Mesanna's Weblog

The Firefox development team are running a design competition soliciting ideas from the community about overhauling the Tab system. Whilst the whole idea is a little theoretical at the moment, they argue that the Tab system isn’t as effective when people have many tabs open at the one time.

The Information Architects web site (the people responsible for the gigantic web trends image) have written a viewpoint on the subject here. To quote the article:

In January 2000, T-Online asked us what we’d do if we could design a browser from scratch. Our answer was “Tabs”. Eight years later Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, asked me what I think a new tab should look like. The answer after days of mailing back and forth: “Forget tabs!”

The general consensus seems to be that instead of a tab bar across the top, there should be one down the side – like the current History and Bookmarks sidebar.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with this. Firstly, they are discussing people who have 20+ tabs open at the one time. Do many people really keep this amount of tabs open? I often have 7 or 8 tabs open and manage fine. Having said that, there are tabs I would probably keep open but tend to close so as not to overcrowd things. But the more tabs you open, the more memory Firefox uses. I dread to think the amount of RAM Firefox would use with over 20 tabs open, given that it is a known resource hog. I’d be happier if they fixed that issue first before redesigning the user interface.

I also wonder if they are considering the ordinary person with a standard monitor. Not everyone is running a super duper widescreen monitor (Disclaimer: I’m actually saving up and hope to buy a super duper widescreen monitor this summer!). Right now, I never leave the Bookmarks or History sidebar open. I have a 19″ CRT monitor with a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024. I don’t like crowding my screen with unnecessary items. Many web pages now (my own included) are designed for 1024 x 768 resolution minimum, so if you’ve got a 200px wide sidebar open, there isn’t a whole lot of extra space. Everyone is comfortable with vertical scrolling, but horizontal scrolling is an absolute no-no.

There is no doubt, however, that more and more computer processes are shifting onto the browser. Instead of running an email program, a word processor and a music player, I could have a tab with Gmail, a tab for Google Docs and a tab for internet radio. Throw in my RSS reader, my WordPress dashboard, the Google home page, plus the two or three sites that I’m browsing right now and, yes, it does soon add up! Perhaps the Mozilla Prism application is the answer. Instead of running everything in one browser window, this allows you to create separate applications for each process (with the bonus of better security as everything is sandboxed). Unfortunately, this just switches the same problem to your operating system task bar!

I’ll be following this competition with interest and look forward to seeing what the creative geniuses out there come up with.

Update: Read my follow up post here.