[Usability] alphabetic sorting of dynamic content

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

I've noticed that the gnome 2.14 window list panel thingy now sorts
the list of windows alphabetically instead of (previously) in some
other order, I think creation date.

Epiphany seems to keep bookmarks sorted, too, which means you have to
put numbers in all your bookmark titles, or start ones yuo want at
the top with AAA or something.

But if this is a trend I think it's not an improvement.

Of course, spatial nautilus is a trend in the other direction: keep
things where the user puts them.

I'm finding it's really hard to do tabbed browsing, because if I have
(say) 10 windows, each with 1 to 10 tabs, every time I switch tabs
in a browser window its position in the window list is changed.
So I used to remember, "ah, planet.gnome.org is the 2nd window down"
but now I have to hunt and find it.

Well, you can say that I should have fewer browser windows, or that
galeon or firefox should have a way to browse all the tabs in all the
windows easily (thumbnails?), but the problem is that I have no way
to control window titles.  Indeed, javascript that changed a window's
title every 500ms between "A", "B", ... "Z" would probably make the
window list entirely unuseable :-)

The bigger issue is one of navigation and findability (see the
wonderful "Ambient Findability" book from O'Reilly!) and of
how to represent the hierarchy of (window, tab).

I don't want my desktop icons sorted unless I say "sort" - same with
bookmarks for that matter.  I want to feel that things stay where I
put them.  And I would like a way to find a tab in my Web browser
without having to resort to keeping file://AAA_W3CSpecs,
file://Gnome_stuff and so forth open in each window.  Maybe these
aren't as related as I think, but the thing they have in common
is that I didn't choose the string that's being used to sort them -
neither the tab title nor the window title for the bookmarks.  So I
don't want the system sorting based on a criteria I didn't choose.  

Am I alone in this?  How do we make tabbed browsing work again?

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
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