Tab are one of those things where I feel if you have to ask you probably know deep down it is something you shouldn't be doing.
To be absolutely clear on my bias: Tabs should only be used sparingly. > FWIW, there's some discussion on this at: > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72101 That bug report covers a lot of valuable points, in particular > tabs should be implemented by the wm. This is an idea which keeps coming up because "window management" is one biggest perceived benefits of tabbed interface. The thing developers and designers hate most about MDI including Tabbed MDI is how it often results in reinventing the Window Manager inside one application at a time. This points to a bigger issue, and I believe any look at tabs should also look at improving batch processing of multiple documents as well as ways to improve the window/task list. It is important to try and understand the problems users think a Tabbed interface will solve and treat the problem not the symptoms. The other claimed benefit of Tabs was speed because Mozilla was and still is horrendously slow at opening a new window compared to opening a new tab. Any developer considering implementing a tabbed interface should also look at trying to improve the time it takes to open new windows. > > The Firefox people think that a X for each tab is much too > > complicated. I don't think so. What do you think? Anybody has done > > usability studies on that? Spreadsheets have been using Tabbed Document interfaces for longer than most and although they are used to represent seperate sheets within a larger document, putting Close buttons on every tab will cause more inconsistency problems than it could solve because it will never be approrpiate for spreadsheets and any other applications which use Tabbed Document interfaces in that way. The browser is one of the most used applications and there will always be a penalty to doing things differently from such a well known behaviour (inconsistency and yet another thing to learn). http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2004-March/msg00118.html This post on the Gedit mailing list points out the benefit of a context menu on each tab, which invariably includes the option to close the tab. This approach gives users a fairly convenient way to close one specific tab and there is less chance of accidentally closing a tab you intended to select. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2004-September/msg00058.html There was a discussion a while back about adding a Read Only indicator to Gedit and in that discussion the issue of tab spacing and how cramped it was came up, which only convinced me futher it was a bad idea to have a close button on every tab. I have plenty more to say about Tabs but I've said enough for now. Sincerely Alan Horkan Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
