh with a blank page like FF does is just what I want.

The Go menu - Call me unobservent but I'd never even noticed it was there, let alone used it.

The best way I can think of to deal with tab overflow is to mimic an auto-hidden taskbar. When you mouse over scrunched up tabs, the fully or mostly extended tabs could drop down in as many rows as necessary (the number of rows would have to be automatic, though, so my taskbar analogy doesn't really work). It shouldn't matter that you're obscuring the text since you're switching away from it anyway. Of course, the size of a tab that's considered too small would have to be looked into pretty closely, because it would be really annoying to have a tab I'm pointing to jump from under the pointer. I like the rolodex idea, too, but it would make it hard to search by title or icon.

Yeah, I'd agree with Kyle. When you open a new tab it is pretty much guaranteed that of all the pages in the web, the least likely to be desired is the one that you were just on. But having the history would be nice. Not on new tabs that are opened via "new tab", but on tabs that are opened by a middle-click.

Find: The F3 key works as expected, thanks!

Go: Useless.

FavIcons: Need to work more reliably.

DOWNLOAD MANAGER: Takes an hour to open in all the latest versions! Why? It's just a little tiny window! Make it faster before I die waiting for it to open again! Especially since I can't do anything else while it is attempting to load itself...even when I hit ctrl+n and have 30 pages as my home, the new window opens and loads all the pages quicker than the download manager opens! What up!

;>

FF RULES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now, if I could just get Blakey to listen to my email about panes..... PANES I SAY!

---

PANE BABY

Blake:

I just had an awesome idea! I was thinking about how much I hate
trying to read a site that spreads the entire width of the window with
text. Which led me to thinking how bad it would suck on a wide-screen
display. Which led me to thinking I would probably tile three browsers
across the aforementioned display. I mean, truly, speed reading
requires as little horizontal motion as possible. SOOO building on
this and the tab idea, what about PANES! Yes, panes! Lovely lovely
panes. My precious. Dig it, much like tabs, you can pop up panes.
With seperate tab sets in each pane and of course it would properly
detect which pane you were rolled over so the scroll button on mice
would work properly.

Imagine the possibilities....my mind is whirling now! PLEASE PANE ME!!
:>

Keep rockin!

J

---

Also, it would rock if they 'folded'.

O, one more thing.... multi-column css layout is cool, but don't break my validation, mmmK!

On Tab overflow, I have two ideas:

1) Not sure why this hasn't been brought up yet, but the Safari handling of tab overage is nice. They shrink tab titles for a bit and then when you have too many it places the extras off into a drop-down side menu that's activated by a control on the far right side of the tab bar (looks like ">>"). So it's different than scrolling tab bars (which I've always disliked as you have to look both ways before crossing the tab street as it were AND it moves all existing tabs to new locations compared to where they sat before - often tabs wind up with similar titles and spatial memory is what you have to go on),

Another idea, perhaps to work in conjunction with that, is to implement some kind of "tab succession from the union". That is to say, have a group of tabs arbitrarily break off into a whole new window. It seems like given some visual cues this might not be too annoying; perhaps there could be some way to link the two windows so a user knew they were related and that's where the tabs had gone (like the last tab holding a UI Ransom Note linking to the other window). In fact it might be cool to have some way to see tabs as a multi-select set and be able to say "move all these tabs into a new window".

Another way to help reduce the instances of this might be to let users drag tabs into other windows (not sure if it does this already or not, I've never tried!).

Oh, and who turned off the pop-up blocker by default in Deer Park? Can you say 'OOPSY!'

And, how about really blocking popups, lots of sites have now figured out how to popup on firefox.

I just had one other thought on muti-tab selection - perhaps as you hold down shift and start to select other tabs (by clickign I imagine), it starts shrinking and tiling the tab contents within your window? That sounds really kind of cool anyway for just revealing what tabs are up to, it would probably only work up to about eight tabs really but it would give you a good mechanism to help decide what tabs could really be broken off into a brand new window.

Please never get rid of the Go menu. It has been one of my favorite and most used menus in Firefox! It is a big saver when I accidently close a tab, and it is so much faster than browsing the history. I hate sidebars anyway.

