<strong>You are suggesting that the tab should extend across the entire window, and each tab gradually gets smaller once a new tab is added?</strong><hr></blockquote>
No...you see how the tab is inverted? It's to give a sense that the website you're looking at now is going to be modified by the action your perform using the back, forward, reload buttons and URL field. But it looks silly right now because there's a little dark brushed metal gap that seperates it from the content itself. It should be extended to touch it and ideally a border should be put around the content (like any true brushed-metal app) to make it feel even more attached.
[quote]<strong>
As for removing the close widgets in inactive tabs, I would prefer to keep them. I like how I can click the close button in an inactive window in the finder. I would want to be able to close a tab without having to switch to the tab. The close widget is such a tiny target compared to the rest of the tab, it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, yes, it's all fun. But destructive commands should NOT be easily accessible especially if they're not in the foreground. Maybe a key combo could override this as it would be a conscious thought and a safeguard against accidental closing a window or a tab.
The close widget is a small target...but it's still clickable and accidents do happen. And when the tabs get smaller...that close widget becomes bigger in a sense.
Normally I'm all for options, but in this case I'm with Eugene and kks... tabs are a so-so solution to a window management problem that *doesn't exist* on MacOS X.
Ask anyone who is addicted to tabs on any other platform why they like them, and 99% of the time you will receive an answer along the lines of: "Because it lets me select a window quickly."
Well, why can't they select a window quickly otherwise? **Because every other GUI out there mixes all your windows into one big stack.** Windows, KDE, Gnome, twm, etcetc all have a keystroke that flips between windows, sure, but it acts as if all the windows in *all* applications are one big list to cycle through.
There is no way to *JUST* cycle through the browser windows. Therefore, they had to come up with a kludge to let you see the windows of your browser at once, and select easily between them.
Repeat: this is a kludge to get around a fundamental problem in window management.
On MacOS X, however, Cmd-Tab cycles through apps, and Cmd-~ cycles through the windows of the current app. In any browser, just hit Cmd-~ a couple of times, and voila, you're there. Overshoot, as one person said, and adding a Shift takes you back. Cripes, I frequently have a dozen windows open, and this is quick, easy, and efficient. No loss of screen space to a silly tab bar, (hey, I even keep the bookmark bar and address bar off by default - just a title bar and sweet, sweet content,) no need for the mouse.
Repeat: MacOS X does not have this problem.
If you like tabs, great. Go for it.
But realize and understand that tabs in a browser window are a lousy solution to a problem that doesn't even exist under MacOS X. They're a hack, they're a kludge, they're clunky, they bring a whole mess of UI problems of their own to the table... and none of it is even necessary, because we have a windowing environment with a little intelligence built in from the beginning.
Yes, yes, it's all fun. But destructive commands should NOT be easily accessible especially if they're not in the foreground. Maybe a key combo could override this as it would be a conscious thought and a safeguard against accidental closing a window or a tab.
The close widget is a small target...but it's still clickable and accidents do happen. And when the tabs get smaller...that close widget becomes bigger in a sense.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Er, I take it you dislike the ability to close a background window without bringing it forward?
<strong>yes, but clicking my mouse is so "sexy" compared to touching my keyboard....
some people are mouse people
some are keyboard people
keyboard people are more technical
mouse people are more "simple"
i is simple
i hate keyboard shortcuts mostly because i can never remember the wiley little bastards....</strong><hr></blockquote>
Okay, fair enough.
For me, when I'm developing and need to review a documentation web page I have open in Safari, I can just Cmd-Tab (to Safari), Cmd-~ (to the window I want), read, Cmd-Tab (only once to get back to Project Builder). Never once do I have to take my hands off the keyboard.
Personally, I love tabs. I find myself opening multiple websites and desiring to easily switch between them. I agree that it perhaps "breaks" some UI rules. However, they seem to work. I know that my wife happens to love them too. She is not a UI expert (or purist). She just wants stuff to work for her. That says it all for me.
I really think all the arguments against tabs are pretty weak. As long as they aren't stacked and swap underneath your cursor as you click (as in windows pref panes) then i dont see the big hairy problem with tabs. I personally prefer multiple sites in tabs over a big clutter of windows. In the same sense that I was so happy to get away from the clutterness of OS 9 finder windows.
Apple has also started to do a good job with addressing some subtles of control with tabs by "attaching" them to the toolbar and adding the "close x". Simple thing, but visually makes much more sense than Chimera's tabs.
One other incrediblly useful thing about tabs that chimera implements is those tab groups. Thats awesome for doing my daily mac site and mac rumor checks. 1-click and I get ALL the sites loaded that I need. Ahhhh organization.
