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 overflow, check out the UI on UltraEdit. I think they handle it pretty well...

http://www.ultraedit.com/index.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1

"Go" is a design mistake.

- As a "back" button, it's too brief. Stuff falls off the bottom and there's no way to scroll it back.

- As a way to reopen tabs, it's an ugly hack. To see how reopening tabs ought to happen, look at "snapback tab" in the session saver extension. Not least, "undo" ought to reopen a tab+state!

- As a history, it suffers the same problem as the other history mechanisms: the "back" button can revert state but forgets side-branches; "go" and the "history" sidebar forget state and jumble items together in a heap. What there really needs to be is a /branching stateful history/ pane that can revert to the entire state of any point in the past, including revisiting branches that had been taken, backed out and done differently.

I definitely agree with him on Search Bar on the bottom. I don't really LOOK at the bottom. I keep my eyes on the body, *or* on the rest of the content -- tabs, toolbar, etc. How about having it on the... top!? :) Layered above a popup infonbar if it's up. Or at least have it be customizable to be on top.

Regarding Firefox tabs, I'd love if there'd be an option to have new tabs reuse the content of the former one, including history!! I don't know if that's one if his remarks, but I came to think of it when reading what he said anyway.

And yeah, I think like him that Go is stupid. :D But I've heard weird stories about people not knowing when to press return so I guess anything is possible here.

Tab Overflow feedback :

Despite using a large screen (1280x1024, so more than 40 open tabs) I've quasi constantly tab overflows. I was suprised to see how my usage is similar that "Alan W." described above. So, my usage :

- In the left, I've a dozen of tab for frequently checked webpages: webmails, news sites and mailing-lists web interfaces. Those stay there for months.

- Then I've 10 to 20 pages of long & denses documents, that are too long to be read in one shot. I switch among them as I switch among differents tasks/interests in the day. It's like someone reading several books/newspapers at the same time. The average lifetime of tabs like those are 1 week.

- Finally, I have also "short life" tabs: when I read an interessiting document, I open the links it contains in other tabs because I want to finish my reading, then I read each of them but close them after reading. They stay there 5 to 30mn. As an example: for this Scott's feedback story I've 4 tabs opened (on this blog, Scott's one, Ben's one, and the story on slashdot).

I should admit that, in many ways, I use tabs like bookmarks (to keep "to still read" documents in the hand). But the current FF bookmarks scheme easn't easy enough to be a better substitute (time to reload pages, don't want to mix with "true" bookmarks, boring bookmark management tool in FF ...). And there's still the case of the (increasingly used) long term tabs: webmails, Rss feeds, news sites ...: this will grow as new forms of webservices appears.

Oh, I should had that I never shudown my computer, nor Firefox (and use the SessionSaver extension in case of crashes or upgrades).

Any of the Ben's proposed solutions would address those needs (and event FF as is is good enough: I switch over the off-the-screen tabs with ctrl-pkg_up/pkg_down).

The find bar top or bottom: whatever; but the close button on the left, when it's on the right in every other UI element, which is just wrong. (I can see a way to try to justify it, but this is a case for consistency.)

The Go menu is redundant to History. Some people like it because it's faster than History, which I think isn't evidence that we need Go, but that History is broken and should be fixed. The following things are broken: it's not a popup and it's on the left, so it moves your content when you open it; it's incredibly slow with large histories (this is a bug that's been in the database for forever), which is bad in general (I had to switch from a 2-year history to a 3-month history) and compared to Go; it only displays the page title and not other info (compare NS4); it can't be dragged wider than a certain amount and it only displays the left edge of titles (so if a site has a long prefix before all its pages, you can't distinguish them).

I don't understand how the blank-page-on-new-tab is at all defensible. Either home page or copying over the history (not just the current page!) would be reasonable, as would doing either of those and leaving the cursor in the location field (which would enable the same behaviors as the current blank setup). Copying over the history has the advantage of not waiting for the home page to load, which is the only reason I can think why that it wasn't chosen as the default. A common use case for wanting to copy over the history: I open a page, and then realize I want the current page and my previous page in two separate tabs; in an IE-style thing I'd create a new tab, then click back. In Firefox I have to go back, locate the link again, and then invoke open-link-in-new-tab. (Or use Go.)

The only other reason I can see for not copying over the history is "it would confuse people", but it seems like the confusable people are the ones who don't really have a mental model of the forward/back stack, and in that case I don't think they're going to care what's in the stack of a new tab. Ok, the one more reason I can see is because maybe the page takes a long time to load because it's got script craziness or something. Ideally cloning wouldn't mean 'load a new copy of the page', but 'display the page again'--in the same way that switching to a tab doesn't reload it, just shows what's already there. This may not be possible since all the state needs to be cloned, but hmm, I'm unconvinced that this issue, which applies to a small fraction of pages, justifies throwing out the baby.

Tab Overflow

Don't have time to read through all the comments, but I wanted to mention that I like Safari's handling of tab overflow. At first I didn't like it at all, but I've gotten used to it and in fact rather like it. So perhaps a bit of a curve, but well worth it IMO.

I prefer single window browsing and middle-click to open tabs. Work tabs are organized by being left most: there's a set of pages I need and that is opened by a button on the toolbar. I mostly open tabs in exploration. Whether I'm searching via google or browsing a website looking for information I will speculatively open tab after tab after tab. I overflow the tabs fairly often, but not constantly. Right now I have ten tabs open, no overflow. But I've overflowed at least once earlier today.

One of my biggest complaints had been that there was not a tab to close when in an overflowed tab. But once I got used to using the keyboard shortcut that went quibble died a quiet death.

By and large my experience (I work with a large number of people at this university) is that inexperienced users won't use many tabs. The techies and support people, regardless of browser, will often have numerous tabs. Which is to say that the scope of tab overflow seems to be for experienced users and not as much of a concern for the less proficient.

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

Amen. It would be awfully nice to have the find window apply to all tabs, without retyping the search term or clicking "highlight". (Read: feature request)

Otherwise, it is just fine the way it is. Other browsers have imitated the feature, but not very well. This works well the way it is.

--------
Tab overflow
Well, I like the idea of the whole tab popping out as you mouse over. A little like that bar at the bottom of OSX. Magnifies the text too. Discoverable, but maybe hard to implement.

A dropdown list with rows of tabs would be useful. It would give you the advantages of Opera's multiple rows without the disadvantage of covering the window. Also discoverable.

First of all: I'm very happy with Firefox since its beginning.

My main complain is the shortcut for Back: neither on the Mac (Cmd + Left) nor on Windows (Alt + Left) it is possible to use the most common command with one hand. The shortcut of Opera (Ctrl + Left) is the choice IMO. Make the common things easy. Unfortunamely not even overriding the Cmd key with Ctrl in the user prefs works, because it screws up everithing. Any ideas how to assign Ctrl + Left to Back are very welcome.

My main wondering is why the Reload-OR-Stop Extension is not in the main trunk. One really needs only one or the other button. Again, the art is to simplify (Bruce Lee).

I agree with Scott that the Go menu should go away. Only the History entry is useful and could be put in Tools under the Downloads entry (as in Opera).

I also don't like the popping up of the Downloads Window. One always has to click it away, if no extension is installed. I think it would also benefit if it could be squeezed in a sidebar. With History and Bookmarks already sidebars it would even add coherency.

Tabbed browsing: for the user there are no big differences between windows and tabs. Why keep both? Keep only tabs (again, as does Opera).

I have to say I also detest IE's behaviour with respect to opening a new window. I would prefer it to be blank. However, one of the things I would like to steal from IE is the ability to open a new tab or window in a separate session, ie separate cookies, separate connections, no access to objects in other tabs or windows. THAT would actually be useful (not to mention more secure).

I like that new tabs and windows are blank. I don't understand the reason for wanting a new copy of something you already are looking at, except when you want to cheat on a web based CBT.

Like one of the remarks above, I typically have "about:blank" as the home page for my browsers. On one at work I have FF with a home page of links in the first tabs and do all my stuff in the other tabs.

@Daniel: "for the user there are no big differences between windows and tabs. Why keep both? Keep only tabs (again, as does Opera)."

In fact, there were raging arguments[*] in the Opera forums over whether things like Downloads and Bookmarks (and Notes & History, etc etc) should be in tabs or in windows or in panels (aka sidebars).

However, all the kerfuffle fizzled out when Opera Software incorporated the option to turn a floating window into a sidebar into a tab. :)

* - Well, 'raging argument' is maybe a bit strong. In fact, I think someone used all-caps once. :)

1) Tab usage - Like many users above, I use tabs to open content I'm interested in without having to disrupt what I am currently doing. For example, articles that link to other articles; Internet shopping (opening a detailed view of a product from some index); search results (opening up promising results). Ctrl-click is your friend.

2) Tab overflow - I like what Eclipse does... it's good enough and not annoying. I would think that the percentage of the user population that runs in to this problem is rather small, so don't implement some radical change just to make life slightly easier (if that) for a small group of people. I tend to open a different window to organize tabs. It would be nice to be able to drag tabs from one window to another.

3) Closing a tab - the one "X" for all the tabs was strange to me, but I adapted. I also have a Powerbook and I like how Safari has a "X" for every tab, but I can understand the concern about accidently closing tabs as I have done it myself.

3) Retaining history in tabs - First, I hear a lot of users wanting this. My question is why??? What is the usage pattern? Why would you want a new tab with the page you were just looking at? If you want your homepage, click the home button. The "New tab" feature should not be a shortcut for "Open my homepage in a new tab".