Hi folks ! For people that really want Download Status Bar on there Firefox 1.5 beta, here's the trick (Hey, it may also be helpfull for themes that do not install) :

* Download the .xpi file to you hard disk.
* Unzip it. For windows user this may require to rename the file from to .zip.
* There's a XML file called "install.rdf" where you unzipped the extension, open it with a text editor (Notepad, Gedit, Kwrite, whatever)

* Find the em:maxVersion tag and set it to 1.5 instead of 1.0+ Hi folks ! For people that really want Download Status Bar on there Firefox 1.5 beta, here's the trick (Hey, it may also be helpfull for themes that do not install) :

* Download the .xpi file to you hard disk.
* Unzip it. For windows user this may require to rename the file from to .zip.
* There's a XML file called "install.rdf" where you unzipped the extension, open it with a text editor (Notepad, Gedit, Kwrite, whatever)

* Find the em:maxVersion tag and set it to 1.5 instead of 1.0+ Hi folks ! For people that really want Download Status Bar on there Firefox 1.5 beta, here's the trick (Hey, it may also be helpfull for themes that do not install) :

* Download the .xpi file to you hard disk.
* Unzip it. For windows user this may require to rename the file from to .zip.
* There's a XML file called "install.rdf" where you unzipped the extension, open it with a text editor (Notepad, Gedit, Kwrite, whatever)

* Find the em:maxVersion tag and set it to 1.5 instead of 1.0+ Hi folks ! For people that really want Download Status Bar on there Firefox 1.5 beta, here's the trick (Hey, it may also be helpfull for themes that do not install) :

* Download the .xpi file to you hard disk.
* Unzip it. For windows user this may require to rename the file from to .zip.
* There's a XML file called "install.rdf" where you unzipped the extension, open it with a text editor (Notepad, Gedit, Kwrite, whatever)

* Find the em:maxVersion tag and set it to 1.5 instead of 1.0+

* Close install.rdf, zip your files, rename it to .xpi if necessary.
* Move the modified .xpi to an open window of Firefox and click install.

Download Status Bar will be available next time you start Firefox. However, in the option author mentions that "Disabled options (...) will work in the upcoming Firefox 1.5 release.". These options are of course still grayed : our modified extension was meant to work on Firefox 1.0.x :)

Actually this extension works well on Firefox 1.5. Now that you are reading me, let me ask : Why the hell do we have a public/private keys system if no author use it? I mean, come on, users are just getting used to wait for the Install(5..4..3..2..1) button. To me, only SIGNED extensions should be available on addons.mozilla.org ! Otherwise, we can't guarantee Firefox integrity and tell people to install extensions at the same time !

Asa, what do you think ?

What's the heck ? My post has been messed up ! Here's the tip :

* Download the .xpi file to you hard disk.
* Unzip it. For windows user this may require to rename the file from to .zip.
* There's a XML file called "install.rdf" where you unzipped the extension, open it with a text editor (Notepad, Gedit, Kwrite, whatever)

* Find the em:maxVersion tag and set it to 1.5 instead of 1.0+ Hi folks ! For people that really want Download Status Bar on there Firefox 1.5 beta, here's the trick (Hey, it may also be helpfull for themes that do not install) :

* Close install.rdf, zip your files, rename it to .xpi if necessary.
* Move the modified .xpi to an open window of Firefox and click install.

(Asa, can you please correct the post and delete that one ?)

LOL! Since other people have decided to post suggestions here, how about adding in split view.

"Either Clone Window or Duplicate Tab should give Scott the behavior he's looking for."

Or, in the "about:config" menu

"browser.tabs.loadOnNewTab"
* -1 : Browser startup page
* 0 : Blank page
* 1 : Your homepage
* 2 : Last visited page

The default behavior works, aka blank page imho.

PS: please fix find as you type bugs. Ok, only a wish, thanks for the GREAT product!!!

Regarding new tab history, Konqueror's solution was
Ctrl-Shift-N - "New": new tab, blank.
Ctrl-Shift-D - "Duplicate": new tab, but has the same history and current page
So the user decides.

Berkun's site seems to be down, otherwise I'd post this there.

