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benlehman at 10:48am on 31/05/2009
benlehman at 10:48am on 31/05/20091) The problem of tabs and the problem of bookmarks are actually the same problem. Now I've just made my life harder.
2) There are different cases where we devote %100 of the screen to the browser vs. browse in window. If we are going to devote %100 of the screen to the browser, we need to browser to also be able to access local applications and files. At this point, we're basically designing an operating system (like MS tried to do with Explorer.) Might be good to avoid this, just to avoid project bloat (see #1, point about making my life harder).
3) As far as I can tell there are four use cases for tabs/bookmarks.
* First is a set a habitual set: my morning newsreads, my afternoon webcomics, the tabs which I use to research something. This is used daily or weekly or what have you and grows and changes with my habits and preferences.
* Second is a project set: all the craigslist ads for the apartments I'm looking for, plus a compiled contact info list, plus google maps for the locations of the houses, transit information etc. This is used intensively for a short period of time and then needs to go away and not bug me again.
* Third is something that I intend to do something with. For instance, oh, I want to send this article to my mom. Or, I want to come back here two weeks before Alexis's birthday and buy her this as a present.
* Fourth is, in the course of reading a standard web article, I would like to open several of the links in the article while at the same time finishing the reading that I'm doing. For instance, I can't get through one of Andrew Sullivan's blog posts without opening at least a couple of extra tabs. In this case, I want to use it and be gone.
Each of these might require a different solution. Or maybe we could combine some of them. Also, I would love to have a certain automatic routine detection. "Hey, you've been visiting this site every morning, would you like to add it to your morning sites network?"
I'd love to have an interface that actually uses the linked structure of the web as its presentation model.
2) There are different cases where we devote %100 of the screen to the browser vs. browse in window. If we are going to devote %100 of the screen to the browser, we need to browser to also be able to access local applications and files. At this point, we're basically designing an operating system (like MS tried to do with Explorer.) Might be good to avoid this, just to avoid project bloat (see #1, point about making my life harder).
3) As far as I can tell there are four use cases for tabs/bookmarks.
* First is a set a habitual set: my morning newsreads, my afternoon webcomics, the tabs which I use to research something. This is used daily or weekly or what have you and grows and changes with my habits and preferences.
* Second is a project set: all the craigslist ads for the apartments I'm looking for, plus a compiled contact info list, plus google maps for the locations of the houses, transit information etc. This is used intensively for a short period of time and then needs to go away and not bug me again.
* Third is something that I intend to do something with. For instance, oh, I want to send this article to my mom. Or, I want to come back here two weeks before Alexis's birthday and buy her this as a present.
* Fourth is, in the course of reading a standard web article, I would like to open several of the links in the article while at the same time finishing the reading that I'm doing. For instance, I can't get through one of Andrew Sullivan's blog posts without opening at least a couple of extra tabs. In this case, I want to use it and be gone.
Each of these might require a different solution. Or maybe we could combine some of them. Also, I would love to have a certain automatic routine detection. "Hey, you've been visiting this site every morning, would you like to add it to your morning sites network?"
I'd love to have an interface that actually uses the linked structure of the web as its presentation model.
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I feel like a month is not a great timeframe for this (long enough to move beyond back-of-the-envelope stuff, but not long enough to really develop and user-test an idea.) But we work with what we have.
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Right now I stick mostly with Chrome and Opera, as FF3 runs slow on -all- of the machines I work with, and I haven't even installed add-ons since the upgrade.
So far Chrome has impressed me the most with the interface. The speed + Drag & Drop tabs has made it really easy for me to do project based stuff.
Fifth use case: tabs as background items?
-- Alex
Re: Fifth use case: tabs as background items?
Re: Fifth use case: tabs as background items?
Re: Fifth use case: tabs as background items?
Design wise- maybe having a set of tabs running across the top vs. a set of tabs running across the side? It lets people do some kind of organizing of tabs with two options. (more than two sides would get cluttered, though)
Re: Fifth use case: tabs as background items?
I'd love to see a kind of tabs-of-tabs approach, as an alternative to multiple windows. E.g. if the top were to contain your "tabs" while the left side was a way to switch between "workspaces" or "collections" of tabs. One advantage here is that, if you organize by task, you no longer have to remember which tab you were in for each "task" (which is something you get right now with multiple windows as well).
-- Alex
Re: Fifth use case: tabs as background items?
I have noticed one major UI issue with that approach. Firefox only does the "Do you want me to save your tabs?" thing when I close my last window (the one I consider to be the logical "main" window), whereas the tabs I usually want remembered for next time are actually the task-specific ones; when I've got a whole window for a task, it usually means it's a task complicated enough that I might not resolve it in one sitting.
-- Alex