4) Find bar - I think it's fine just the way it is and is one of my favorite features about Firefox. Do not go back to the pop-up window. I can see the point about integrating it with the search dialogue at the top but then you wouldn't really have space for the find options. Putting it at the top may seem logical in concept but in reality it would just add to the visual clutter. I keep the find dialogue open all the time.

5) Shuffling a bunch of these suggestions to options - Maybe. But I think a common problem with people who are technically adept is that they want everything to be configurable. I don't feel that Firefox has huge, glaring usability issues at the moment and you're never going to satisfy everyone, but don't over complicate the preferences menu.

I think one of the "problems" is that we have a whole "generation" of people who learned how to use the Internet with IE. The people I've switched to Firefox still don't really use the tabs. I didn't really use them that much when I first switched either. It just wasn't a habit or a known way of going about things. But once I learned how to work with Firefox, I could never go back: it saves me so much time and makes my Internet time much more productive. IE is so primitive by comparison.

Thanks to Leeman for telling me Esc closes the find dialogue, which he guessed from familiarity with vi/vim. Is there any reason why ctrl-w shouldn't close it too, and for that matter ctrl-f toggle it's presence as well? It would be nice to cover all reasonable expectations of behaviour.

For consistency with the (excellent) reasoning that the find dialogue shouldn't push the page down, surely the 'firefox has blocked a popup' message shouldn't either? Is there any good reason why that text shouldn't simply follow the word 'done' in the status bar at the bottom of the window?

The usage of 'go' to restore unintentionally closed tabs seems a real UI kludge to me, especially when power users are congratulating each other on discovering this ability. Surely the logical way to undo something unintentional is ctrl-z? Would adding this behaviour resolve the last objections to 'go' disapperaing?

Oh, whilst on the subject of the find dialogue - shouldn't it respect my preference for text only and not display icons?

@StephenC: "I don't understand the reason for wanting a new copy of something you already are looking at"

Oh, this is a easy one. ;)

If I'm shopping and want to compare, say, 4 different types of armchair at some online store, I will simply click my way from the store's home page down to the specs of Armchair A. Then I Duplicate the tab and go back to the homepage (Opera uses 'Rewind' to go all the way back to the beginning, but I expect Fx has something similar.)

I can now click my way on to Armchair B. Duplicate the tab and Rewind.
Armchair C, Dupe, Rewind, Armchair D.

I now have the specs for all 4 armchairs in side-by-side tabs. I can now flip between them noting that one has foam-filled cushions but a slightly more expensive one has a feather and fibre filling.

I know shopping's a bit non-geeky, but the same technique (Dupe, Rewind) applies to any sort of comparison -- mobos, phones, software, ratings, reviews, gadgets... anything. :)

Hi,

I would like to give a context for tabs overflow, for me it often happens because I have a permanent fullscreen firefox running in a virtual desktop, the same for thunderbird. It is easier and more comfortable to have all the available space for those software, and so I switch applications, switching my desktop.
Opening several windows is not very usable in this situation.

Hopefully thanks to sage rss feeds, I have far less tabs overflow.

I like the suggestion bout grouping tabs, this could be done easily according to the DNS hierarchy, and arrange it into a tree which could look quite similar to a site navigation tree and then a domain tree if the overflow is very deep.

Personnally, I would not like to have a docker-like tab overflow management, too many moving objects, and it would not be easy to quickly find an already opened tab (unreadable titles everywhere but the one you are focusing on and its neighboors). And could firefox remain fast (opera is already faster) ?

Another possibility, could be to hierarchically order tabs depending on the way it appeared: if it comes from a middle-clic, the previous window is he father of the new leaf (tab if you prefer to avoid tree language). If the user close a child window, its chidren belong to its father, if a user type a new url or change it by another way than navigating on the site, it should become a new tab.

moreover, when you close a tab, it would allow the user to come back to the previous logical tab, ie its father aka the originating page from which the user created the defunct tab.

Hope this may help

Just my 2¢ from a lowly designer...

Regarding tab overflow, I think Apple's Safari handles the problem very elegantly. No surprises, no frustrations. The tabs get a little smaller to fit new ones until they reach a minimum size (100 pixels?) when new tabs stack into a drop down menu on the right side. This way you can always read at least part of the title (enough to identify the tab) and when I see the drop down I know it's time to close some tabs or open a new window. I do wish it was as easy to switch tabs with the keyboard as it is to switch windows. Also, this behavior is similar to the Windows task bar that any Windows user should already be familiar with.

Regarding new tabs, I prefer them to load with content but not the page I was currently on. In about a decade of using web browsers, I don't think I've ever once wanted to open a new browser with the same page I was already looking at. On the flip side, when I'm surfing the web I equate a blank page with an error of some sort, so opening a new tab to a blank page has always been a peeve of mine. This just seems like a no-brainer to me, why would you ever present the user a blank screen on purpose?

But that's just me. Thanks for reading.

Thanks for elaborating, but you could have accomplished the same thing using one tab as the navigation tab and then opening up the specs for Armchairs A-D in new tabs using right-click or ctrl-click.

If the online store has any decent navigation, you might find that you are able to open up new tabs for each detail armchair page right off the same page.

This is usually how I shop online. I always have one tab for navigating the store and use the other tabs to temporarily "bookmark" products I'm interested in.

---------- original post -----------
@StephenC: "I don't understand the reason for wanting a new copy of something you already are looking at"

Oh, this is a easy one. ;)

If I'm shopping and want to compare, say, 4 different types of armchair at some online store, I will simply click my way from the store's home page down to the specs of Armchair A. Then I Duplicate the tab and go back to the homepage (Opera uses 'Rewind' to go all the way back to the beginning, but I expect Fx has something similar.)

I can now click my way on to Armchair B. Duplicate the tab and Rewind.
Armchair C, Dupe, Rewind, Armchair D.

I now have the specs for all 4 armchairs in side-by-side tabs. I can now flip between them noting that one has foam-filled cushions but a slightly more expensive one has a feather and fibre filling.

I know shopping's a bit non-geeky, but the same technique (Dupe, Rewind) applies to any sort of comparison -- mobos, phones, software, ratings, reviews, gadgets... anything. :)

Yes, but why would you open a new tab with a Web page just for the sake of showing something?

If a blank page says "error" to you, what would you want to see?

------- original post --------

...when I'm surfing the web I equate a blank page with an error of some sort, so opening a new tab to a blank page has always been a peeve of mine. This just seems like a no-brainer to me, why would you ever present the user a blank screen on purpose?

I love Firefox 1.5 beta.

I would like to have an enhancement request, which most of the people might be facing. Navigating between different tabs.

Maxathon browser (http://www.maxthon.com/), in this browser they can see list of tabs open and then can select any particular tab they are looking for.

Nice to have this functionality.

Otherwise this tool will rock and break Microsoft off

@Klim: "Find bar - I think it's fine just the way it is"

One of the dumbest things in the world is to have anything which requires precisely targetted mouse action to be located at the bottom of the screen.

In Windows, my Taskbar is on Autohide and if I overshoot a bottom-of-screeen toolbar by a few pixels, up it pops (bleh!) and I have to move my mouse up (wah!) and wait (sigh) and then move it down again... this time, more carefully please.

Cf. this with the concept of a mile-high menu. (As used to control Opera's panels for instance.)

Question: why does Fx have to have an actual physical box to type search terms into? What's wrong with a popup which slides into view as you type? What function does the actual toolbar serve?

Oops! That's 2 questions!

@Klim: "Thanks for elaborating, but you could have accomplished the same thing using one tab as the navigation tab and then opening up the specs for Armchairs A-D in new tabs using right-click or ctrl-click."

Ah, well...

... when I'm shopping for armchairs (I wish I'd said sofas: it's much easier to type) I often don't realise that I will want to compare 3 or 4 side-by-side. Well, not until I'm actually looking at the specs of Armchair A. By that time, it's a lot easier to open a duplicate than it is to go back to the beginning, use that tab as a nav tab and then go forward again. Then switch tabs and go forward again in that.

Yes, if I'm at an obvious search entry-point (aka Google :g:) I'll always use middle-click or whatever to set up a bunch of results for me to read.

But, in some situations, it's the after-the-factness of it that makes it easier to dupe a page into a new tab.

Of course, in an ideal world, I'd plan things beforehand, but... (sigh) it doesn't always work out like that. Must be my age. Or my memory. Or age. Or all three.

@wanna_be_guru: "Maxathon browser (http://www.maxthon.com/), in this browser they can see list of tabs open and then can select any particular tab they are looking for."

Sort of like when you go Alt-Tab in Windows? Yes, nice.

Ctrl-Tab is what does that in Opera. Shows a vertical list of all the tabs complete with their title and favicon etc. Or rt-click + scroll-wheel (if you have one).

Oh, and you can also change the way that you cycle through the pages and whether or not you have the list showing while you do it. Neat.

I never use the Go menu in Firefox...but I would use it if it worked like Safari's or Camino's, where it lists everywhere in your history, organized by date. That would be easier than opening the History sidebar--but as it is, just showing the last few sites visited Go isn't very useful for me.

I'd have to agree about the Go menu. I didn't even realize it was there until this article. Maybe it is useful for someone, but I don't know who.