Also from a "newbie" standpoint. Which do you anti-tab people think is more confusing? A row of labeled tabs or a big stack of windows with some hiding behind your main window? Windows that aren't visually shown confuse the heck out of inexperienced users from what I've seen (mother, wife etc).
People need to remember two things...
1) Its is hidden feature in a unreleased beta... therefore not AT ALL what you can call finished Im sure.
2) You wanna clutter up your screen with a bazillion browser windows you still can. Ignore tab feature and go on with your lives.
<strong>a green button should never close a window or tab...i like how it looks, but not how it functions...confusing.....g</strong><hr></blockquote>
This is my biggest problem with the mockup Xidius posted. Green already means zoom. Red means close, and there are three shades of clear for inactive window buttons (basically, the three colors desaturated). If you're going to use the stoplight gumdrops (nothing to start your day like a mixed metaphor!) they should look and act like the ones on the titlebar, or confusion will ensue.
My other problem is that Apple is already establishing the grey-circle-with-white-x widget as "clear this item," eg. in the Google field, and the search field in Finder. That removes any possibility that the tabs will look like windows, because they aren't windows. Dammit.
As for tabs, it is an established fact, and a UI rule, that tabs exist as a static means to organize related content within a window. They aren't supposed to move, change, appear or disappear, and as anyone who's ever tried loading a lot of pages into a tabbed window quickly discovers, they simply aren't designed to handle dynamism gracefully. Using them inconsistently is no better than using radio buttons as checkboxes, for example. All it does is muddy the meaning of the interface for the user. That's a lost cause on Windows, but the Mac UI is founded on consistency, and while I will concede that sometimes you do have to break those rules (in fact, there are some Mac UI guidelines where following one breaks another, in acknowledgement that there is more than one way to do things) this should not be undertaken lightly. Not even if there is a voluble group of people demanding the "good enough" solution. Windows is good enough.
I won't comment on Safari's implementation, simply because it is an experimental feature in a beta, except that the tabs-as-bookmarks idea is a clever hack, and it will be interesting to see how they develop that. The bookmarks bar, at least, looks like a bookmarks bar. If it resembles anything, it's a toolbar, which (e.g. in Finder) behaves similarly. Shortcuts to favorite places aren't bad, or un OS X-like, by any means. Breaking UI consistency is.
<strong>The problem isn't really the existence of tabs, but the fact that people are using them the wrong way.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Wow, I guess I should get some notes from you on how I should work then. Talk about arrogance. This is a FEATURE folks, you don't have to use it. And I am not an idiot to not want to use the window menu or dock to change windows views. What possible difference does it make if an application has a feature you don't use. Not everyone thinks and works the same way Eugene. And I don't care how long you've been around or how many post counts you have, you are wrong to tell me how I should prefer to intereface with my Mac.
The difference is that features that make the UE more difficult aren't useful, and features that are exceptional and inconsistent are difficult in other contexts. This is a bad precedent, and that's why it's aproblem because it's either very exceptional or else encourages poor and difficult solutions like it in other applications and contexts.
If we were happy with this exceptional treatment, and leaving every mistake optional, we would just use Windows. Call it elitist if you like. I guess using Macs is elitst too.
Some people prefer the Windows taskbar. Some people like having a menu bar in every window. Some people prefer MDI.
Just because some people like a particular feature doesn't mean that it's worth adding to a product.
Personally I'm sad that Apple added tabs. If you want tabs, there are plenty of options out there.
I mean fer chrissakes, they could have at least re-thought them and done something a little more innovative that takes care of some of the problems tabs bring to the table. (Yeah, yeah, beta-blahblah... chances are they're pretty much as they'll end up, but with some minor tweaking. Whee.)
I can understand the desire to keep tabs out of OS X, because once one app does it, it sets an example that other apps may begin to follow, and it could lead to the OS X interface being very inconsistent from one app to another.
My biggest observation after reading this whole thread was this:
The people who don't want tabs have rather elegant and technical explanations of why they don't want tabs.
The people who do want tabs simply say, "I like them."
Personally, I find the anti-tabs commentary to be more convincing, but you can't slam Apple if they add a feature that users are begging for, since listening to customer feedback is a good thing.
However, listening to customer feedback when it may be bad advice is not necessarily good. I mean, if users were asking for MDI, would Apple start using that too? I think not. Part of the problem is that these habits are developed from using other products and people want their habits to be carried over into OS X. If a solution better than tabs existed, I'm sure Apple would prefer to use that. Unfortunately, no other solution exists aside from cycling through windows (which I think I prefer anyway), so Apple has to implement browser tabs, a potentially flawed interface element, to make the customers happy.
