2 posts from June 2009

We need to talk. It's not me, it's you. You're just really busy at the moment. I'm just moving too fast. You need some space.

Tabbed user interfaces are really meant for grouping collections of user-interactables into logically categorised, more manageable arrangements. More than 5 tabs and you should be thinking "This isn't great," more than 10 tabs and you should already be thinking about making changes.

Enter Firefox, where I seldom have fewer than 30 tabs open at any given time. Anyone, who has tried to use Firefox once the tab bar starts getting wider than the window, knows that this UI is a square peg in a hole that doesn't exist. Tab widths are almost always greater than tab heights, so who thought it was a good idea to have tab bars run horizontally?

Fortunately some people have realised that disaster is afoot. I like Aza's suggestion that web apps are treated more like OS X dock items than plain old tabs.

My current approach to tab management is a rudimentary grouping mechanism, based around the awesome Tree Style Tab Firefox extension: Once I have a bunch of tabs open on a particular topic, I create a blank tab, set its address to data:text/html,<title>Sci-fi</title> (or whatever the relevant category is) and dump the relevant tabs in there. A recent addition to my management policies is "shelving" a tab group that I haven't interacted with for a while, meaning I bookmark a tab group and close all the tabs. Being able to reduce the number of active tabs (usually in the region of 10 to 20) really helps with Firefox startup times. I just wish I could navigate my tabs without the mouse (filtering, selecting, etc.)

Alexander Limi has a great post about approaching redesigning tabs. However, one sentence troubles me greatly:

The first thing people say when we indicate that we are looking into alternative approaches is usually “But I like my tabs. Please don’t take away my tabs!”

People really say this? Who are they? They can have all my confounded tabs! I want something better than tabs.

Specifically, I'm referring to Mozilla Firefox and it's incessant addon pestering, in various shapes and sizes. Ironically, the addons behaviour feels like the most bolted-on thing in Firefox.

Firstly, short of the sky falling, nothing should prevent software from getting to a usable state when the user performs the relevant action to start it (clicking a shortcut, invoking a link handler from another process.) Possibly the most annoying thing that Firefox does is pop a dialog up in your face telling you about how your addons have updates before the rest of the browser starts, bringing about (at least) two sub-annoyances:

1. It prevents you from actually using the software until you make a choice as to whether you want to update your addons or not;
2. If you happen to click multiple links (expecting them to all open in tabs), only the first one is handled while the rest vanish off into the ether.

I realise that, in someone's mind, this might have been a good idea because you can't update addons without restarting the browser, and that restarting the browser isn't what most people would call fast; but it really wasn't a good idea. At all. Ever.

Secondly, after having survived the first point and chosen to update your addons, you still have to watch progress bars slowly fill up and your browser restart, while you twiddle your thumbs. You are then assaulted with another addon dialog, informing you that the progress bars you just watched complete were actually addons, by the same name, being updated! If you're lucky then you are ready to start using your browser. If you're not so lucky, some of your addons (I'm looking at you, NoScript) have taken it upon themselves to provide additional annoyances, usually in the form of opening new tabs that explain very little about what you did not know and quite a lot about what you did already know.

There have been some attempts to openly discuss improving the current addon experience, although things seem rather quiet at this point in time, one can only hope that the Firefox team realises that there is a problem and maybe Firefox 4 will have teleportation, time travel and an improved addon experience.