PS I really like the deer park sanitize button.

rhY

I want to echo Will's suggestion about the ability to start a new Session in Firefox. As a web developer there are time's when I need to have two browsers open at the same time that don't share anything. I want to be able to have two separate browser sessions, that have separate session cookies and connections. Currently I can get this behavior from IE by launching a new instance of IE (not just a new window). This is one of the few reasons I have to keep IE around.

To Daniel @2:50pm... about the awkward shortcuts for "Back". Try the backspace key. That is a single-fingure gesture. Works (unless you are "finding").

Anon.

Just a quick vote on two of the items that were mentioned.

- Issue #1: I think the bottom for the find is the perfect location and LOVE your new find feature. The old way IE does it drives me nuts.

- Issue #3: IE is also horrible (for me) in opening new browser windows and automatically bringing a page up, which cause it to be really slow sometimes. Please do not change this!

Thanks for the great work! And love your new beta!

Thanks Anon. This really works (hope it'll work also on the Mac :-)

Blank tabs / new windows: Please leave them as they are!

The IE behavior is simply bizarre. There is two separate issues about it. One is keeping the browsing history of the previous window. It could be argued that this might be useful to some, though I don't miss it and it's a bit strange.
The second one is to provide a 1:1 clone of the existing page. This is A) redundant, B) wasteful (loading a page takes time, even if its all in the cache most of the time) and C) totally confusing.
Would any user consciously open two windows / tabs with the exact same content? No, they would not. Information duplication is bad - there is no one reference to look to. The windows cannot be told apart until the user goes to a new page. The user cannot be confident that the "new tab" action was really exectuted because the result is the exact same view that he just had.
I think this behavior is _the_ major design flaw in IE and one major reason I will always prefer FireFox even if IE catches up in terms of security.

I also want to thank the FF team for the wonderful find implementation. It's awesome. Compared to the power and usefulness of the feature, the question of whether it should be on the bottom or top is really very minor.

This thing about IE new windows basically becoming a duplicate of the previous window (and same for IE7 tabs, to the limited extent I've played with it) has always scared me.
I'm just not comfortable with the idea of "buy something, get to the "confirm_order.html" page, then open a new window.

If IE would reload the confirm_order.html page, with all the POST data of my credit card details, etc, can I really be confident that I've not bought the thing twice, when all I really wanted to do was to visit www.example.com?

That is something I really like about tabbed browsing - I can keep that page open (so I can refer back to it, copy/paste stuff from it) when I get the opportunity, but for now, I have to deal with a question about something else, so I've got to go straight to (eg) http://corporate-intranet/ (or, worse still, http://dodgy-site/). If I can just open a new tab, I've got the reassurance that the previous stuff is not going to be passed on there, and I'm not going to repeat any transaction, or pass any POST data to the intranet or the dodgy site.
Tabbed browsing gives me a visual assurance that this is a new instance; IE's model does not give me any visual assurance in either instance. I don't know the details of IE in these situations, because (a) I rarely use it, and (b) if I have to, I hit "STOP" ASAP. So far, I've not been hurt, and if it really did hurt, then I'm sure I'd have heard about it before now.
I distincly prefer the visual confirmation that this is a new tab, so it's a new instance. If I wanted to go "Back", I'd have used the original tab, surely?

Regarding Tabs: I didn't read all of the posts, but I've noticed at least one post to the effect that tabs should not start on a blank page. I disagree. I want tabs to start on a blank page. I run Linux, I use Firefox and Thunderbird, and other clients, and I often use the X method of cut and paste: highlight text, middle-click to paste. I do that an awful lot with URLs. If I open a new tab, it is to do one of two things:

1. Right-click a link and select, "Open Link in New Tab".

2. Middle-click paste a link I want to visit.

In the former case, it's obvious that it shouldn't open my home page, or previous page, or whatever. It should only open the clicked on link. In the second case, it's not so obvious, but it would waste time. In that mode, I have to open the new tab, wait until it is established so that I can select the link that is in the location bar, erase that, possibly reselect my original link (the auto-selection style of MS Windows would likely override my selection), and then middle-click to paste. I do that now with my wife's computer and IE: I can't open an empty window, so I have to wait a second or two until it's far enough along that I can stop and delete what it's loading before I can get it to load the page I want. On my systems, in Linux, all I do now is select the URL, move to the browser (always Alt-2 because of the way I do things), right click in the tab bar and select New Tab, and middle-click in the location bar. Easy. Consistent. Anything else is waiting, for me.

I'm not saying this is the way it has to be. If usability requires that we pick one proper method that will serve the greatest number of people, I'd probably not be in that greatest number, and I'd be left behind. And I'd find a way to be happy (plugins, plugins, plugins). But I'd certainly rather have the option to select that new tabs open with nothing loaded.

That's my coupla pennies.

---Bruce

Personally, I use the Go menu every now and again when I do something stupid like hit Ctrl/Cmd-W when I didn't mean to. Currently, while extensions are kind of broken, I've held off on installing undoclosetab, or any other extension that contains it. *That* would be a really great extension to incorporate into the next Firefox version, I think. Oh, and I prefer Go vs. the history, as I find the latter way too much clutter to manage (I have a tendency to visit a *lot* of websites when researching fixes, tweaks, etc., and I don't even /want/ to look at the history). Right now, my only two gripes are the horribly broken print preview [which really hurts seeing how that IE blog thing the other day spoke of a 'print to fit' feature, which is something I always used to enjoy in Fx], and the status bar's tab 'issues.' (Bug #2 on Peter (6)'s unfixed list.)

"Middle-click is your friend."

Not if you're on a laptop, or if you run a recent version of Firefox on Linux and the Tabbrowser Preferences extension hasn't been updated to match your version.

"A common use case for wanting to copy over the history: I open a page, and then realize I want the current page and my previous page in two separate tabs; in an IE-style thing I'd create a new tab, then click back. In Firefox I have to go back, locate the link again, and then invoke open-link-in-new-tab. (Or use Go.)"
Or
"you could have accomplished the same thing using one tab as the navigation tab and then opening up the specs for Armchairs A-D in new tabs using right-click or ctrl-click."

Sometimes you _can't_ open link in new tab, especially if a site does a lot of POSTing through forms, or if you're say using a search engine and trying to open results for several different queries in new tabs. See b.m.o bug 17754. Cloning the page into a new tab and then clicking Submit would be a workaround for this behavior.

"Is there any reason why ctrl-w shouldn't close it too, and for that matter ctrl-f toggle it's presence as well?"

Press Ctrl+F to open the find bar. Then click elsewhere, on the page, to defocus the find bar. Press Ctrl+F again and the find bar is refocused. Ctrl+W is already in use to close the tab.

I open a lot of new tabs by middle-clicking links. In these cases tabs should inherit the session history because all those pages are related to a single story. This is really useful for blogs. However opening tabs with Ctrl+T or by middle-clicking the tab bar means I want a new tab to start a new line of thought/browsing.

When I have lots of tabs I prefer for them to spill over onto another row. If Firefox did this, (or provided the option, which I think it should,) it would be nice if the padding and margin of the tabs was decreased also. That would make the multiple rows not take up as much vertical room as multiple rows normally would.

Also, after several rows (maybe 3 by default, with an about:config pref to change it,) some other method would need to be combined with it to prevent the browser screen from becoming obscured by tons of rows of tabs. As a total tab junkie, I'm aggravated by some extensions that don't compensate for this.

Asa, on tab overflow here's my idea (others may have had it too :)

Use the mouse and enlarge the tabs under the mouse cursor, along the way of what OS X does with the doc. It's simple enough as a concept, but I imagine it might involve quite a bit of reworking. I think it'd be pretty usable.

The tab overflow is of particular intrest to me as I use OS and am torn between FireFox and Safari.

I actually have more Mozilla use than Firefox so I hadn't noticed in Firefix what happens. In Mozilla the tabs end up as single letters when I get a good number on the screen. I can still find what I want because I know the order I opened them in. For this very reason, the idea of grouping is terrible as it would imply reordering, which destroys the usability as something has moved from where I left to where it felt like going.

In Safari, the close on the tab is very nice. If I left a page open to come back to but later decide I really don't want it I can get rid of it without ever bringing it to focus and waiting for the render. This does however take more room and make the overflow happen faster. I really hate the way it handle it with the menu on the right. If anything, the menu should be on the left. Think about this, the newest tabs you open off the current page go on the right and thus are the next thing you are going to get to. All those are lost i na tiny sebmenu and harder to get to. The stuff on the left is what you are done with for now, and would like to keep around, but won't be coming back to for a while.

Someone made a great suggestion, and I think a variation on it would be great. Start with the dock bubble idea, but don;t do any verticle size change, that would be a disaster. Have the current tab be wider than the others and just let all tabs get really small as the overflow conditions worsen. When you mouse over the tabs, make the widest the one the mouse is over so you can read it, those near it a less wide, trailing off the the tiny ones far away. Also, only show the close on those that are widened to save space. Everything keeps order, you can read and close the one you are near, and you won't overflow into oblivion. I'd love to try this but don't know a damn thing about XUL and would rather not have to.

An aside, what's the deal with browsers bogging down with many tabs? If I get a lot open, it gets progressively slower to switch between them. No matter how many I have, the expense of changing focus should always be the same. Those not in focus need not be involved in the process. The slowdown indicates some flaw i nthe internal structure, likely as a result of the assumption nobody would have 10 windows with 30+ tabs each. I am a huge fan of SessionSaver for FireFox and Saft for Safari.

