I think you're somewhat right.... folks use tabs to enhance or partially replace poor history systems. Instead of going to the root to create a "good" history system and telling users to "stop doing that," perhaps we should be asking how can we enhance what the user wants to do: *Use tabs (in their current highly evolved presentation and placement) to improve on history!* After all, tabs *are* a mechanisms for presenting a vast array of windows in a more usable and orderly fashion than the anarchy of a pseudo-randomly overlapping window set. Such a windowing anarchy is what we had in Netsacape and IE prior to tabbing. To put it another way, tabs *are* a clever history presentation mechanism, and not an abuse of a feature. Several of the videos provide alternate views of tabs. I think providing better views is a very worth-while goal, although I think too often demos abandoned the existing tab UI, and provided wholesale replacement. :-(
Brian focused on a nice element, which showed how long tabs have been open. Fundamentally the ability to see tabs differently, rather that moving them automatically, may be a key way to help a user do what is most natural. When I search for a needle in a haystack, one of my goals is avoid moving much hay, as I have a lot of structure in the placement of the existing piles. One really nice element of gmail is that messages are sorted by tagged views, but not really moved (a giant stride when compared with pop and imap message replications in folders). I think we need ways to view the data (what's in a tab, and the history and relationships of tabs) without moving the tabs from where the user placed them. Perhaps we need to help the user achieve the integration, and provide more views of their tabs, that enhance their actions. The "Best in Class: innovative" sadly seems to discard the current tab view (providing a radial view), rather than work to enhance current tab placement and information presentation. For instance, perhaps a new-tab page should (optionally) have a view that graphically looks like a spread sheet descending from the tabs. Something like a tinderbox waterfall which shows history of build bots, should show some history of tabs. Perhaps we should have mouse-over thumbnails (as suggested in some of the videos)... all sorts of ideas spring to mind. Clever innovation such as Nsylvain's enhancement of waterfall presentation that warps time in a traditional waterfall may be applied to make views most useful for various search scenarios. ...but that UI thread seems quite orthogonal to the performance enhancing portions of this thread about how to transparently freeze-dry lingering tabs so that they don't impact performance. I think this freeze-drying can indeed be done well, if not perfectly by heuristics mentioned in this thread. It may be that the heuristics are conservative, but looking at my use cases, I'm convinced heuristics could do an excellent job on the bulk of my tabs, and still have zero lost content (re: lost edits and state) just by being conservative. The only way we'll see if such heuristics *could* cover the bulk of genuine users tabs is to do some data gathering on real users (example: We could sample at each UMA gathering point how many tabs could be conservatively freeze dried). Jim On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 8:28 AM, Dean McNamee <de...@chromium.org> wrote: > > I feel like people are using tabs as a replacement for a good history > system. At least in all current browser implementations, tabs are > "running". Even if we can make the UI scale to 1000 tabs, the 500 > flash instances that are likely running aren't really going to > perform. The making tab performance scale is a separate technical > issue that will hopefully also improve. > > Looking at a lot of these design videos, they looked more like good > ideas to me for history navigation than tab navigation. If history > was good, I think people wouldn't be so worried about "losing > something" by closing a tab. Having had bad history systems for so > many years, people are now trained to keep tabs open if they ever > might want to look at that page again in the future :\ > > On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 1:16 AM, Peter Kasting<pkast...@google.com> wrote: > > http://design-challenge.mozilla.com/summer09/ > > The results of the "Reinventing Tabs in the Browser" challenge have been > > announced. > > "Collapsible Tab Groups" includes among others some things I've proposed, > > including grouping and collapsing groups. > > "Favitabs" reminds me of some old brainstorming ideas from pamg about > > converting certain tabs into favicon buttons. > > Folks considering the future of tabs (e.g. Ben, Glen, Scott) might do > well > > to take a look at some of these. > > PK > > > > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Developers mailing list: chromium-dev@googlegroups.com View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
