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Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

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Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#161

Post by overlordalex »

benrbray wrote: post #25
gkoberger wrote: post #19

Maybe I'm wrong (EDIT: seems I'm wrong!), but I feel like the people with dozens of tabs open (guilty) aren't the ones who use organizational features? Also, it's a hidden feature, but you can already Shift+Select a group of tabs, and close/move/etc the whole group.

Wrong! I have a very sophisticated system for managing my tabs. I'm very breadth-first when browsing the web and I also switch contexts a lot. Tabs are like a big Todo list for me. For a while, I would get really frustrated when chrome would crash and close all my tabs, but recently I found a ln extension that keeps track of my tab history as a big tree! Yippee!

I use tabs exactly the same way! I also use windows for context switches. Right now on my work machine I have one personal window, and 5 other windows of 10-20 tabs each.

Closing a window after doing all the "TODOs" is insanely cathartic

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#163

Post by DonHopkins »

qubex wrote: post #26

What I find hilarious about tabs is that it’s basically a full reimplementation of a multitasking interface within a MDI (Multiple Document In Window) context: we came up with windows for different applications and for different documents within that application, and then for the browser we went back and revised the conventional wisdom.

I implemented tabbed windows for NeWS, UniPress (Gosling) Emacs, and the HyperTies hypermedia authoring tool in 1988, and shipped them in a commercial product (UniPress Emacs 2.20).

They were written in object oriented PostScript, as an extension of the NeWS window manager, so you could apply them to the windows of all NeWS applications, and they were especially useful for UniPress Emacs (which was the first version of Emacs to support opening multiple windows, so you ended up opening a LOT of them at once, which the tabs really helped with).

The Wikipedia page describes my earliest implementation of tabbed windows for NeWS in 1988, and has a screen snapshot of tabbed windows and pie menus with UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES on NeWS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History

And later at Sun I re-implemented tabbed windows and pie menus for TNT (The NeWS Toolkit), and we implemented an ICCCM X11 window manager for X11/NeWS that could consistently apply tabbed windows with pie menus to all X11 and NeWS windows.

Here's a demo of tabbed windows for The NeWS Toolkit (which we could wrap around X-Windows too):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4

This posting describes different versions of tabbed windows, including PSIBER with tabbed windows for PostScript objects that you can impale on a "spike" that represents the PostScript stack, the tabbed pie menu X11/NeWS window manager:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730

These discusses the advantages of putting tabs on the side (and enabling users to move them around the any side: top, bottom, left or right), instead of just the top:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181988

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#165

Post by aembleton »

Non24Throw wrote: post #89
andrewstuart wrote: post #83

I have needed "the tab problem" solved for many years. I've tried and never stuck with any third party solution. I work in specific "modes/projects" and each mode has several tens at least of tabs open. It would be great if I could somehow switch between work modes and see all the relevant tabs for that mode.

Control+N a new window for each mode is what I currently do. Then Super+ to cycle through them (if you’re on a Mac) It’s not perfect though. If you accidentally open a few tabs in the wrong mode there’s no easy way to transfer them. And I’ll often forget that another window is open in the background

If you are using Tree Style Tabs and they are all children of a parent tab then you can just drag the parent tab over to the other window.

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#167

Post by DonHopkins »

kevsim wrote: post #30
qubex wrote: post #26

What I find hilarious about tabs is that it’s basically a full reimplementation of a multitasking interface within a MDI (Multiple Document In Window) context: we came up with windows for different applications and for different documents within that application, and then for the browser we went back and revised the conventional wisdom.

I guess nothing stops us from running one tab per window but I have to say I'm not keen to go back to that. What we be the advantage there over tabs in your opinion?

Why WOULDN'T you want to be able to use tabs on all of your windows?

And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to move any tab to any edge (top, bottom, left, right) of any window?

And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to group and stack and tile tabbed windows from different applications together?

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#168

Post by richrichardsson »

chrisyeah wrote: post #101

A great next iteration would be to let users fold/unfold those groups, so that you only have one visible "tab" per group in the top bar. This would really help the "tab collecters" (like me, who had to close 78 tabs some weeks ago).

I can't see any benefit really to this new feature they announced without what you're suggesting.

If they add the ability to collapse groups, then I would probably use it, otherwise I can keep my tabs just as organised without a need for some colour hints.

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#169

Post by qubex »

DonHopkins wrote: post #163
qubex wrote: post #26

What I find hilarious about tabs is that it’s basically a full reimplementation of a multitasking interface within a MDI (Multiple Document In Window) context: we came up with windows for different applications and for different documents within that application, and then for the browser we went back and revised the conventional wisdom.

I implemented tabbed windows for NeWS, UniPress (Gosling) Emacs, and the HyperTies hypermedia authoring tool in 1988, and shipped them in a commercial product (UniPress Emacs 2.20). They were written in object oriented PostScript, as an extension of the NeWS window manager, so you could apply them to the windows of all NeWS applications, and they were especially useful for UniPress Emacs (which was the first version…

Very impressive. I wish this had become a common feature of GUIs beyond the browser.

One thing I liked a lot about the Windows95 GUI when it was introduced were the tabbed property and settings. They kind of went by the wayside as a general concept though they survive in places (not that I’ve had much experience with Windows over the course of the past 20 years or so).

On the topic of moving tabs, I was a BeOS user and one thing that I enjoyed enormously (albeit in an infantile and purposelessly inchoate manner) was sliding the yellow title tab around by holding (if I remember correctly) the shift key. It wasn’t ever developed into something useful but it was fun and suggested it would be made into a useful feature.

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#170

Post by zo1 »

rohan1024 wrote: post #56
akersten wrote: post #23

Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aware of this too, since none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15…

On my 1080p monitor most of websites still keep white spaces on either side so this makes sense.

I blame "mobile" for that. All that whitespace is such a waste of space, and all this after a gigantic push away from 4:3 screens to 16:9 wide versions.
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