Re: Epiphany 1.3.2

[Roberto Piscitello <robepisc freemail it>]

Since I'm new to the list, I can't start but saying hello everybody!

Il gio, 2004-07-08 alle 19:03, Marco Pesenti Gritti ha scritto:
> On Thu, 2004-07-08 at 15:35, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> > On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Christian Persch wrote:
> > 
> > >         * Append new tabs to the end instead of grouping them (Marco)
> > 
> > Nooo! Why was this necessary? Adding a new tab next to the currently
> > opened one is one of the nice icing-on-the-cake features that makes ephy
> > such a joy to use!
FWIW, count me too on the Nooo! side.

> Well, it's a tradeoff. I think appending at the end is the intuitive
> behavior (I actually did a mini test on this and everyone I asked was
> expecting to have the tab added at the end). Personally the few times I
> used tabs I was a bit confused by the the grouping behavior, even if I'm
> sure when you get used it feel sort of natural ...
I use tabs a lot, and can say it's natural and even logical (for me, at
least:) that tabs related to the page I'm reading get opened close to
it.
Why should I want it to open 10 tabs further, maybe out of the screen?
Would that be more intuitive?  Remember that opening a tab via
middle-click doesn't switch (and it's right) to that tab.

PROs of tab-grouping:
 - new tabs (which probably are the ones you'll read next) are easier to
reach;
 - related tabs are automatically grouped and not spread around the tab
list.
 - new tabs always appear on-screen, even if you have tens of them;

CONs of tab-grouping:
 - Mozilla or Firefox behaves differently:
        Uhm... not a good point for me.
 - gedit (or gnome-terminal, etc...) behaves differently:
        FALSE. Gedit does/can not have click-to-open-a-related-tab; it
        only uses tabs (and puts them at the end) to open a new document
        or an existing one given its URI.  In that situation Ephy
        already behaves exactly the same way: it puts its tab at the end
        and makes it the current one.


So I really can't see any clear problem caused by tab-grouping.
However I see some usability issues opened by its remotion:
 - if there are many (where many=7 on my 1024x768 screen) tabs open, new
tabs are opened "out of the screen", so the user doesn't get any
feedback of them getting created and loaded.
 - the user keeps scrolling back & forth the tab list to get to his new
tabs; this can be _very_ annoying if you have many (>7) tabs, because
the arrows to scroll the list are small and difficult to hit.
 - related tabs are spread around the tab list.

In my experience 7 is not that many tabs.

> What we are losing in the tradeoff is the ability to create subgroups of
> tabs, but is that such a common use case ?
I think it is, at least for me.
> You can already create
> multiple groups of tabs using windows...
It depends on your navigation habits and necessities.

In conclusion, I think that, without tab-grouping, Ephiphany loses more
then that (what?) it gains.  I hope you revert your patch.

Thanks a lot for your work.  Keep on rocking guys!

Ciao,
  robepisc
-- 
Roberto Piscitello <robepisc freemail it>