2009/2/12 Allan Day <[email protected]>: > On Thu, 2009-02-12 at 14:17 +0200, Kalle Vahlman wrote: >> 2009/2/9 Allan Day <[email protected]>: >> > Hey all, >> > >> > I've been working (on and off) on reviewing all the bugs and other >> > discussions on tabs in GNOME [1]. It's reached a fairly mature stage >> > now. I think the review contains useful information about how tabs could >> > be improved in GNOME. Any comments or suggestions? >> >> Not to encourage innovation or anything, but according to this study: >> >> >> http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/12/casual_fridays_whos_tabhappy_a.php >> >> most people have less than 7-8 tabs open when they browse the net (IMO >> the number one tab use scenario really). >> >> And there's a simple reason for that; tabs just don't work when >> there's too many of them (ie. more than what can be reasonably >> accomodated by the window size). >> >> So rather than reinventing tabs and figuring out clever ways to make >> tabs work, in my personal opinion the same effort would do much more >> good in designing and implementing a better way to handle multiple >> views (eg. improving window management or using a canvas approach) >> than what tabs can offer... > > Thanks for the link - really useful. I'll add it to the tab review. > > I agree that, in an ideal world, we wouldn't have tabs and we'd just > have really awesome window management instead. I'd also agree that > improving window management is important, and I would hope that, in the > future, window management gets so good that we don't need tabs any more. > > Whether we like it or not though, tabs are going to be around for a > while, if for no other reason than them being something that users > expect nowadays. My argument is that, if we're going to have tabs, we > should make sure that they work well.
They do work well when the tab count is manageable. Eg. they work for me with Gedit since I don't keep too many files open when I work. > Likewise, evidence that most users don't have high numbers of tabs open > shouldn't stop us from making sure that our tabbed interfaces work well > when a user does have a lot of tabs open. The report you linked to says > '16.7 percent of respondents said they had more than 10 tabs open.' > Let's ensure that those 16.7% (the proportion with tabs flowing off the > screen could be higher) have a positive experience using tabs. I just don't belive tabs *can* be streched that far with worthwhile results, and thus I think it would be wiser to direct effort to fix the WM... But as said, I don't want to generate stop energy too much so please ignore me :) -- Kalle Vahlman, [email protected] Powered by http://movial.fi Interesting stuff at http://sandbox.movial.com See also http://syslog.movial.fi _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
