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Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

darrinhenein.com

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Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#61

Post by randallsquared »

zo1 wrote: post #50
randallsquared wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough, the apparent lack of the setting (or maybe it didn't seem to work) drove me to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-tabs/ around six or eight months ago.

Second time i find myself plugging this add on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... You can put it on either side, and it doesn't look as ugly as "side-tabs" that you linked to. No, I'm not the author or anything, I've just been using this thing for a good solid few years. And I can't believe people are now falling for this silly side-tabs prototype when a perfectly Good , 100% working sid…

I totally agree that side-tabs isn't the prettiest thing in the world. That said, the tree-style-tabs addon seems to be built around a concept that I don't need, which is why I hadn't really considered it before. It does seem to be fast, though, so I'll give it a try for a while and see if my life improves.

Thanks!

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#62

Post by blahedo »

minikites wrote: post #21

OmniWeb did this over a decade ago: http://i.imgur.com/U4Q5siY.jpg I'm glad it's getting more popular but surprised it's taken this long. It makes more sense to use horizontal space on a widescreen monitor.

I'm glad OW got a mention here; I miss its tabs very much. More than just putting the tabs vertically, it included a thumbnail and a scrollbar, both of which I found incredibly helpful; my workflow hasn't been the same since I switched away from it.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#63

Post by MortenK »

baby wrote: post #58
dhenein wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out, I should have made mention in my post :) I've have seen tree style tabs – which does a great job for more advanced organization of tabs. For my experiments (and Firefox features in general), we try and focus on simplicity and the more general audience.

TST is pretty simple to use and extensible if you want more. What you did was... not really practical. Have you tried using TST for a few days? I promise you won't be able to go back to any other way of browsing.

For developers and other tech guys maybe. But the average, non tech savy users have a very hard time understanding hierarchies and therefore tree controls. It's to such a degree that UX specialists like Alan Cooper strongly suggests never using tree views unless the data is naturally thought of as a hierarchy, such as a family tree etc.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#64

Post by baby »

MortenK wrote: post #63
baby wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TST is pretty simple to use and extensible if you want more. What you did was... not really practical. Have you tried using TST for a few days? I promise you won't be able to go back to any other way of browsing.

For developers and other tech guys maybe. But the average, non tech savy users have a very hard time understanding hierarchies and therefore tree controls. It's to such a degree that UX specialists like Alan Cooper strongly suggests never using tree views unless the data is naturally thought of as a hierarchy, such as a family tree etc.

It looks a lot like the windows start menu. Which is pretty easy to use.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#65

Post by mnarayan01 »

pllbnk wrote: post #44
mordero wrote: post #2

I've been using Tree Style Tabs[0] with Firefox for a long time. Being able to nest tabs and then collapse them is awesome. It is hard to live without it when using Chrome (I know there is a similar addon for Chrome[1], but it doesn't have the same feel since it just adds a new window off to the side and still has the tabs across the top). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [1] https:…

In addition to that, Firefox handles many tabs very well because it is a single process application and does not use as many resources as Chrome does. Tree Style Tab is the best when you are researching something and you basically keep all open tabs under a single branch. When you are done, you just close all branch.

At this point I'm legitimately unsure how people do web research/search without TST. I know at some point in the far past I did it myself...but I'm not sure how.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#66

Post by wjoe »

baby wrote: post #60

How does this compare to Tree Style Tab? I've been using TST for years and I don't want to downgrade.

It looks nicer (in my opinion at least, and I've only test it on Linux), more minimalist style. But it doesn't have the collapsable tree groups that TST has, just a standard list of tabs.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#67

Post by josh64 »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #32
minikites wrote: post #21

OmniWeb did this over a decade ago: http://i.imgur.com/U4Q5siY.jpg I'm glad it's getting more popular but surprised it's taken this long. It makes more sense to use horizontal space on a widescreen monitor.

Yup. They also had a list view that's similar to what's being shown here. Omniweb was great back in the day, it's too bad it's no longer around.

Or is it? http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/

Now with OS X 10.9 support!

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#68

Post by frandroid »

baby wrote: post #64
MortenK wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For developers and other tech guys maybe. But the average, non tech savy users have a very hard time understanding hierarchies and therefore tree controls. It's to such a degree that UX specialists like Alan Cooper strongly suggests never using tree views unless the data is naturally thought of as a hierarchy, such as a family tree etc.

It looks a lot like the windows start menu. Which is pretty easy to use.

I have seen people get lost in the Start Menu, and beg to have all their apps in one giant list at the top level.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#69

Post by subsection1h »

lcedp wrote: post #17
mordero wrote: post #2

I've been using Tree Style Tabs[0] with Firefox for a long time. Being able to nest tabs and then collapse them is awesome. It is hard to live without it when using Chrome (I know there is a similar addon for Chrome[1], but it doesn't have the same feel since it just adds a new window off to the side and still has the tabs across the top). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [1] https:…

TST is awesome. "Bookmark this tree" & "Close this tree" features make so much sense when one researches some topic.

While I love Tree Style Tab, I think separate windows for separate topics is more useful than trees, and I think saving windows/topics as sessions using the Session Manager extension is more useful than bookmarking, especially seeing as how Session Manager supports appending windows to previously saved sessions.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#70

Post by nevster »

mordero wrote: post #2

I've been using Tree Style Tabs[0] with Firefox for a long time. Being able to nest tabs and then collapse them is awesome. It is hard to live without it when using Chrome (I know there is a similar addon for Chrome[1], but it doesn't have the same feel since it just adds a new window off to the side and still has the tabs across the top). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [1] https:…

As an aside, for those that aren't aware, try pressing Ctrl-Shift-E in Firefox for another way of organising tabs...
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