Re: Epiphany 1.3.2

[Roberto Piscitello <robepisc freemail it>]

Il gio, 2004-07-15 alle 19:40, Bryan Clark ha scritto:
> > 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.
> 
> The difference in behavior here is an issue with the HIG not specifying
> a standard tab behavior.
I suppose you're talking about gedit (and Gnome apps in general), since
Mozilla doesn't follow the HIG at all.  Of course we need to uniform
with Gnome, not mozilla.
Before I propose a solution, I'd like to emphasize a little more the BIG
difference between opening a new "parent-tab" and a new "child-tab".

CASE 1 (parent-tab):
        I want to open a fresh new tab (to digit an url, use a bookmark
        or see my default home page).
Command:
        Open in new tab, from the File menu or the apposite toolbar
        button.
Right(TM) tab position: 
        At the end of the list.
Focus: 
        Switch to new tab.
Considerations:
        WRT opening parent-tabs, Ephy behaves exactly as any other Gnome
        program which use tabs.


CASE 2 (child-tab):
        I want to open a link of the page I'm reading (to let it load in
        the background and read it later).
Command: 
        Middle click on a link of the current page.
Right(IMO) tab position: 
        Near the current tab, since we know for sure they are related
        and since it propably is the one we're going to read next.
Focus: 
        Stay on the original tab.
Considerations: 
        This case does NOT EXIST in gedit or gnome-terminal. So you
        can't compare Epiphany and gedit on this.

Case 1 and 2 are _totally_ different in purpose, operating modality and
supposed effect (WRT focusing, at least), so they could (and, IMHO,
should) also be different WRT tab positioning.

There is no incoherence, since Ephy is AFAIK the first and only Gnome
app[1] which needs to cope with "child-tabs".
So there's no prior art in Gnome and, of course, there's no HIG.  Here
Ephiphany can dictate and be the test-bed for a new HIG.
It's just a matter of _cleanly_ solving the problem.


But where's The Problem?
> While tab grouping is a nice thing to have, in its current
> implementation it is confusing to users where the tab will appear next.
Here it is!  I do agree there's something confusing in _current_
implementation.
But again, what's confusing?
IMO not the fact that "child-tabs" don't show up at the end (for me it's
natural and useful, as explained in my previous email), but that they
don't _always_ appear next to their parent.
Currently[2], If I have a parent page with three links A, B, C and click
on them in sequence, here's what will happen:
                ________ _______ _____
   Click on A: | Parent | Tab A | ...                  : Ok
                ________ _______ _______ _____
   Click on B: | Parent | Tab A | Tab B | ...          : Wrong! 
                ________ _______ _______ _______ _____
   Click on C: | Parent | Tab A | Tab B | Tab C | ...  : Wrong!

The wrong (and confusing) thing is that newly opened child-tabs show up
after the last opened child-tab of the same parent, and not right after
their parent.
I they did, you should end up having a saner:
    ________ _______ _______ _______ _____
   | Parent | Tab C | Tab B | Tab A | ...              : Right!

That solved, tab-grouping would be predictable and less confusing.

Moral: please, Marco, fix tab-grouping insead of removing it!

Ciao,
  robepisc


[1]: I don't know about Galeon, because I don't use it anymore since the
fork; anyhow it's a GTK+ browser;-)

[2]: at least with my old Ephiphany 1.0.3 that I never updated because
of my damn slow dial-up connection...  If newer Epiphanies behave
differently, please ignore what I say and let me know (so that I don't
speak anymore until I get an ADSL connection:-).

-- 
Roberto Piscitello <robepisc freemail it>