Re: New Tab Behavior and Close Other Tabs

Hello all,

Ctrl+Enter is your friend. Quoting the Frequently Asked Questions:

"To have focus on the location bar in newly opened tabs, you need to set
an empty startpage in Epiphany preferences. Alternatively press ctrl+L
to focus location bar, type or paste an URL and press ctrl+enter to open
that URL in a new tab."

Of course, this also works for search engine smart bookmarks.

I would say having the homepage open on every tab without any option to turn that behavior off is a "bad thing" as you force a chunk of your users to try and relearn a browser they may not even use consistently (let's face it, most of us don't use Linux all the time). Also, again, this is the only browser I've seen that has this behavior.

One of the design decisions in Epiphany is that whenever a page is
loaded, it should receive focus. You could argue that this is wrong, but
doing it another way has equally "bad" consequences. You would be forced
to manually focus the page you just loaded to interact with it by
keyboard.

Personally, I believe the concept of a "homepage" has long outlived its
usefulness.

I would not argue that is wrong. But I would say forcing a page to reload everytime someone hits ctrl+T and then giving the homepage focus every single time is the wrong kind of behavior. I guess one can ask: What does a user open a new tab in this fashion for most of the time? To visit their homepage again, or to enter in a URI? As I had said before, also, I asked several people to go to cnn.com after opening a new tab. Every single one of them opened the new tab (Ctrl+T or File -> New Tab) and just went on to typing 'cnn.com'. None of them clicked into the location bar or hit "ctrl+L".

In fact a lot of them didn't even use Ctrl+T, which means they aren't even using their keyboard. So when they see their location of choice isn't being typed in they stop typing, grab the mouse, and double click into the location bar to hilight it.

On another note I'll be honest. My homepage is set to google.com. When I open a new tab in epiphany I STILL hilight the location bar and type in google.com without thinking. It's just second nature to type in my destination when I open a new tab.

Given the scope of users I would say the simplest thing to do would to make it a an option that can simply be toggled on or off.

Yes, the concept of a homepage is not very useful. Still, many people continue to use it :)

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen
http://vanschouwen.info/

Cheers,
Zotnix