RE: [Usability] Tabs

["Andrei Yurkevich" <urruru ru ru>]

On Thursday, June 23, 2005 8:37 PM Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> > > I find an X for each tab most confusing. When I tried out 
> > > Epiphany I 
> > > happened to close the wrong tab several times.
> > 
> > I'm pretty sure this has more to do with using habits. After using 
> > Epiphany for a long time, I also kept closing the wrong tabs when I 
> > tried to use Firefox.
> 
> A lot depends on your theme, and how clearly it shows which 
> is the current tab.
> 
> I often want to close tabs that correspond to windows that 
> are not currently visible, by the way.
> 
> As I recall, Opera has a right-click pop-up menu on each tab, 
> which also makes some sense, but has a severe discoverability problem.
> The trick might be to have a |> button on the tab that 
> brought up a menu I suppose.

A pop-up menu would cost extra time, mouse movement/clicking and a bit of
confusion as well, so it is not the best way out IMO. Instead, I suppose
that the tabs should somehow visually appear like other desktop objects that
can be closed - windows. Thus, if tab headers' are decorated in a way that
they resemble window decorations (that is, having 'close' buttons that look
as similar as possible to those on windows titles), the user will have no
doubt whether the tabs can be closed and what he should do in order to close
them.

Cheers,
Andrei