Maybe that was a bad move on Apple's part. I mean, they went on all this time without bowing down to the "two button mouse" crowd, so why would they give in on tabs so quickly? Maybe Apple actually likes tabs too? Or maybe they realise that people can buy a new mouse, but they can't write their own perfect web browser, so they want to give more options?
What I fear, and why I sort-of side with the no tabs crowd, is that if every user interface element from every operating system and application that somebody likes gets put into OS X, it will become a mess to use and it will confuse new users. Right now, OS X is only confusing to people who want the OS to behave exactly like Microsoft Windows and get frustrated when some behaviors are different. If people spend more time learning the way OS X was designed to work, they may start getting frustrated at how windows works, instead of vice-versa.
I do think Safari has the best implementation of tabbed browsing I've seen yet (ignoring the bugs) but I still think it is more troublesome than cycling through windows which, by the way, is an interface that is consistent almost everywhere in OS X (except BBEdit, sadly).
okay, having palyed with build 62 for a bit, i can say that those who hate tabs are full of crap... the same crap that those who LOVE tabs are full of.
basically, there are some serious upsides and downsides to this phase of human interface. for example...
each tab essentially represents a "session" that would typically be handled by a window. however, dig deep into one tab, then switch, dig deep into links again, switch tabs again, dig around, then say to yourself "hmmm... now which tab had that site i visited 15 minutes ago?" there's no easy way to tell, because the tab only ever show you the topmost page. at first, i thought they should add a "+" widget next to the "X" close widget, but then the tabs get seriously overcrowded. you should be able to AT LEAST command-click on those tabs to bring up a "tab history," just like you can with the window title just about anywhere else in the system.
i would also like a way to "open up" the tabs a little more, by grabbing the right side of a tab and "pulling them open," so to speak. "tool tips," such as the ones that exist for trunacted names in dialog boxes, are okay, but pop into sight WAY too slowly. as it stands right now, open too many tabs, and they all get truncated to little 7 letter blurbs with ellipses in the middles. yay.
i would suggest these ideas to apple, but methinks they wouldn't take to kindly to suggestions to a beta browser build that hasn't even been fully released yet. but otherwise, tabs make surfing the web feel even faster -- which is pretty scary.
Well I've read through all four pages of this interesting discussion. I've never used tabs, since the pre-loaded IE has always been my "browser of choice". <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />
Speaking for the majority of Mac users who use Explorer, I personally found the inclusion of AutoFill in v62 to be the one feature that will cause Safari adoption to spike, and ultimately kill IE for OS X.
It's the only feature I'm waiting for to make the switch.
<strong>okay, having palyed with build 62 for a bit, i can say that those who hate tabs are full of crap... the same crap that those who LOVE tabs are full of.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Comments
<strong>You are suggesting that the tab should extend across the entire window, and each tab gradually gets smaller once a new tab is added?</strong><hr></blockquote>
No...you see how the tab is inverted? It's to give a sense that the website you're looking at now is going to be modified by the action your perform using the back, forward, reload buttons and URL field. But it looks silly right now because there's a little dark brushed metal gap that seperates it from the content itself. It should be extended to touch it and ideally a border should be put around the content (like any true brushed-metal app) to make it feel even more attached.
[quote]<strong>
As for removing the close widgets in inactive tabs, I would prefer to keep them. I like how I can click the close button in an inactive window in the finder. I would want to be able to close a tab without having to switch to the tab. The close widget is such a tiny target compared to the rest of the tab, it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, yes, it's all fun. But destructive commands should NOT be easily accessible especially if they're not in the foreground. Maybe a key combo could override this as it would be a conscious thought and a safeguard against accidental closing a window or a tab.
The close widget is a small target...but it's still clickable and accidents do happen. And when the tabs get smaller...that close widget becomes bigger in a sense.
Ask anyone who is addicted to tabs on any other platform why they like them, and 99% of the time you will receive an answer along the lines of: "Because it lets me select a window quickly."
Well, why can't they select a window quickly otherwise? **Because every other GUI out there mixes all your windows into one big stack.** Windows, KDE, Gnome, twm, etcetc all have a keystroke that flips between windows, sure, but it acts as if all the windows in *all* applications are one big list to cycle through.
There is no way to *JUST* cycle through the browser windows. Therefore, they had to come up with a kludge to let you see the windows of your browser at once, and select easily between them.
Repeat: this is a kludge to get around a fundamental problem in window management.
