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Comment by seltzered | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of mixing tabs on the same level as the url box. but I can imagine it was a design decision to allow for a bit more reading on widescreen monitors.

I'm no fan to judge though, as I don't think I've actively used ie for nearly a decade now.

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As you can imagine, your average IE-only user typically only has one tab open at a time - so there's no reason to provide an entire tab row for them.

My hope would be that the "tab bar" would act like any toolbar that IE has today - easily dragged down to its own row. Heck, it might have been dragged UP by whomever took that screenshot.

I've always wondered about tab usage among the typical IE user. Do you have any hard numbers or studies that corroborate your statement? I ask not to put you on the spot, but figure it's possible you have this information or may even work in a usability lab that has actually studied this (this is Hacker News after all).

You would not use tabs either if it took three seconds to open a new one.

I think I might like this actually. Chrome was a good start to reducing the wasted vertical space in the browser compared to earlier versions of firefox. Combining the address bar and tabs into one line is the next logical option, it might work, it might not. Tough to know unless you've tried it for a while.

I wonder if there's a clean way they could hide/collapse the URL field to a minimal width on the left side of the tab bar, then automatically expand it on mouseover or selection.

Agree that vertical size of the toolbar should be minimized, less scrolling helps everyone.

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