Why Tabs are on Top in Firefox 4
blog.mozilla.com
blog.mozilla.com
Personally I use the totally fabulous Tree Style Tab extension and have the tabs on the left. Given the prevalence of widescreen displays, it makes a lot more sense to have them on the side and use up the wider screen real estate, even if you are not using the Tree Style Tab functionality (which is essentially a collapsible hierarchical tab structure).
- shrink the tabs ever smaller
- implement scrolling of tabs(!)
- limit creation of new tabs
- auto close them
Also a scrolling pane is a standard UI element that is well accepted by users.
I have 47 tabs open in Firefox currently, with trees of different research. That may seem like a lot, but it's really quite natural to manage that many with that extension. With tabs at the top, when you start getting to 15 tabs , you can't read titles and it becomes so much messier. You close stuff down just to make the current tasks simpler.
That extension is the primary reason I don't use Chrome for anything but a few Google services. It's so much more natural to coordinate them in FF until some other browser catches on and adds support.
Well, since I'm sharing the love... Tree Style Tabs in combination with Selection Links is a killer combo. Say somebody points you to a page (or sends you an email which you read through a web interface) with a bunch of links in it. So you select the text and use a one click Selection Links function to open all the links in the selected text. With Tree Style, that loads all the links as children of your original tab. Then if you want to monitor the content of those links (say each link shows the status of some activity), you use Tree Style Tab's "Reload children" to get firefox to reload only that part of the hierarchy.
I love it.
One such experiment is http://azarask.in/projects/tabcandy/ - but be warned, this is a rough sketch. It's not clear what shape it will ultimately take, or when it will be ready for production. (That's why we haven't been publicizing it.) The current concept/demo isn't something we are planning to ship yet, but I wanted to point it out anyway because it's so relevant to your comment. Hopefully with this disclaimer Aza won't be too mad at me for linking to his work before it's ready. :)
I'd love to find out if Aza has done user testing with the tree-style tab approach and what feedback he got back. There simply has to be a reason why Mozilla hasn't considered that approach.
My perfect browser would do this to bridge the two worlds:
* Start out with tabs across the top.
* As soon as the tab count increases to make titles less than five-six characters, offer a popup that says "For managing lots of tabs, we recommend using the tab tree sidebar" and points to the button.
* User presses the button and they get the behavior of the Tree Style Tab extension instead of tabs at top
or it asks the same question when you start rather than waiting, so power users can put tabs on the side if needed.
Hey, you're welcome - somebody pointed it out to me, so I am just paying it forward :-) Anyway, if you use Tree Style Tab, you might want to disable Tabmix Plus. They don't seem to play well together - it seems to interfere with the Tree Style tab drag and drop. It's not like you'll need it, anyway.
0) this is the new default, but it's configurable 1) visually separates controls that affect the current tab (back, forward) from controls that affect the whole browser (close, minimize) 2) saves space and reduces clutter in tabs that don't need certain controls 3) FF is moving certain sidebars (like the bookmarks sidebar) inside of tabs, and tabs on top will look/feel more consistent with this 4) allows notification pop-ups to be attached directly to the address bar without covering up the tab area
downsides: 1) mouse distance increases
I love this, since I already do this with a lot of applications (I have Gmail, Google Calendar, Wave and Facebook always open).
I think I recall some talk that this might be going away in future versions. But I certainly hope not, as it helps cloudify the desktop rather nicely when you stop seeing such web applications as only existing in browser-like windows.
I'd like to see some sort of notification system added to the icons of pinned tabs (like icon badges in Mac OS X) so you could see how many unread items you have in Gmail, Google Reader, etc.
No idea how you'd go about implementing such an idea though.
However the dev of chrome (not sure if its in stable yet) allows you to have these custom apps already. When you install them they also give the app extra permissions such as display tray notices and geo location. This way the app does not have to ask for them every time.
Thanks for the summary, tl;dw is right. It's preposterous and sad that the Principal Designer on Firefox values the time of his users so little that he thinks a 7 minute unskimmable, unlinkable, unindexable, unexcerptable, bandwidth-heavy video (best viewed full-screen, lest you miss a pixel of detail or are tempted to look at some thing of lesser import) is a better way to communicate this change than some text and a few screenshots.
There are downsides to it, sure, you described them quite well. It would certainly be best to have both but detesting videos on principle seems a bit preposterous and sad to me.
- How will will show how App Tabs work and how they will look?
- How can we explain to the user that the tab display preferences are not locked?
- Show users how App Tabs will work and look with UI overloading.
- Why we choose to use internal UI over platform.
All of these can be displayed with some JPGs/PNGs and a bit of sultry text, but it probably made more sense to compile a video since some of these elements are best shown, rather than described.
The point is moot, really. Who cares? They took the time to illustrate a few points. There wasn't any jive, grandstanding or hyperbole.
For someone who learns through visuals better, I appreciate the extra effort.
You (Peter Gadjokov, me thinks) and your HN persona are now forever attributed to petty point outs and hopeful karma bait.
Congrats to that.
Let's see whether they keep their lead regarding extensions. There are some nice goodies for Firefox that I haven't yet seen in Chrome, Opera or Safari. Some of them even pertaining to tabs (forgot what that color-coded, collapsing mega-tab add-on is called). But the other browsers are catching up quickly, mostly because they make it easier to write extensions. For Chrome and Safari it's basically HTML5 and JavaScript, nobody's royally rogered by XUL.
