Tab Delimited
November 8th, 2005Software, UI
In a post on his Mozilla blog Ben Goodger discusses some of the UI research being done on tabbed browsing at Google, along with some solid proposals for streamlining tabs in Firefox.
This is great news because, as it stands now, the tab UI in Firefox is fundamentally flawed. Well, the tab close button to be specific. In the current implementation (a single close button, positioned to the far right of all open tabs) there is little to no connection between the button and the specific tab on which it is going to perform its designated action. It’s subtle, but fatal. At first blush, one might even say it makes it look as though the purpose of the button is to close the entire tab bar (that is, all open tabs at once). This is one case where Safari gets it right. Each tab contains its own close button. The relationship is obvious, direct, and instantly recognizable.
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Comments
Ron November 21st, 2005 at 2:13 pm
I have to disagree. Putting individual close buttons on each tab will only serve to take away space from the title text on the tabs. It seems logical to me that if there is only one close button for all tabs, the focused tab will be the one to close. Perhaps if the close button is only visible when the tab is active, it would be acceptable to have it on the tab itself.
David Sleight December 11th, 2005 at 4:48 am
Well, first off, there’s always going to be at least one active tab, even if you have the tab bar set to be on by default and it’s a blank window. If a window is open in Firefox there will always be a tab that has focus.
The idea that a close button on every tab negatively encroaches on space for displaying the document title is really the result of another oversight in the way Firefox implements tabs. Firefox has no real mechanism for dealing with high volumes of tabs. On both the Mac and Windows, Firefox keeps reducing the width of every tab for each one you add until there’s just enough space to display the document’s proxy icon (favicon). Then it stops reducing the size of the tabs but keeps adding them outside the right-hand side of the window, where you can’t even see them.They run right off the window!
Again I’m going to have to invoke Safari’s tab implementation. Safari also reduces the size of each visible tab as more are added, but there’s a logical limit. Safari sets a minimum width for this reduction (about 80 pixels) at which point it stops shrinking the tabs and adds a disclosure arrow with a list of titles for those documents that can’t be displayed in the tab bar. This ensures that every visible tab will have enough space to display a close button and a useful portion of the document title. For a 1024×768 display this means you have about 12 to 13 tabs visible before they start getting stacked in the menu list.
Ironically, displaying page titles is probably of far lesser importance in Firefox since it also displays the site favicon on every tab (which, also pretty ironically, takes away space from the document title).
I still hold that the single tab close button metaphor seriously messes with the document interface model users would typically see in either Windows or the Mac OS.
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