While on the topic of tabs, the current way they are totally blank is correct. Having some unified history would be a disaster. Half the reason to have a new tab is to create another thread of browsing. Mixing the history would be mixing threads. It like a new window, but without all the waste. Same reason for not copying the current page to a new window. If I use ANY other program and ask for a new window, its blank. This is the expected norm. I'm ready to do something NEW. If I wanted to keep doing what I was, then I wouldn't make a new window. If anything, the deafult in IE to copy the contents indicates the need for tabs. The only use I can think of to copy everything is to keep the current page and follow a link in the new one. Replace with open link in new tab and then switch to that tab when you're ready to actually read it.

/ramble

I'd like to see the find toolbar stay open for longer, it disapears too quick for my liking while I'm thinking. I'd also like to see the close button for find move from the left back to the right side where it used to be. I don't know why it was moved. The tab close buttom is on the right, why not find?

In regards to tab overflow...

I am very confident in the UI team to come up with something for this. I am, however, very surprised that even in the 1.5 beta, there is no overflow chevron or anything of the sort to deal with this issue. Tabs keep getting smaller & smaller until eventually one of them overlaps the close icon, in a bizarre-looking display, and then they just continue off-screen.

I had written an extension for Firebird 0.7 that gave the tab bar a chevron. I enjoyed it, although I'm not sure if it would be useful for most people.

Whatever the solution, please make sure it's nothing found on this page:
http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/tabs.htm

In particular, any suggestion of multiple tab rows should be thrown right out. This is about the worst idea you can possibly come up with. Additionally, horizontal scrolling of tabs will resemble Visual Source Safe, namely it will show and hide certain tabs in a very confusing manner. I personally would stay away from that also.

I've personally found that a chevron or similar drop down, while not perfect, has the least number of issues for the more advanced users who will be more likely to open a large amount of tabs in one window.

I would like to contribute whatever I can to resolve this though. The issue is greatly exacerbated if a user is running a low resolution. On my desktop, I'm working in 1920x1200, it takes over 50 tabs before I have an overflow issue. If someone is running 800x600, even with a maximized window they'll be hitting an overflow issue at closer to the 20 tab mark.

Some stuff...
1) If two large groups are fighting over two different solutions to a problem, there's just one solution: Make it a pref, while setting the default to majority's (no matter how marginally larger) preference. Just allow the search to move to top by prefs.
2) Tab overflow has been in works for years now but no satisfactory solution has been developed. For now I use workarounds like ctrl+pgUp/pgDn and rocker gestures in mozgest extension.
3) Kill "Go". Just do it. Or at least move it deeper. Now I realized I have NEVER used it. And I use the browsers since Netscape 3. By the way, I reconfigured my Firefox so it's one bar total - really, all the stuff from nav bar can be moved to menu bar (in 1600x1200 there's a plenty room between "help" and the throbber!) but really it does take room I could use for "personal toolbar items". Same with "Bookmarks", move it deeper if there's an icon available!
4) Tabs not inheriting previous tab history - well, my stronger complaint is you can't reopen a closed tab. There are extensions that do it, but... no, it never occured to me that "go" menu could be used for that. So it probably didn't occur to many. Just implement "reopen tab" (say, right-click on tab bar...) instead.
5) Adding "close tab" button to each tab: I'm strongly against. There's not enough tab real estate already, and it would be way too easy to close a tab instead of switching to it by accident. Want it more intuitive? Add a bit of tab-like background to it, so the X seems to be attached to current content window just the same way as "current tab" is, instead of being sunken in the background of the tab bar.
6) Opening BLANK tabs/windows: As long as you can come up with homepage/start page/anything that opens faster than about:blank on Pentium MMX 166MHz, feel free to replace blank page with it. Otherwise, if I want to go to a completely new page without closing the current one, I want to be able to start typing the new address as soon as possible, without waiting for the start page to load or for "stop" button to take effect (it only stops loading, not rendering, and on slow machines rendering DOES take time too!)
7) Pushing down the page: "surely the 'firefox has blocked a popup' message shouldn't either?" Thing is, you start "find" often while beind mid-way through reading some page, moving what you see. "Firefox blocked"... appears on page load, when the page is being created, in constant flow anyway. But "This site is not allowed to install extensions" DOES move existing content.

@Matthew: "When you mouse over the tabs, make the widest the one the mouse is over so you can read it, those near it a less wide,"

Okay, let's put this one to bed.

Having grow-and-shrink bars/icons/tabs in the middle of the page is a bad idea.

If a tab were to widen as you moused over it, would you want that to happen when you were actually moving the mouse to the menubar? No. It'd be an ugly visual distraction. As bad as a Flash ad.

So there'd have to be a delay. And that means that when you actually *did* want the tab to widen, you'd have to wait for it. PITN. You may as well use the current tooltip display.

What about slower machines? As you run the mouse along the tab bar, you'd expect to see each tab grow-and-shrink as the mouse passed over it. In fact, what would happen is that the ripple effect would lag behind the mouse and lag more so on slower machines and those with below-average graphics cards.

That means that grow-and-shrink is a solution for *some* users, and not only a distraction but a *lack of solution* for others.

No, the solution to tab-overflow has to work for *all* users.

Haven't read all the comments, but re: tab overflow, why not give the option of right-click tab -> move to window1, window2, similar to excel where you can move a sheet to a different workbook. I frequently start surfing and find I have opened 3-4 schools of thought in my tabs when too many are open, and would love the opportunity to move them into a new window where I can click away between tabs and be on-topic. This "too many tabs" happens both when opening new tabs from current links, and creating a search in a new tab when something I read sparks a new train of thought/remembrance.

Also, perhaps find a cut-off point on # of tabs open (20?) and go to a thumbnail view of all tabs, click on one to bring it to the forefront and close it back down to thumbnail view. At the point where so many tabs are open you will recognize the screens a lot faster than trying to disseminate between tiny tab descriptions, which are frequently indistinguishable due to the limited amount of text on the tab descriptor.

The single biggest problem with Firefox for me is that
I can't start a new session. The problem is that FF will
occasionally crash (as will Mozilla), and then all my
open browser windows will go down with it. I have (at
the moment) 14 virtual desktops, with open firefox windows
in many of them. Sometimes FF will either crash, or hang
with 99% CPU and I'll have to kill it. All gone.
Konqueror is much nicer in this respect, if I deliberately
start a new instance it will be a new instance,
not just another open window that'll go down in flames later.
(the problem though with Konqueror is that it uses a common
networking process, and if that one was started say a couple
of months back when there was an intermittent DNS problem it'll
never forget that negative lookup and you'll have to go hunting
for that process and kill it.)

Everything else in FF is just either something that can be fixed
with an extension, or just slightly annoying.

OK, I guess I'm a mainstream user. I'm not PC illiterate, but I'm not a programmer or developer.

The find at the bottom of the screen is perfect. I don't want it to be in my face at the top.
The tabs thing is also perfect. I hated it in IE that I had to open a new window and then delete the address from the address bar and type in my new one. Why would I want to open the same page twice?

Sorry Scott - if I was part of the mainstream users test, then you'd be buying a very expensive dinner in the near future...

on Firefox performance...

Extensions do kick ass! I do worry about the effect on performance, though (I have at least 16 installed).

And Firefox opens a lot slower than IE. Why is that? I thought it was meant to be faster browsing? I'd try Deer Park, but my extensions won't work.

I want to add that I found Scott's notes on "Go" menu and on the search bar very relevants.

I'm still wondering if people use the "Go" menu. Personally, I discovered it by reading Scott blog post, while I use FF as main browser since 0.9 series !

The search bar isn't coherent with the rest of the interface. Why is the close red cross in the left, while on the right everywhere else ?

Being on the bottom is suprending also (as we are use to have all menus, bars etc. on top, especially the similar (where we type in text) location bar and google search bar.

Finally, why is this bar taking all the width of the window for such a small content ? wouldn't a small box on a top corner do the same thing while avoiding to scroll some lines when it appear/disappear ?

Or maybe, making the search function an engine among the others (google, yahoo, ebay ...) in the "engine searchs bars", and get this engine selected by defaut when the user hit Ctrl-f or Edit / Find in this page ?

All in all, the actual search bar look is very strange in regard of FF.

Scott Elkins:

"I do wish it was as easy to switch tabs with the keyboard as it is to switch
windows"

Just use Ctrl-PgUp / Ctrl-PgDown or Ctrl-Tab.

I agree with Daniel about the lack of a one-hand default shortcut to Back (Ctrl-left needs too hands!).

"Go menu": is there a way to know if people use it ?
(any statistical data somewhere ?

@Tiff: "At the point where so many tabs are open you will recognize the screens a lot faster than trying to disseminate between tiny tab descriptions, which are frequently indistinguishable due to the limited amount of text on the tab descriptor."

This is where multi-rowed tab bar comes in handy. A minor disadvantage of multiple rows is that it slightly decreases the size of your viewing window.

But you don't *only* recognise tabs by the favicon and description -- you also recognise them by their approximate position left-to-right.

If I've got 40-odd tabs open, and I'm looking for the 'Astronomy Picture of the Day' site, I know that that was one of the first I opened today, so I'll be looking at the left-hand side of the tab bar for something that says...

Ah, there it is... a tiny Saturn picture and an 'Astr...' :g:

And I'm not likely to confuse it with the 'Astrological Predictions' website that I've only just been on, because that one is way over here --> on the right.

