Re: Shelling Epiphany

[Luke Morton <luke morton internode on net>]

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 14:37 +0000, Allan Day wrote:
> Alexandre Mazari wrote:
> > = Let the user switch to a specific epiphany's opened site using g-s
> > facilities =
> > I am using the term site here, instead of tab, because it is not really
> > clear we should to keep the tabs management in ephy IMHO.
> > Tabs and notebooks are just a way to have application-local window
> > management, mostly duplicating wms/shells facilities, compensating for
> > their missing features (windows grouping for instance).
> > Re-giving that responsibility to the shell seems like a natural thing to
> > do, reducing the number of different ways to switch to a specific
> > site/app/context.
> > It seems the design team shares this opinion, as seen in
> > http://gitorious.org/gnome-design/gnome-design/blobs/raw/master/mockups/epiphany/epiphany2.png .
> 
> That particular design was my effort. I wouldn't say it was the view of
> the 'team' ;) (though one or two people did seem to like it). The way I
> left things, I was hoping for a prototype to do some user testing with.
> (The design needs a lot more work, too.) That said, I'm of the opinion
> that tabs don't make a huge amount of sense in the context of the shell.

If this is the same as
http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/FeatureDesign/DesignConcept then I think
it's a path that deserves exploration. Tab management needs to be better
than it is, and it shouldn't be something that requires user
intervention (like Firefox 4's Panorama). It should just work.

> > This idea being very controversial, going against years of tabbing
> > browsers usage, displaying ephy tabs contents in alt-tab switcher and/or
> > overview might be an intermediate solution.
> > Here is a quick and dirty mockup:
> > http://people.igalia.com/amazari/ephy-tabs-in-switcher.webm
> 
> I think one of the real shell designers should comment on this. It makes
> sense in one way, but it also breaks the convention that each of those
> thumbnails is a window.

I'm not a shell designer but for what it's worth, Windows 7 does
something like this with IE and it's awful. It's impossible to
distinguish between different windows and different tabs and as soon as
you get a few sites open (7 or more in my case) the thumbnails start to
all look the same.

A possible solution for the thumbnails is to crop and scale a portion of
the window contents (probably the top left quadrant) so a snippet of the
sites content is more easily recognisable--the same way you'd crop and
scale a photo to just a headshot if you needed a postage-stamp size
representation for Gravatar for example.

But that doesn't address the window/site separation and nesting a third
level of alt + tab seems messy to me.

> > What do you think ?
> 
> That this is awesome. Integrating the shell and the browser could be
> amazing.

Agreed.