On MacOS X, however, Cmd-Tab cycles through apps, and Cmd-~ cycles through the windows of the current app. In any browser, just hit Cmd-~ a couple of times, and voila, you're there. Overshoot, as one person said, and adding a Shift takes you back. Cripes, I frequently have a dozen windows open, and this is quick, easy, and efficient. No loss of screen space to a silly tab bar, (hey, I even keep the bookmark bar and address bar off by default - just a title bar and sweet, sweet content,) no need for the mouse.
Repeat: MacOS X does not have this problem.
If you like tabs, great. Go for it.
But realize and understand that tabs in a browser window are a lousy solution to a problem that doesn't even exist under MacOS X. They're a hack, they're a kludge, they're clunky, they bring a whole mess of UI problems of their own to the table... and none of it is even necessary, because we have a windowing environment with a little intelligence built in from the beginning.
Tabs are for people who can't handle Cmd-~.
some people are mouse people
some are keyboard people
keyboard people are more technical
mouse people are more "simple"
i is simple
i hate keyboard shortcuts mostly because i can never remember the wiley little bastards....
g
<strong>
Yes, yes, it's all fun. But destructive commands should NOT be easily accessible especially if they're not in the foreground. Maybe a key combo could override this as it would be a conscious thought and a safeguard against accidental closing a window or a tab.
The close widget is a small target...but it's still clickable and accidents do happen. And when the tabs get smaller...that close widget becomes bigger in a sense.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Er, I take it you dislike the ability to close a background window without bringing it forward?
Personally, I love this.
<strong>yes, but clicking my mouse is so "sexy" compared to touching my keyboard....
some people are mouse people
some are keyboard people
keyboard people are more technical
mouse people are more "simple"
i is simple
i hate keyboard shortcuts mostly because i can never remember the wiley little bastards....</strong><hr></blockquote>
Okay, fair enough.
For me, when I'm developing and need to review a documentation web page I have open in Safari, I can just Cmd-Tab (to Safari), Cmd-~ (to the window I want), read, Cmd-Tab (only once to get back to Project Builder). Never once do I have to take my hands off the keyboard.
I'll definitely be leaving tabs off.
<strong>
Oh no! We'd better get rid of the close button on all the finder windows in which are not in the foreground!!! That's... DESTRUCTIVE!!
<img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
- Xidius</strong><hr></blockquote>
I'm not saying we should get rid of them. I'm saying their should be a safeguard against accidental clicking of a background close widget.
Apple has also started to do a good job with addressing some subtles of control with tabs by "attaching" them to the toolbar and adding the "close x". Simple thing, but visually makes much more sense than Chimera's tabs.
One other incrediblly useful thing about tabs that chimera implements is those tab groups. Thats awesome for doing my daily mac site and mac rumor checks. 1-click and I get ALL the sites loaded that I need. Ahhhh organization.
Also from a "newbie" standpoint. Which do you anti-tab people think is more confusing? A row of labeled tabs or a big stack of windows with some hiding behind your main window? Windows that aren't visually shown confuse the heck out of inexperienced users from what I've seen (mother, wife etc).
People need to remember two things...
1) Its is hidden feature in a unreleased beta... therefore not AT ALL what you can call finished Im sure.
2) You wanna clutter up your screen with a bazillion browser windows you still can. Ignore tab feature and go on with your lives.
<strong>a green button should never close a window or tab...i like how it looks, but not how it functions...confusing.....g</strong><hr></blockquote>
This is my biggest problem with the mockup Xidius posted. Green already means zoom. Red means close, and there are three shades of clear for inactive window buttons (basically, the three colors desaturated). If you're going to use the stoplight gumdrops (nothing to start your day like a mixed metaphor!) they should look and act like the ones on the titlebar, or confusion will ensue.
My other problem is that Apple is already establishing the grey-circle-with-white-x widget as "clear this item," eg. in the Google field, and the search field in Finder. That removes any possibility that the tabs will look like windows, because they aren't windows. Dammit.
As for tabs, it is an established fact, and a UI rule, that tabs exist as a static means to organize related content within a window. They aren't supposed to move, change, appear or disappear, and as anyone who's ever tried loading a lot of pages into a tabbed window quickly discovers, they simply aren't designed to handle dynamism gracefully. Using them inconsistently is no better than using radio buttons as checkboxes, for example. All it does is muddy the meaning of the interface for the user. That's a lost cause on Windows, but the Mac UI is founded on consistency, and while I will concede that sometimes you do have to break those rules (in fact, there are some Mac UI guidelines where following one breaks another, in acknowledgement that there is more than one way to do things) this should not be undertaken lightly. Not even if there is a voluble group of people demanding the "good enough" solution. Windows is good enough.