That said, a vertical listing may be a simpler solution for many people when managing large numbers of open tabs. You can get a lot more readable tabs vertically than horizontally.

In Opera, that's done by rt-clicking the tab bar, choosing Customise... Placement.[Left]. A quick check shows me that I can get 44 tabs down the left-hand edge of my screen. And it's scrollable list.

@brianlj

Actually, I guess I forgot to say it, but a delay was part of the idea to prevent it from going nuts passing over it. It would be less troublesome than pages with mouseover actions near the top which spawn new windows. Anyway, a slight delay, half second or so, should be just enough to cross the area undistrubed but not so much to make the tab switch slow. And guess what, if you have good memory of most of the tab locatiions, then you'll be over it, clicked, and gone before it does the resize magic so the switch will be really quick and undistrubing. The resize is just for the case when you can't find the tab and need to see the titles.

You may have a valid point about slow machines, but not completely. If you look at what I said about progressively slower performance with more tabs and consider how many tabs it would take to need the resize action, then you quickly realize any machine that would realign a single line of text chunks too slowly would have already became painfully unuseable due to the number of open tabs. That is, assuming the resize used any sort of decently efficient algorithm, which may be a horrible assumption based on the rest of the broser. I fail to under why it takes several hundred megabytes of memory to render a single static page. A professional DTP app can hold a thousand page document with complex and precise layout, and repaginate that layout during editing, with less memory and processor use than any modern browser I've seen can do with a handful of tabs open and inactive. Something is SERIOSLY wrong with the way the browsers work internally. Its the simplest and most dumbed-down interface of all the common internet applications and yet the most popular and inefficient....

A small problem with verticaly expanding overflowed tabs is that this break the -so easy to understand- physical metaphor of tabs.

When you have a pile of file with tabs, the tabs won't appear erraticaly verticals. With the actual look of firefox, the tabs look like if they're attached to pages, like real files with tabs. This make the concept easy to come with.

@Benjamin P: "Finally, why is this bar taking all the width of the window for such a small content ? wouldn't a small box on a top corner do the same thing while avoiding to scroll some lines when it appear/disappear ?"

Good point. In fact, in Fx, why not not have the current Google (+others) search drop-down include a 'Find in page...' option?

Or, if users find it too cumbersome to switch 'search engines' (I know that I would) why not allow, as Opera does, the user to put a 'Find in page...' box alongside the Google one?

Or, better, simply allow the user to type 'f banana' directly into the URL bar?

Or, even better, why not simply type '/ banana'? :gg:

AFAICS, the only reason for having the SearchBar at all is so that you can click 'Highlight All'.

The verticle tabs brings up a huge pet peave. I don't normally like verticle toolbars because they are slower to view, but this may be a useful case due to another fundamental web problem. A horizontal bar is fast to find stuff on as you read across the whole thing in one line. A verticle bar of text items requires glancing across, moving down left, glancing across, down and left, glancing across.... which is much slower.

Someone long ago decided to make their silly page look all pretty with a right hand border back when 99% of the people apparently had a SVGA screen. This angered me as I had larger. Now I think many of us have larger and many sites have yet to figure out that we do. Many sites forcibly wrap text far from the right hand edge of the browser pane, creating a huge waste of screen space. Wide aspect screens continue to gain popularity, making the problem even worse. So using that space for a verticle tab bar would be appealing, but I think its better to fix the real problem. Since we can't reach out and beat every retarded web designer with a cluebat, there should be an option to reflow a page while ignoring whatever retarded mechanism is used to limit the width of the text area.

Tidbit about wide aspect screens: the whole trend is dumb. Wide screens are here solely for watching movies, as movies are wide. Why is a movie wide? Because it was easy to do in theaters and it would've been hard to change the TV standard, so when TV first got popular and threatened movies, the theaters went to a wide format to be unique. Go watch an old movie and notice not only may it be 4:3 but it may even be square. The computer was intended to be a work tool, which means lot of reading. The presentation of text tends to favor a tall narrow layout. Notice books are always taller than wide except children's picture books and a few other exceptions. Look at your newspaper and notice its broken into columns. This is so that when you go down a line and have to do the equivalent of a carriage return with your eyes, you don't have as far to go and are thus less likely to lose the line or get distracted by the outside world between words and lose the flow of the sentance. With this in mind, perhaps the forcible reflow should use columns, but then repeat verticle scrolling becomes a disaster. Reading a PDF of columned print media is a quick way to experience this annoyance. So, the solution would be to make columns only as tall as the screen, and horizontally scroll to the columns out right that are the later text on the page. Maybe I'm just crazy, but there has to be some better way than the disaster we have now with 3/4 my screen whitespace while I sit stuck in this retarded browser that everyone seems so crazy about (mis)using for every task.

Toolbars:

They should have a minimum width which is still enough to read the first, say, five or six chars of the page title.

When there are too many to fit on, a thin slider should become part of the tab toolbar, with the slider width and position indicating the location and relative size of the currently displayed tab tops within the actual set.

Exactly what a slider bar is for, really!

Scott's point about tear off tabs turning into new pages is exactly right too. Plus drag and drop tabs between windows. I know there are extension for it, but it should become part of the codebase.

Cheers, keep up the great work.
J.

@Matthew: "Anyway, a slight delay, half second or so, should be just enough to cross the area undistrubed but not so much to make the tab switch slow."

Hmmm. The thing is, y'see, that tooltip delay times (or, in this case, grow-and-shrink delay times) are never big enough when you *don't* need them and never small enough when you *do* need them. I always find that waiting for that 1/2 second delay to laboriously tick away(!) is a... well, it's a source of annoyance.

When I want to find a particular tab, I want to find it NOW. I'm just too impatient, I guess. :g:

"A professional DTP app can hold a thousand page document "...

I must say that I don't find that Opera regularly bogs down dramatically when I have zillions of tabs open. Or, on those occasions when it does, it can be put down to the fact that when I have zillions of tabs open, I stand a greater chance of accidentally happening upon a page opening in a background tab (PDFs always seem to do it for me) which gobbles resources faster than a black hole who hasn't eaten for three millennia. :sigh:

@Matthew: "A verticle bar of text items requires glancing across, moving down left, glancing across, down and left, glancing across.... which is much slower"

True. Very true. And that's precisely why I don't have my tab bar down the left-hand edge. :g: But what I *do* have, is the option to put it there if I want.

Your point about wide-screen displays is well put. It *should* be useful to put things like tabs down the side because there's usually so much screen real-estate wasted there. But it feels... uncomfortable.

YetMe makes a point about tabs being linked in our minds with physical tabs on real-world files. And yet, aren't there index books which have tabs all down the side? (Although... the tabs are down the rt-hand side, aren't they? Let me see what it looks like. Customize...Placement.[Right]. Hmmm... Nope. Still don't like it. That's not for me.)

Still. It's an option. :g:

Speaking of which... " there should be an option to reflow a page while ignoring whatever retarded mechanism is used to limit the width of the text area."

Opera goes half-way towards solving this problem. Using View|FitToWindowWidth only works to /contract/ the page content to fit the current screen width. At times, it would be nice if it could /expand/ it when needed. Very nice.

:sigh: And if you find a suitable clue-bat, please let me know.

@brianlj

The idea of a delay is based on reading UI theory from Tog and has to do with assisting only when you have paused to indicate you can't remember where you are going. Its an extension of the idea of delayed circular context menus, which are sorta where mouse gestures are going.

I admit Opera is the one browser I've not tried. I don't feel like paying for it when Mozilla has done so well with a few minor nits. I have a feeling for every nit ift fixes, I'd find a new one to pick. I could try the free version, but then what's all the adblack, popup blck, flashblock, etc that I setup good for when the application itself shows an ad. Ads are the bane of the internet and moving them into applications is a dangerous move. Adobe followed Operas lead in Acrobat Reader and I fear the trend. I wish all thes estupid business types and marketing folks had never found the internet. Think of the way it was in the mid 90s: simple pages that got to the point, no ads, no burned out shamble of an economy/industry from the collapse following the realization the new hot shit was just a warmed over fart.

@Justin: "When there are too many to fit on, a thin slider should become part of the tab toolbar, with the slider width and position indicating the location and relative size of the currently displayed tab tops within the actual set."

I wouldn't like that. Too much clutter on the tabs. It'd make 'em too tall.

Why not do what Opera does and have each tab's width automatically determined by the title length -- up to a user-set maximum? That way, all those tabs which say:
[index                                    x]

get compressed to:

[index x]

and leave a lot more room for those which say:

[* Asa Dotzler - Firefox and more: berku...x]

@Matthew: "The idea of a delay is based on reading UI theory from Tog and has to do with assisting only when you have paused to indicate you can't remember where you are going."

Yes, Tog's ideas are good[1] but if people are prepared to 'wait' for a tab to expand, why don't they simply wait for the tooltip[2] to appear? That would tell them exactly the same as an expanded tab would, and it would do it without all this tab bar leaping and shuffling.

1 - I've mentioned it before, but Opera is one of only two of my regular Windows apps which use a mile-high menu. The other is Xara. The concept is brilliant.

2 - Opera's tab tooltip, actually, tells me wa-ay too much information. Title, Address, Encoding & MIME type. Whoa!

@brianlj: "if people are prepared to 'wait' for a tab to expand, why don't they simply wait for the tooltip[2] to appear?"