The extension to solve each of the 5 issues mentioned (as summarized by a Slashdot poster):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=162348&cid=13567782

Interestingly enough I never noticed the "Go" menu, but I have accidently closed tabs and wanted them back. So thanks to reader comments I now have a use for the menu... although I'm pretty sure I've seen an extension that will restore the last closed tab. Got to love those extensions.

As a side note, if you haven't tried "Easy Gestures", give it a try. It now governs the way I browse and I find myself using gestures in other applications and become frustrated that they don't work.

I think the "Go" should be renamed to "History" ... I think it's more accurate ... and without back forward and go ... i've never used any of them

Regarding tab overflow:

Although you say that several approaches were suggested to dealing with tab overflow, I'd suggest that a less-than-perfect solution is certainly better than none at all. Safari implements the chevron idea, and it works passably well for the case of a tab bar such as we have today.

What I'd *love* to see is a hybrid of Firefox/Safari style tabs and OmniWeb style tabs. OmniWeb orients them vertically with optional thumbnails of each page. When shrunk down to just a title, it works extremely well:
- Any number of "tabs" can be shown
- The title is visible to the user regardless of the number of tabs, and the length of that title is user adjustable
- It takes advantage of the current shift to widescreen displays
- Reordering tabs is much easier in a list than across the top of the screen, as the title both lengthens the drag and shrinks the amount of text visible

The main problem with such an implementation is it doesn't scale well on the other end of the spectrum - when there are just a couple of tabs open it wastes a huge amount of space. What I've always felt would work best is allow the user to switch a given window on the fly between the two modes (horizontal or vertical). Click a button (select a menu item, etc - final UI TBD) and the tab bar disappears and a tab drawer appears with all tabs in the same order. A user can freely ignore the vertical mode until they have so many tabs that they decide to switch views - I would avoid trying to "intelligently" switch views, as it springs unexpected behavior on the end user.

To my mind, there are few downsides. Those who like the current system (or no tabs) can continue to use it with no loss of functionality, indeed without even noticing the new functionality is there. Those who like the vertical list can use it instead. And those of us who just need a lot of tabs infrequently can easily switch between the two.

Any feelings or comments on this?

Speaking of the content moving down being jarring...

Why didn't the same logic apply to the yellow popup bar? It is almost as annoying as the popups. It is even worse than the popups themselves because you can't make it go away and always stop that particular popup without banning all popups on a site.

The key to me isn't what page is shown on a new tab, its the history. I think that TeK (above) got it right - a "new" tab should be just that, new, but an "Open in new Tab" tab should contain the history. That way if you're exploring 3-4 paths on a very slow site, but may want to go back somewhere else later, it doesn't /matter/ which path is correct, one of the tabs or the "original", they're all equivalent and you can just close off the one you don't want. Now if you find yourself down a tab path you either have to cut-n-paste its URL into your original tab, or (much more often) you end up accidentally closing your "master" tab for the site, and losing your history.

This is really cool that everyone is discussing features and people are helping one another by the interchange of ideas.

Maybe when overflow is reached, open up a dialog similiar to ms office, when a user copies multiple data or objects to the clipboard the sites favicon is displayed?

Mouseover favicon for page title maybe right click; order by 'date', 'frequency' e.t.c. Would have to have an order by 'name' for those sites without a recognisable icon, would be cool to be able to drag icons from the overflow to the browser tabs to exchange tabs.

Good stuff, happy user of Firefox, Asa all you guys helping keep up the cool work!

Simon

Asa and Scott,

I guess before reading these couple of blogs I never realized how difficult it must be to stumble through all the biased opinions from superuser geeks. I am an everyday computer user with a little bit more than common computer literacy. Please, I invite you to read:

I. ANY unexpected shift of the page is jarring
---A. FAYT - Have the option (checkbox) in the "Find" toolbar
---B. Tab toolbar - Cover up that 20px of the page at the top rather than shifting.

II. Tab overflow
---A. Use multiple rows (very common tab implementation)
---B. For real estate's sake, keep the toolbar shrank to one row until a user mouses over for > .8s or so, then dynamically expand the toolbar to show all rows.
---C. I know you can't take up the whole window with this, so limit it to 5 or 6 displayed rows and have a scroll bar at the right side for that guy who opens 100 tabs for whatever reason he has.
---D. PREFERENCES - With such an amazing feature, you've got to slap some preferences on those tabs rather than throwing them out to the extension programmer hyenas!!! Also, put a menu shortcut to these preferences on the popup menu to a right click on any tab.