A a slight tangent: For the last couple of months, I've been using Safari at home without tabs. Expose is great, and it forces me to single-task a bit more. I tend to factor out the "read that later" pages to Instapaper, Evernote and Delicious anyway. Jamie Zawinski ain't that wrong. (On dual screens or without Expose it doesn't work as well, which is why my Linux setup at work is Chrome.)
[Note: I work for Mozilla but I am not on the Firefox UX team and was not involved in this change; these are just my own thoughts.]
If Mozilla 1.0 or even Firefox 1.0 had tabs above the address bar from the beginning, we wouldn't have this problem. But we've spent the last eight years training half a billion people (literally) to use tabs below the address bar. Now most of them have internalized that model and think of as natural, or (much more likely) don't think about it at all but are used to it anyways and will be annoyed if it changes.
(Remember the story about Stuart Feldman in the 1970s when someone asked him to fix annoyances with Makefile parsing? He said it was too late to change the syntax, because Make already had more than a dozen users!)
Mozilla has been debating this for so long because there are good reasons not to change an existing product. Upgrading is more hassle for users when more has changed. Changes to the main UI are the worst.
But users are much more forgiving when adopting a new product like Chrome (not least because the change is less likely to be forced on them). And now that Chrome is so popular, we can point to it as strong evidence that tabs-on-top is a reasonable default that people will be happy to use.
Of course, Firefox still couldn't get away with it without the option to switch back to the old style...
One thing I'm curious about for the mac is whether full titles on the very top will still be displayed if the tabs are on top. In Chrome, if I go to a page that has a long title (including this comment page), I have to hover over the tab to get the full title. Otherwise, it just shows up as "Hacker News | Why Tabs a...".
Right now my bookmarks in one line with buttons, address bar and search bar to reduce vertical space. With tabs on top it would definitely feel quite strange (I usually middle-click bookmarks to open them in new tabs, so action is not tab-local).
Will watch the video some time, but the two "conceptual model" images hit my reasoning too. It seems to be how non-geeks think about browsing too, as many I've seen have trouble with the address bar + tabs in anything but Chrome.
That right there is the reason that Firefox is headed downhill.
That's the reason Firefox takes 30 seconds to open where Chrome takes 3. Every time you fire it up, it pulls in extra bloat so that it can perform all these little user customizations that don't really matter (or that in this case have a "right way" that can be defended for a full seven minute video), but that are needed to keep 10,000 nerds from writing angry blog posts.
Google, on the other hand, made some decisions about what they wanted the browser to look like and do, and implemented them. Want something different? Get a different browser. Want to check your gmail in the next few seconds? Chrome can do that.
My advice to the FF team is to remove that little check box they're so proud of that lets you rearrange the way tabs work. Then strip out the 100k lines of code supporting it. Then ship a noticeably better browser.
The suggestion that this causes the 30 second delay is crap. An empty firefox takes about 2 seconds to load for me; a new window takes seconds. My experience (and a cursory chat with firefox devs) is that it is really memory usage which slows firefox down, and I believe this is being helped in the new version.
100k lines is total exaggeration. I'd suggest that checking for the flag is one line, and implementing it the other way is less than 1000 lines (I would think less than 100, but I'll leave myself some breathing room). It's not like they can remove the whole about:config thing just because this one button is gone.
And if you think that removing a checkbox that nobody uses will make a "noticeably better browser", then you are dreaming.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html
As to the level of effort to get that feature in and maintained, there's plenty of literature out there too documenting the perils of the "you can add this in 5 minutes" feature. For this one, you'll need:
- changes to the settings page
- logic to store the setting
- two parallel rendering paths for the window chrome
- checks everywhere that tabs are touched and special case logic for things that work differently when tabs are in their old location
- special case handling for all future features going forward (such as their new popups) to deal with two possible tab placements.
- unit tests for all the above
- bug fixing for all the above
- maintenance for all the above
- support for all the above
- documentation for all the above
It's a lot of stuff, measured in man years of effort over the lifetime of a software project as big as Firefox. And they can eliminate it all with a simple executive decision.
Tabs are moving to the top of the browser. They've done the research themselves and come to that conclusion. By both moving and not moving them in their next release, they're only making things hard for themselves.
It's a lot of stuff, measured in man years of effort over
the lifetime of a software project as big as Firefox.
And they can eliminate it all with a simple executive
decision.
The only positive thing I can say about this mindset is that, since so much software is open source these days, at least forks can be created when products err too far on one side or the other of one of these lines. But is all that duplicated effort really benefiting the community?
Lets just say that Firefox is Emacs and Chrome is vi and move on.
Bad UI design.
At least we will have the option to change it back, with the stop button we are fucked. And every day of my life I damn the "genius" who moved the stop button.
Hell, I'm using a free version of AVG antivirus and it just detected bgattack.js as a threat!
I still use a plugin to make Firefox 3.6 look like 2.0
It makes it easy if the tabs are on top for a user using touch tablets.
Of course, the people who download FF4, don't know about the change, and don't know how to change the preference (I.E. most older folks) will complain about how their firefox has changed. On the other hand, most of these people who would react this way are using IE6, and not firefox.