Re: [Usability] Tab implementation review

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

On Thu, 2009-02-12 at 14:17 +0200, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> 2009/2/9 Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I've been working (on and off) on reviewing all the bugs and other
> > discussions on tabs in GNOME [1]. It's reached a fairly mature stage
> > now. I think the review contains useful information about how tabs could
> > be improved in GNOME. Any comments or suggestions?
> 
> Not to encourage innovation or anything, but according to this study:
> 
>   http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/12/casual_fridays_whos_tabhappy_a.php
> 
> most people have less than 7-8 tabs open when they browse the net (IMO
> the number one tab use scenario really).
> 
> And there's a simple reason for that; tabs just don't work when
> there's too many of them (ie. more than what can be reasonably
> accomodated by the window size).
> 
> So rather than reinventing tabs and figuring out clever ways to make
> tabs work, in my personal opinion the same effort would do much more
> good in designing and implementing a better way to handle multiple
> views (eg. improving window management or using a canvas approach)
> than what tabs can offer...

Thanks for the link - really useful. I'll add it to the tab review.

I agree that, in an ideal world, we wouldn't have tabs and we'd just
have really awesome window management instead. I'd also agree that
improving window management is important, and I would hope that, in the
future, window management gets so good that we don't need tabs any more.

Whether we like it or not though, tabs are going to be around for a
while, if for no other reason than them being something that users
expect nowadays. My argument is that, if we're going to have tabs, we
should make sure that they work well.

Likewise, evidence that most users don't have high numbers of tabs open
shouldn't stop us from making sure that our tabbed interfaces work well
when a user does have a lot of tabs open. The report you linked to says
'16.7 percent of respondents said they had more than 10 tabs open.'
Let's ensure that those 16.7% (the proportion with tabs flowing off the
screen could be higher) have a positive experience using tabs.

Allan