I'm generally opposed to image-based tab preview - the amount of time it takes for the image to come up, for me to parse it, and then for me to decide to click is generally greater than just clicking on the tabs I need to look at.
That said, I think a good starting point is the implementation of proper tab title tooltips - we shouldn't be using the Windows ones we're currently using, as they take too long to show up in the case where you are rolling over multiple tabs. Our tab tooltip behavior should be closer to OSX dock tooltips: - Same Windows-default delay to show up - Position is anchored to the tab, not the mouse (with some kind of pointer) - If the tooltip is being shown and you move your mouse directly to another tab, the new tooltip shows up instantly. We do need this functionality (it's been a TODO for well over a year), and it forms a good basis for further tab preview-like experiments. Enhanced tooltips like this will be useful in other areas where we would want to show richer information, like the download shelf. I imagine the infobubble class would be a good place to look for anyone interested in working on this, as it does a lot of the display work already (though I would hope that we could use a layered window for the tooltip system). ~ Glen On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Itai <[email protected]> wrote: > > We have a number of discussions which mention Tab Previews as a > desirable feature. To get everyone to the same page: A Tab Preview is > a small image which shows the contents of a tab and appears when the > mouse is placed over any non-selected tab. The present state is that, > when the mouse pointer is over a tab, Chromium shows the title of the > page in a standard tooltip. > > Tab Previews are useful for identifying tabs without selecting them > when either tab titles are not descriptive enough or when enough tabs > are opened that their titles cannot be read. At its simplest > implementation, the Tab Preview feature simply adds a the thumbnail > within the tooltip which is shown for non-selected windows. A Tab > Preview is not shown when hovering over the selected window's tab > because it would be redundant and may hide portions of the viewed web > page. In Chrome, the thumbnail added could easily be the same > thumbnail we use for the most visited pages in the New Tab Page. > > The most important question is: Can someone find a reason why this > would hinder usability? That is, if we added this feature, would there > be a compelling reason to turn it off? > > The second question, which is something we can do even after > implementing the simple approach, is can we do better and make tab > previews even more useful? > > Being partial to Tab Previews, my personal take is that the preview > itself is extremely useful because titles quickly become too small to > display with 10 to 20 tabs and that this feature helps identify tabs > quickly. It would be nice if we could take this further and offer > previews elsewhere too. > > For previously visited links for example. It happens that I go back to > a page and forgot which link had what I was looking for. If hovering > over a visited link, it would be a lesser problem. It would not be > done for non-visited links for latency issues and not to trigger > unwanted requests. > > Bookmarks are another place where previews would be very useful, if I > don't bother editing bookmark titles, a lot of bookmarks end up with > similar titles like 'homepage' or 'welcome'. Yahoo's bookmarking > service offers such previews based on when they last crawled the site. > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Discussion mailing list: [email protected] View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-discuss -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