III. Find
---A. You have a search box taking up real estate. Think like the Google Toolbar and have a "find on this page" option too.
---B. Again, need the FAYT checkbox on the toolbar.
---C. Remember the starting location someone was at before they started searching. If they type a word in and it wasn't found, so they backspace to erase or close the toolbar, move back to their starting position. Of course neglect this action if they touch the scroll bar at all.

IV. Go menu
---A. I honestly had no clue it existed until Scott brought it up. It's unnoticeable, so getting rid of it shouldn't have too many impacts, but neither should leaving it there.
---B. How about a down arrow beside the Go button that pops up this menu? A button AND a menu with the same name is confusing.

V. Random
---A. I open my browser. It starts to load my home page. I click the address bar to type in a new URL, but it relocates my cursor for to the first text box on the page for no real reason at all. I've slapped FF so many times for interrupting my typing when a page is loading/has loaded.
---B. Saved Usernames/Passwords: load them as soon as the box loads, rather than waiting for the entire page.
---C. KEEP THE WARNING WINDOW about closing multiple tabs! If you're new to tabbed browsing this will save you lots of headaches.
---D. Downloads
------1.) You can close the downloads window but sill be downloading?! Confusing!
------2.) If you wanna keep this, leave a notification (download percentage?) on that huge screenwide status bar.
------3.) I'm downloading and I close a window, but it won't let me cause I'm still downloading, but I can't see anything? No way... confusing. Rather than popping up that message, if the last browser window is closed and there's still a download going, pop up the download manager!
---E. New tab/window with same contents - The Duplicate rather than New feature of Konqueror makes extreme sense! Maybe on the popup menu of the tab right-click.
---F. When I think New Window/Tab, I think about what happens when I open a browser for the first time, not a completely blank page. Simply not intuitive. If Mr. "I changed my home page to about:blank" hates this so much, then it really doesn't affect him at all now, does it? His argument is null and a realistic argument should be initiated.

That's all for now. I hope you read. Unlike most of the people here I am not a super computer guru so I hope my opinions in these matters come as useful rather than nonsense.

Take care guys, and keep up the wonderful work!

Dr. Watson

I looked at FireFox 1.5, and I WANT to try it. My daily browser is FireFox 1.06.

The reason I have not installed FIreFox 1.5 is, neither the Release Notes nor the Known Issues say (one way or another) if it is SAFE to install both FireFox 1 and FireFox 1.5 on the same machine.

I want the ability to use both 1.0 and 1.5, but not if there are any side effects with 1.0 (including third party plugins... which I do not expect to magically work in 1.5, but I do want assurance my 1.0 install is unaffected completely).

Any comments? Thanks. FIREFOX ROCKS! :-)

Tab overflow:

Remember how those "Preferences..." dialogs evolved? I think old versions of Word used to have tabs stacked three or four deep, which was just awful - confusing and an eyesore. Then somebody decreed that one row is plenty, and put scroll buttons on each side when the width was exceeded (I think Visual C++ 6.0 does this in some dialogs). Great to look at, but painful to use - it scrolls either too fast or too slow, and then you've got to mouse over to the other side to scroll back. Then somebody came up with a pattern that says, "if you've got more than X tabs in a notebook, make it into a list that runs down the
left-hand side." And now this seems to be the standard design for preference dialogs.

So tabs are great when there are less than 10 pages, but become confusing and fiddly after that - in which case a sidebar with a list should be used instead (possibly with sort and incremental search abilities, and hotkey navigation - the typical extras you need to manage large lists). The problem is the number of pages is dynamic, so when do we switch from tabs to a sidebar? Switching automatically once a limit is exceeded would be annoying. It needs to be manual: a button, a menu item, a shortcut. The user tells the browser: "ok, my tabs are getting a bit cramped for me - switch to hardcore browsing mode.", at which point the browser removes the tab bar and adds a side bar. Later on, when you
feel your attention span returning, you can switch back to the tab bar. But it's got to be one or the other - you can't have both on window at the same time.