The tooltip you have to wait for each one on each tab, which is painfully slow. With the expanding tab idea, once you've waited on one, the penalty is paid and you can browse them all bysliding along in the area you remember and find the right one. As nearby tabs expand you are likely to catch it with your eye before the mouse even gets there and then you can quickly leap upon and click that tab. Also, tooltips tend to block other stuff and are hard to get rid of since you have to move far away to dismiss and then wait the same penalty you did to make it appear. In the case you were getting close, the tooltip could be sitting over the correct tab the whole time, whereas with the resize that nearby tab would've grown a bit and given the chance to read it without pointing right at it but just pointing at its area.

@Matthew: "I admit Opera is the one browser I've not tried. I don't feel like paying for it when Mozilla has done so well with a few minor nits."

You missed Opera's 10th birthday giveaway? Gosh! :g:

On Slashdot, people were posting hundreds of reg codes for all OS's and Opera Software didn't seem to object. Most odd.

Anyway.

Scott's original blog entry listed his current 'Top Five' problems with Fx.

Opera has already solved those problems.

And they've been solved for ages.[1] They've not only been solved, but in many cases, they've been further refined by user input. And they're not extensions which may or may not work when the next release turns up. They're all built into the browser and they all work from Day One.

Want to shift tabs around? In Fx, you install TabMix or suchlike. In Opera, you just drag the tabs around.

Want a decent download manager? In Fx, you install another extension. In Opera, you simply customise the basic browser so that the download manager is the way that *you* want it. Full-blown floating window? Not a problem. Single-line in-progress bar? Not a problem. Side-panel? No problem. You can even reduce it to a single popup tooltip[2]. No problem.

Lost your way in all those tabs? You want to recover closed ones? Opera already does that. All the tabs that you've ever opened in that session are available from the wastebasket. Either open it up and rummage around to get the one you want or Ctrl-Alt-Z will LIFO them all out them out in sequence. Complete with their browsing history/navigation sequence right up to the point when you closed them.

Yes, most Fx extensions work seamlessly together. Granted. Hardly ever a problem.

But, after a new release of Opera, what you never ever hear on the Opera forums is, "I see you've added BitTorrent support -- but you've buggered up mouse gestures!"

If you go on from Scott's blog entry to read 'How To Build A Better Browser' (as I suspect you have) you'll see a few more things he'd like in a good browser. Guess how many of them *aren't* already in Opera? :g:

Oh, I'll grant you, though... you /would/ miss Flash block.[3] :gg:

1. Although, only partially for the modal dialog box problem. Mind you, I can't think of what modal dialog boxes Opera uses that aren't applicable to all tabs anyway. Still.
2. Which *won't* appear when you have another app in full-screen mode. I watch TV on this computer and there ain't nothin' worse than having a tooltip pop up over my fave reality show. ;)
3. There are several User-JS (a la Greasemonkey) scripts that do work as Flash blocks, but it's something that's not built into the browser.

@Matthew: "With the expanding tab idea, once you've waited on one, the penalty is paid"

Ah, good point. Yes.

I have to say though... the only app I use which has a grow-and-shrink bar is Xara Picture Editor. And its menu bar... sucks. Bloomin' thing leaps around under yer mouse. If I can't remember what an icon of a magnifying glass does, I'm not going to remember when it gets bigger, am I? ::mumble, grumble::

I guess I'm just prejudiced. ;)

"To Daniel @2:50pm... about the awkward shortcuts for "Back". Try the backspace key. That is a single-fingure gesture. Works (unless you are "finding").

Anon.
Posted by: AnotherGuest on September 15, 2005 04:47 PM"

That was not me. Apparently an unintended name collision.

@brianlj I wouldn't like that. Too much clutter on the tabs. It'd make 'em too tall.

I think you must've misunderstood me.

We're considering the case where there are far too many tabs to draw them all on screen.

Suppose the actual tab set (with as much width as is necessary to display useful amounts of text) would amount to say, three screens. The slider which would be drawn underneath, requiring perhaps 10px, would show that one-third of the tab bar was currently visible, and by moving it left/right, the currently visible tab tops would move offscreen to one direction, allowing those which had been offscreen on the opposite site to come on.

Basically like any other slider, but for the tab tops.

Justin.

@ Justin: "I think you must've misunderstood me."

My apologies, yes I did.

I thought you meant that *each tab* should have a slider to vary its width. (D'oh!)

Yes, a slider underneath the whole tab bar could be used to bring off-screen tabs back into view. Presumably, this slider only appears when you have more tabs open than would fit on the screen?

Okay, that's a solution which has the advantage of being a familiar one ("Hey, mom! It's a scroll bar!") but it does require a balance between precise mouse placing to grab the slider vs. the loss of screen real-estate.

OTOH, the slider's /width/ does also show you the approximate number of tabs off to one side or the other of the screen, so that's better than a simple extender menu.

OTGH, it's another piece of furniture cluttering up the UI. More drop-shadows, more shiny, rounded corners. Hmmm...

I'm flipping a coin here... ;)

How could I have not noticed the "Go" menu--isn't that strange? I guess you look at it & nothing like "Oh, I'd want to use that someday" registers in the subconscious. Also, the name is vague, and the vagueness of the name points to the lack of focus of the menu. (Kind of like creating a code routine called DoStuff.) I agree with some other posters that it could be renamed to History, or maybe the History feature should just be made better.

One complaint about the current History in FF is that it takes up that left pane. I always have the Sage extension (for RSS feeds) sitting on my left pane for regular & daily usage (RSS should be a browser function, shouldn't it?), and if I used History more that would compete with Sage. Maybe someone else does something similar with Bookmarks. I also use the Scrapbook extension on the left pane for saving Internet pages, but that is only occasional usage & I don't mind popping in & out of it.

I can't understand MS's hesitancy to embrace tabs. I understand their desire for Keep It Simple Stupid. But isn't the whole point of having hyperlinks embedded into a web page to allow people to fork off into different tangents for further research as they read the page? The single back/forward history model doesn't work well for this--what if I want to finish the article first and go to my multiple tangents later?

Thanks Scott for pointing to this discussion. I never would have given any feedback on FF as I just want to use the browser and don't have the time nor the inclination to search the right community pages or forums. Last not least English is not my native language which does not make things easier. But after reading through many of the posts here I feel encouraged a little (no, not because of the grammar but because of the contents ;)

Okay, here we go - my personal world awaited list of FF usability issues:

-----------------------------------------
1. Highlighting of active tab
-----------------------------------------
It often takes me some time to identify the active tab if I want to close it by middle click. And sometimes it happens that I think to be quite sure about the position of the tab I want to close, and as coloring and shading don't stop me in the nick of time, I am closing the wrong one.

It really would be a great improvement for me if the inactive tabs could be greyed out just a little bit or something like this.

-----------------------------------------
2. Extensions
-----------------------------------------
The modular concept of extensions and being able to build my own browser according to my needs is really awesome.
On the other hand it's quite complicated to get through this whole extension thing when being confronted with it the first time.
I know this will not be easy at all, but maybe there are ways to lighten novice users' access to extensions and their great possibilities?

And what really annoys me:
Every time FF provides updates for my installed extensions, there's no simple comfortable way of finding out what changed. It makes quite a difference if the update is only a bugfix or if it provides new features and settings which I'll miss then. (And no, visiting each updated extension's website is not simple and comfortable ;-)

-----------------------------------------
3. Blank new pages
-----------------------------------------
I have to admit, the missing feature of easily duplicating page and history was one of the most annoying behaviors of FF to me. The duplicate tab extension did a really great job here on reconciling me to FF and now it's even better than IE's "always duplicate" behavior as I'm having the freedom of choice in FF :-)

-----------------------------------------
4. Find
-----------------------------------------
Yes, I like FF's find feature as it is. No, for me as first time user switching from IE to FF 'find' was not intuitively to ... uhm ... find. I just thought the shortcut may be broken, which happens now and then in localized software. What about a little "don't show this again" info dialog or optical clue (like a balloon tip) when calling 'find' the first time?

-----------------------------------------
5. Go?
-----------------------------------------
Think I have to queue up in the line of users who never noticed and used this menu. If some people use it as 'undo' for accidentally closed tabs, maybe extending FF's undo function would be an idea? This would be the first place for me to search such a feature. Okay, I think the currently available undo action would have to be named then dynamically to avoid confusion about unexpected behavior (e.g. "undo close tab").

-----------------------------------------
6. Tab overflow
-----------------------------------------
Has never been a real issue to me. Nevertheless additional settings for additional tab bar lines or a vertical sidebar solution would be nice.

That's all folks.
Time to go back in line with 80.000.000 others ;)

Keep on the excellent work!

hans

Man, that's a lot of posts on tabs, go menu, and everything else...
So I'll add my tiny voice to the masses.

In regards to whether a new tab should open blank or use the previous page I think it should remain as it is and open a blank page. But since middle clicking the back and forward arrows opens the previous (or next in forwards case) page in a new tab, shouldn't middle clicking the reload button open the current page in a new tab?

I use the go menu quite often, usually after I have closed a tab by mistake. It take me back to where I was no matter which tab i am using.

The history sidebar can't help me on this, the list is so long that I don't know where to start with. ( yes, i know there is a search box. but not all web pages have meaningful title )

@brianlj: "You missed Opera's 10th birthday giveaway? Gosh! :g:"
I was backpacking across Europe at the time. Priorities...

