Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack • Hacker News Board

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#101

Post by scottjad » Wed, Jul 16, 2014, 8:32 PM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #78

scottjad wrote: post #41

Where I really want side tabs is on my Android Nexus 7 tablet. On it in Chrome I normally browse the web in portrait mode and I can see the titles of about three tabs, but only a few words of each. With a slide out side panel on the left (activated by dragging left to right from off the screen onto the screen) I would be able to see the titles for 15 or so tabs, with larger press areas and close buttons. I realize fo…

Firefox on my N7 has side tabs, but with full-tab previews, not just the titles. I don't find the extra space used to be a problem.

Unfortunately not in portrait mode, at least for me. And in both portrait and landscape modes on my N7 Firefox only shows 3.5 tabs, about the same as Chrome.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#102

Post by Camillo » Wed, Jul 16, 2014, 10:21 PM UTC

cs02rm0 wrote: post #86

Camillo wrote: post #85

This post attempts to walk a fine line between hyping up the work the author has done and recognizing the contributions of... largely the wrong people. - There is a pretty popular Firefox extension called Tree Style Tabs, by "Piro". It is awesome, it is actively maintained, it works great. It has around 100k active users. - Some time later, "philiKON" (Philipp von Weitershausen) made a smaller extension that just sho…

Presumably he wasn't necessarily aware of TST? I wasn't. I don't see anything wrong with crediting where he found his inspiration. There's always a chain to these things, presumably TST wouldn't exist without Firefox, which wouldn't exist without IE or Netscape, which... which wouldn't exist without the wheel... fire...

Plausible deniability is extremely thin here. TST's inspiration is credited in the first paragraph of Vertical Tabs's Readme on GitHub (even in Vlad's fork), and in Vertical Tabs's description on addons.mozilla.org. In fact, if you google "Vertical Tabs" the first result comes with the snippet "This Firefox add-on arranges tabs in a vertical rather than horizontal fashion. It is heavily inspired by and borrows ideas from the excellent Tree [...]".

On top of that, Mr. Henein is a Mozilla employee and has several colleagues who are also working on vertical tabs (he mentions Vlad, but also Stephen Horlander, one Hayden, and there are others who are not mentioned by name). Basically, there is a group of people at Mozilla who is (finally, after seven years) looking into officially supporting vertical tabs. How likely it is that none of them has ever heard of TST, or found out about it while researching this feature? I'd say it defies belief.

It takes active, deliberate effort for Mozilla to ignore the community's efforts in this field. It is certainly more satisfying to a designer's narcissism to pretend that he (with some help from his pals) is bringing forth a bold new creation, but it is an especially egregious attitude to take for a community-based organization like Mozilla.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#103

Post by frandroid » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 7:40 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #71

frandroid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They get lost in it because there are too many things, but they understand how it works. Which is the point here since they would make the tree themselves with something such as TreeStyleTab

No, the cases I speak of get lost in it when they have tree-style menus, when their apps are grouped in different themes (games, tools, office) and want a flat, 3-column single layer.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#104

Post by superfunc » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 10:34 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #45

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.

About two hours later, I've switched back: Vertical Tabs is very slow, and makes Firefox 30 on Ubuntu 14.04 seem slow. Ah, well.

I had the same experience on Elementary.