Personally, I browse like this when I'm doing research. I begin with a Google search, fire a load of page requests, then work through the tabs, fire more loads from links or keywords searches, kill pages that don't seem relevant, eventually whittling the list down to a bunch of highly relevant pages that I will either read in depth now, or file in my bookmarks for later.

[Somebody mentioned another browser that did something like this with thumbnails. This might be a nice enhancement, like Acrobat Reader's switchable contents/thumbnail view.]

Just wanted to drop in a couple of observations from my usage of Safari:

** Go menu: Safari has a History menu with global history, which is the only useful bit of the Go menu. I use History frequently, both to find a page again after accidently closing a tab and to find a page that I remember that I was at yesterday or last week or something. This is a _very_ useful thing.

** Tab close buttons: Watching my wife (not an expert user) shows the big advantage of having a close button directly visible on each tab. I actually saw her use Firefox at a friends house, and she was very confused by the association of the close button on the far-right with her current tab.

** Tab overflow: My use-case is Cmd-Click on many links in one page to open new tabs following the links, then work through the pages in sequence. Having the tabs overflow into a >> with a menu works well in reducing clutter for me.

With regards to Scott's post: "I'd start by trying to come up with a profile for who's using 15+ tabs and what they're doing."

I certainly can't represent everyone's usage, but I can explain mine and maybe that will help understand the power of tabs.

Basically I have two patterns: I use them when I read for breadth and when I read for depth.

Breadth:
I browse in one window to a site (cnn.com, slashdot, some bb forum). I'll scan all the interesting articles/posts and middle-click them to open in tabs. That way, I've got all the content I want to read available when I'm ready for it. No waiting for pages to load; no rerendering the main/index page. Some of the servers are slow or overwhelmed, so rerendering that page often adds significantly to the browsing time.

Depth:
I'm researching a topic, and some article links to another supporting article. Since I don't want to break with what I'm reading, I'll open it in a new tab. If I had to open a new window for this (as in IE), I lose the context in which I found the new article. With tabs, I can simply look in the tabs to the left to see who linked to that tab.

As far as overflow, I'd never noticed the issue. I'll get up to 20 or so tabs open, and hadn't noticed. Personally, the non-fix of leaving it alone wouldn't bother me, nor would using chevrons to scroll the tabs. I strongly dislike the idea of grouping tabs by site though, as it would totally break my usage when I'm reading for breadth.

I'm surprised that I haven't seen my most common Go Menu use, but I think that's a reminder that most of the people who post on this site are Power users. I do unofficial "tech support" for the small non-profit I work for, and we are stuck in a technological wilderness, using hand-me-down computers with win 98, 98se, and ME (proof that no good deed goes unpunished). The staff is a bunch of non-techie social-work types (the internet=blue e until I hid it on their desktops).

I teach people to use the Go Menu when their computer crashes unexpectedly (regular occurence), because the "History" menu contains too much information and they get confused, and you can't use the "back" button after a crash. I know that I could install the "Save Session" extension for everyone, but since most of them don't even use Tabs, it's just easier to point them to that menu.

So, please don't eliminate the Go Menu, because those of us with computers still daily showing the blue screen of death will be SOL.

Tab overflow: Why not do what Opera has done?

1. All tabs automatically adjust their width (up to a maximum) according to the page title.

2. When you have over a certain number of tabs open, each tab's close button (the 'x') vanishes, thus giving you more room for tab titles. Except the active tab, of course; that retains the 'x'. Unless you've turned of 'x's off completely.

3. Tab bar behaviour is configurable to: (a) No wrap, (b) wrap to multiple lines, (c) extender button (>>)

As for someone who uses tabs quite a bit, and runs into tab overflow quite a bit (though I usually use Mozilla and not Firefox - the behavior seems nearly the same) - I have tabgroups on my personal bookmark bar with groups for general news, geek news, science news, and the largest one - webcomics I read more or less daily. The latter opens about 50+ tabs in one fell swoop. However, as the first tabs are usually among the first to finish loading, I select the ones that's finished loading, read it, close it, and fairly quickly sweep through the entire list in 15-20 mins. So, the tabs that I don't see because they've gotten pushed off the end don't bother me - I'll be seeing them soon enough.

For handling tab ov