So, I tried Opera last night, the free one, and ignoring the weird feel of the layout and just trying a few things, here are my quick observations.

Rendering is fast but buggy. Load up slashdot and it looks fine. Open another tab, do some stuff, come back, still good. Close the browser and open again to test the tabs reloading with history. Looks good till I get to slashdot an see its rendered completely screwball. Scroll down, back up, now it fine. WTF? So, background rendering of tabs can be a little jacked but scrolling seems to fix it.

Tried a few sites that I use. Gmail doesn't work. I can open it, but I can't open any messages in my inbox. I thought in their feature list I saw something specifically about gmail, so this seems odd.

I also ran across some odd plugin behavoir. With a site that had an embedded wmv file, it opened in Windows Media Player (on OS X). Going to the plugins page shows its pulling the plugin from the disabled plugins folder (that thing can't stream to save its life, QuickTime + Flip4mac is much better). So, delete the plugin totally and reload Opera, back to the site and popup "you need a plugin for content." Nope, sorry, I have one, its called Quicktime and Safari uses it just fine. Oddly, Mozilla also fails to realize Quicktime can handle Windows Media files. Is Safari the only one that asks the Quicktime plugin what it can do? Do all the other browsers have a preset notion of what a plugin can do and just sticks with it?

Tab overflow, seems about the same as Mozilla. The tabs get small until they are less than even one character and you just kinda stab in the right area till you hit the right one. The auto-hide of the close is nice, when I have just a few its like Safari in that I can close any quick, but when I get into overflow realm I have to switch to the tab to close it, which is fine.

Overall, the experience seems much like when I tried OmniWeb. Some fundamental differences exist that look like they could be really nice, but would take some time using to see if I get along with them or not. However, there's enough small bugs in the thing to mean I need to keep a second browser open so I just end up working in the other browser and not the new one.

Wow, last I looked, there were only about 30 comments here -- now there are over 150.

Anyway, I skimmed it, and one caught my eye:

@Daniel: "for the user there are no big differences between windows and tabs. Why keep both? Keep only tabs (again, as does Opera)."

Actually, there is a *huge* difference if you have a large screen and don't keep your browser maximized. I like to have several windows open, each with a set of related tabs. Having everything in one window drove me crazy in the old days of Opera 4-5.

Also, Opera has let you have both windows and tabs since version 6, though the UI and keyboard shortcuts discourage opening new windows. In Firefox, Safari, and IIRC in most other tab-capable browsers, the shortcuts for new windows and new tabs are the same number of keys -- usually Ctrl+N for window and Ctrl+T for tab (or Command, on Macs). Opera uses Ctrl+N for a new tab, and Ctrl+Alt+N for a new window. This makes opening a new window slightly less convenient (more keys to press). Also, since Ctrl+N is the standard shortcut for "New document," it encourages "new tab" slightly. And, of course, there is a default toolbar button for "New page" (tab) but not for "New window." Result: it's much easier to open a new tab than a new window, so efficiency (or laziness) leads to opening fewer new windows.

I'd like to add 1 to the vote for "find bar on the bottom" (and if it's switched, by god have an extension to put it back to the bottom). The top is busy enough with the menus, navigation, bookmarks toolbar, and tabs. Add something like the find bar there, then about a quarter of the top area is filled with stuff. Necessary stuff, but a lot of it at any rate. By having the find bar at the bottom, it divides the clutter, so to speak. And right now, I think it's a great balance having what's on the top there, and having my find bar nested comfortably where I won't notice it against most every other UI component in Firefox.

I could create space by making the navigation icons smaller, but little as I use them I like to be able to freaking click on them when I actually need them. I could remove the bookmarks toolbar, but that also removes the single-click functionality of them (the reason it's there, I'm sure). Also, strange though it may seem, I actually like to keep as few things out of my bookmarks menu as possible. Seems cluttered otherwise.

Though, on the other hand, removing the stuff that's been there forever comes as somewhat of a shock to me. Though I've never touched the Go menu at all, once it's removed my brain goes "wait, something should be there." Kind of like how Google keeps the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button - even though few people ever use it (hell, I just type a search term into Firefox's address bar), they prefer it being there. Now, I'm certain I could easily adapt, as I have NEVER (seriously, not once) used the Go menu. But it'd take getting used to.

It's actually sad sometimes, in my case: I try any other software/UI than what I use, and immediately feel lost (though, oddly enough, I don't think this happened when I first tried Firefox; hmmm...). Guess that'll involve experimentation. But for any of these cases, if I try it and don't love it at once it probably means I don't want a UI feature. I guess it's also hard being an "in-betweener" - between default and minimalist. But I digress.

For one, I agree with number 4 of Berkun's issues with tabs and modality. But, with agreeing, I agree that it's more of an annoyance than a UI deficiency.

So far as tabs and history saving goes, I'd say this is pretty much a personal difference. I never need the ability to copy a tab and its history; I use tabs in much the way one would use a new window. I open a new tab when a page digresses with links (or when I need to open another site, of course). Just middle click, and now I can follow the parent page's links while still having the initial page and its history. For instance, I read Slashdot, open an article in a new tab, and if I wanted to go back from where I was on Slashdot, I go back to the Slashdot tab. It wouldn't be necessary to travel backwards in the article - it renders the parent page (Slashdot, and its back history) useless anyways. But to have the clone tab ability, what would you do then? Read Slashdot, open an article in a new tab, then travel back and everything, as if you hadn't even opened it in a new tab, resulting in unneeded clutter of tabs. Not sure if there's any reason I'd want a tab's history in the next tab...though, I can see the application of opening the same page in multiple tabs, but you can open links in other tabs for that (or middle click Refresh with MozFBRH installed). I hope that roundabout makes sense...

Lastly, the downloads dialog. I never actually thought of this. Just download, the dialog comes up, it goes away, bada bing bada boom. I am not a heavy downloader. However, I am extremely intrigued by the download bar concept. Simply smashing, and with a little refinement, I daresay better than the dialog. I mean, the extensions and options fit in a dialog well, but a new box for something used as often as downloading is (oft times) not very fitting. I'd almost go so far as to say the bar should be default. But I'll wait until I can give it a whirl, so when I do actually download stuff, I'll see if the UI fits in with the rest of Firefox.

Speaking of Firefox and UI, I'd just like to take this moment to point out that, while I love the new implementation of menus in 1.5 alpha, the font in menus seems to show up rather larger than in 1.0.6. Anyone know what's up with this?
Also, one other nitpick complaint, is that the live bookmark icon is now in the address bar; what the hell? I think the only other major issues I have is startup speed, but the rest of Firefox (as it stands) makes up for it - especially bringing back the javascript options! I find the two changes mentioned rather detracting though (hope at least extensions can fix them), but every other bug fix and change is welcomed whole heartedly! Great work guys!!

Anyhow, that's my two cents.

Cheers,

--Alex Vondrak

@Matthew: "I was backpacking across Europe at the time. Priorities..."

Way to go!

"So, I tried Opera last night.... However, there's enough small bugs in the thing to mean I need to keep a second browser open so I just end up working in the other browser and not the new one."

Good for you. :) I shan't be discourteous to Asa and attempt to debug your problems here on his turf, but suffice to say that GMail works perfectly for me, rendering (or display?) isn't something I see unless I sometimes combine zoom, smooth scrolling and a non-maximised window, and WMV is a pig to get right here on Windows as well. :g:

I keep Fx around for oddball sites that won't take Opera (Yahoo mail is one who doesn't play by the rules) and that works out just fine for me.

After all, there's no rule that says we only have to use one browser, is there? :)

@Kelson: "Also, Opera has let you have both windows and tabs since version 6,"

One of the really useful (but probably under-used) features for keeping bunches of related pages together is what Opera calls the Linked Tab.

Start at a 'navigation' type of page, rt-click its tab and choose 'Create linked...' A blank tab opens up in the background. Now, all the links that you click in the navigation page will open up, one after the other, in the background, in the linked tab.

That saves you from having multiple tabs (and tab overflow) all stemming from the same source of information. Instead, all those related would-be tabs are now condensed into a single tab.

Not sure if you read all of the comments Asa - but I'd like to make a quick point about the Go menu.

I, like you, would not have been concerned at all if you removed the Go menu from Firefox a week ago. Reason being - I didn't really know what it was used for.

This discussion about Scott Berkun and his distaste for the Go menu caused me to look into it - and the global nature of this menu is a big advantage for me. I wish I had have known about (or looked into) the use of the Go menu earlier, as I have been using it at least once each browsing session since I re-discovered it.

I hope that if you do choose to "put it out to pasture" you do so by making it accessible as a sub-menu (such as IE's use of View > Go).

Looking through the Mozilla Forums I've seen a few examples of people like me - that have recently discovered a use for the Go menu since it's been brought up.

Thought you might be interested.

How I understand Scott Berkun's criticism of Firefox's tabbed browsing in a nutshell: Avoid trying to suggest what users should prefer compared to what they will prefer.

Fair argument, but Berkun's criticism fails to take into account the one thing that can do the nastiest and greatest harm to a UI: Impatience.

I don't need a usability study to tell you what users prefer. Users want to do something and they want it done fast. Most of the people who I install Firefox for on their computers wanted their computer to behave faster. "Go faster!" is the axiomatic saying of just about every layman who uses a computer. Most people do not "love Firefox," they only care that it works. Their only concern is, "Taxi, Point A, to Point B, how fast can you get me there?"

Now, where is my point? The correct behavior is the blank tab, because it requires the fewest initial resources. (At the end of my rant, I will present an alternative reason why this is the correct behavior.)

I consider myself an advanced/expert user, I spend at least seven hours of every day at the computer, and I am always conciously aware of my productivity and efficiency. I *rarely* open a *blank* tab in Firefox. If someone is going to conduct a usability study, they would surely have to study me. For me, I use tabs to set-up the juxtaposition of two linked web pages.

For instance, I started off at scottberkun.com's website, then middle-clicked my mouse on a link in his blogs comment section to http://downloadstatusbar.mozdev.org/, then middle-clicked my mouse again to open up a third tab for http://www.totalidea.com/freestuff4.htm, and finally middle-clicked once more to come here. Therefore, the most efficient use of tabs I have come across is the juxtaposition of web pages. Instead of using the back and forward buttons, I can now compare what is being said on each of these pages without waiting for pages to reload. Come to think of it, I also unknowingly save the server I am accessing some bandwidth.

Furthermore, and this might just be crazy-talk, I have noticed there is a fundamental difference between users of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. In at least in my group of friends, the browser name correctly describes their browsing personality 100%. People who use Netscape Navigator use their browser truly to navigate with a set task in mind, whereas users of Internet Explorer are adventurers and often "surf the 'Net" as the expression goes. As for Mozilla Firefox? The name itself does not appear to be a browsing personality like an Explorer or Navigator, but foxes are just foxes! :-)

Finally, I promised an alternative reason as to why a blank tab is the correct UI decision.

While it might be considered okay to clone the previous tab, a few problems are noticeable: In Internet Explorer, if I had two windows open for a significant amount of time, and one was a clone of the other, I would lose track of which browser contained which set of back/forward histories. The most noticeable situation for this was browsing anything with a hierarchial tree, such as a shopping site like newegg.com when comparing whether I should buy a power resistor, surge suppressor or power supply back-up. It was extremely irritating to identify each tab because they all had similar histories but all were seperate tasks and only one task could have the focus of my single locus of attention.

Of course, so far as the Go menu, er, goes, you could get the Menu Editor extension (which I just discovered for the first time) at http://menueditor.mozdev.org

I think you might even consider making it default, since it stands for so much flexibility. But then again, most normal users don't want to go through the hassle. At the same time, would anyone other than a power user notice that they didn't need a certain menu? Not sure...but a cool extension nonetheless, though it doesn't seem to be implementing the Go menu options in Firefox 1.5 alpha. While you can get rid of the Go menu, it doesn't let you put Go options in, say, the View menu. Ah well.

Have fun,
--Alex Vondrak

Firefox is my favorite browser now as Mozilla was before. But I continue to wait for a combination of key that let me put a tab character inside a text area. I try the tabinta extension but is not what I like to have. When Firefox will support those kind of future requested by users? If you take a look in a bugzilla entry https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29086 the bug / feature request were opened in the far 24 february 2000 and received 121 user comment.

oh man i love 1.5

first off, i consider myself a 'power user'. some of you uber-power users may scoff at this, but that's that. i'm not a developer, but i try to help out and report bugs etc. oh, and i'm young, so be nice to me :)

sorry that i don't cite whoever mentioned each point up there in all those comments, but there's just too many.

--tabs--
i browse almost exclusively in single window mode, and use SessionSaver to restore everything i had if i shut down (crashes are very, very, very rare for me with firefox). i commonly get up to fifteen tabs at once, and the same tabs stay for a week or so. i use tab mix to wrap my tabs when they get too long.

and, my mom shies away from tabs because "you accidentally close all of them at once" (not a direct quote). i guess she just hits enter or clicks automatically when the pop-up shows.

Bruce: exactly. i do the same thign, and i _hate_ it when my homepage is auto-loaded in a new tab.

i absolutely hate a scrolling tab bar (both horizontally and vertically). i am not sure of my opinion about a drop-down menu for exess tabs, but i would definitely like to see drop-down menus for other toolbars, like in OOo, M$ Word, etc. there seems to be no way to manage overflowing buttons atm.

OmniWeb's strategy seems interesting, though i definitely think there needs to be a manual switch between that and the current tab system. thanks Watts.

p.s. no drag-and-drop tabs between windows in 1.5?!! seems like half a job done.

Roland Tepp, there is a problem with creating new windows from tabs dropped into somewhere other than firefox, which is that it can interfere with the DE/WM's drag-and-drop API. e.g. in GNOME/Nautilus, dragging a tab to the desktop makes a link, or downloads the page there (you get a pop-up asking which).

--history UI--
let's face it, the history UI sucks. i think it would do well to be completely redesigned, allowing for greater sorting flexibility, e.g. remembering the state of a web page, and possibly even being able to restore a complete state of the browser window from the past.

i think the history should optionally be able to be displayed in a seperate window, like i seem to remember from netscape 7, no?

--'Go' menu--
i very rarely use the go menu and on the few occassions where i do it is because it sits there all the time and i feel like i should put it to some use, even though there are other ways to do everything it offers.

i object to removing it completely for accessibility reasons. specifically the back, forward, and home entries need to be kept. i would love to see it be integrated into other menus. however, i think just tossing the Go menu into some other sub-menu, like in IE, is confusing, unintuitive, and inaccessible.

what i think should be done with the three parts of the go menu:
1) i would like to see the back, forward, and home entries together in some other menu, specifically next to the stop and reload entries under View.

2) the short history section should be in History menu, perhaps located under View or Tools. there should definitely be an entry Tools > History or Tools > History > Full History (or whatever) to show the sidebar/history window.

3) the "History" checkbox is redundant, and i think does not need to be kept at all. you could think of my suggested entry in Tools as a relocation of it if you like. i see the Tools entry rather as a new addition, this entry having been killed off.

--downloads--
i have tried the download statusbar extension, and feel that the "full version" takes up too much screen real estate. i do appreciate the "mini version", however, as you can watch the progress of downloads while browsing (the full version interferes with my browsing too much). i would be in support of a small display like that of the mini version to be included in Firefox, perhaps with a percentage of the most recent download etc.

--find toolbar--
i love the find toolbar at the bottom, and would be very very frustrated if it were moved to the top.

Ze1, i like that idea. i have experienced the same frustration.

--thunderbird ui--
like MarbleheadMan said, the thunderbird ui needs a ton more work than firefox. it's inconsistent and redundant all over. i've got a tiny creeping feeling this isn't the right place to talk about it though :)

--incorporating extensions--
Paul Irish, incorporating an extension such as TBP, TBE, would lead to severe bloat and 'feature creep'. i think that more popular and well written extensions could optionally be taken over by mozilla itself, and included in teh release automatically. this would provide the option to remove the features if desired, and likely expose some more people to extensions in the process.

that said, there are soem things i think should be included within the ff core. these are small extesnions that provide pretty-much non-noticeable features for those who don't want them, and wonderful functionality for those who do.

the two i would like to see included are resize searchbar and go up.

I frequently use the Go button (even more than the "Bookmarks" menu) and think it is an important feature of the browser. Please don't remove it.

Since we're on the subject of the menus, there's a real mistake that no one has noticed. Go to this Web site and read it: http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-003.txt . There actually is a way to read it with Fx, but it's an intelligence test to find it.

The instruction to wrap lines should be in the View/Page Style menu, or better yet, it should do it automatically. I'll tell you the clever way Opera does it in the rag on Opera blog.

AnotherGuest[$this->prev], View Source > Wrap Long Lines

that wasn't hard at all.

sptankard@gmail.com

i agree that this should me a menu option, but not under Page Style. imho, it should be a check box directly under View. also, how would it appear on non-text files? disabled or hidden?

what do people here think about tabs within tabs...?
-- "tab folders may in fact be the next logical stage for tabbing" http://www.understandingxml.com/archives/2005/09/firefox_15_beta.html#more
e.g. the 1.5 preferences window, for browsing.

Just posting to get ignored, but I hate the findbar. For some reason, even on this P4 with a Gig of RAM, I get nervous as hell trying to bring that thing up. Like its going to crash FF or something. It never seems to work quickly, jumps me around the page like crazy as I type, and doesn't take me back where I started if the find fails. Mostly it just seems less polished than the rest of FF though. Like one of those extensions that you get that works, but you're always a bit nervous to use it. I'd be more in favor of find just happening in the searchbar somehow, like it did in the old days, but I can't think of a good way for that to work either, without requiring extra clicks. I'd probably give it its own searchbar if I could have everything my way.

Scott Tankard wrote,
"that wasn't hard at all"

I guess it depends on your point of view, and whether you know there is a way to do it. I had to search the forums to find it. Granny wouldn't find it, that's for sure.

It occurred to me after I wrote that note that I have also seen lines that didn't wrap on other types of pages -- HTML, I'm pretty sure. I've seen it on the Mozilla forums. I don't know how Opera or anything else would handle it, but View Source just wouldn't cut it.

Avant Browser does tab overflow perfectly -- it adds a new row of tabs. (First, each tab gets a little smaller, but eventually, a new row of tabs appears.) Tabs can be at the top or the bottm.

I personally think Avant gets just about everything right.

Double-clicking on a tab to close it (or right-clicking on a tab, user-configurable) works for me.

Hi Asa,
I've written up my own discussion of changes I would make the the Firefox user interface.
http://lachy.id.au/log/2005/10/firefox-interface