I won't comment on Safari's implementation, simply because it is an experimental feature in a beta, except that the tabs-as-bookmarks idea is a clever hack, and it will be interesting to see how they develop that. The bookmarks bar, at least, looks like a bookmarks bar. If it resembles anything, it's a toolbar, which (e.g. in Finder) behaves similarly. Shortcuts to favorite places aren't bad, or un OS X-like, by any means. Breaking UI consistency is.
[ 02-24-2003: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
no love for thegelding....
<img src="graemlins/cancer.gif" border="0" alt="[cancer]" />
<strong>The problem isn't really the existence of tabs, but the fact that people are using them the wrong way.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Wow, I guess I should get some notes from you on how I should work then. Talk about arrogance. This is a FEATURE folks, you don't have to use it. And I am not an idiot to not want to use the window menu or dock to change windows views. What possible difference does it make if an application has a feature you don't use. Not everyone thinks and works the same way Eugene. And I don't care how long you've been around or how many post counts you have, you are wrong to tell me how I should prefer to intereface with my Mac.
If we were happy with this exceptional treatment, and leaving every mistake optional, we would just use Windows. Call it elitist if you like. I guess using Macs is elitst too.
Some people prefer the Windows taskbar. Some people like having a menu bar in every window. Some people prefer MDI.
Just because some people like a particular feature doesn't mean that it's worth adding to a product.
Personally I'm sad that Apple added tabs. If you want tabs, there are plenty of options out there.
I mean fer chrissakes, they could have at least re-thought them and done something a little more innovative that takes care of some of the problems tabs bring to the table.
My biggest observation after reading this whole thread was this:
The people who don't want tabs have rather elegant and technical explanations of why they don't want tabs.
The people who do want tabs simply say, "I like them."
Personally, I find the anti-tabs commentary to be more convincing, but you can't slam Apple if they add a feature that users are begging for, since listening to customer feedback is a good thing.
However, listening to customer feedback when it may be bad advice is not necessarily good. I mean, if users were asking for MDI, would Apple start using that too? I think not. Part of the problem is that these habits are developed from using other products and people want their habits to be carried over into OS X. If a solution better than tabs existed, I'm sure Apple would prefer to use that. Unfortunately, no other solution exists aside from cycling through windows (which I think I prefer anyway), so Apple has to implement browser tabs, a potentially flawed interface element, to make the customers happy.
Maybe that was a bad move on Apple's part. I mean, they went on all this time without bowing down to the "two button mouse" crowd, so why would they give in on tabs so quickly? Maybe Apple actually likes tabs too? Or maybe they realise that people can buy a new mouse, but they can't write their own perfect web browser, so they want to give more options?
What I fear, and why I sort-of side with the no tabs crowd, is that if every user interface element from every operating system and application that somebody likes gets put into OS X, it will become a mess to use and it will confuse new users. Right now, OS X is only confusing to people who want the OS to behave exactly like Microsoft Windows and get frustrated when some behaviors are different. If people spend more time learning the way OS X was designed to work, they may start getting frustrated at how windows works, instead of vice-versa.
I do think Safari has the best implementation of tabbed browsing I've seen yet (ignoring the bugs) but I still think it is more troublesome than cycling through windows which, by the way, is an interface that is consistent almost everywhere in OS X (except BBEdit, sadly).
[ 02-24-2003: Message edited by: rogue27 ]</p>
basically, there are some serious upsides and downsides to this phase of human interface. for example...
each tab essentially represents a "session" that would typically be handled by a window. however, dig deep into one tab, then switch, dig deep into links again, switch tabs again, dig around, then say to yourself "hmmm... now which tab had that site i visited 15 minutes ago?" there's no easy way to tell, because the tab only ever show you the topmost page. at first, i thought they should add a "+" widget next to the "X" close widget, but then the tabs get seriously overcrowded. you should be able to AT LEAST command-click on those tabs to bring up a "tab history," just like you can with the window title just about anywhere else in the system.
i would also like a way to "open up" the tabs a little more, by grabbing the right side of a tab and "pulling them open," so to speak. "tool tips," such as the ones that exist for trunacted names in dialog boxes, are okay, but pop into sight WAY too slowly. as it stands right now, open too many tabs, and they all get truncated to little 7 letter blurbs with ellipses in the middles. yay.
i would suggest these ideas to apple, but methinks they wouldn't take to kindly to suggestions to a beta browser build that hasn't even been fully released yet. but otherwise, tabs make surfing the web feel even faster -- which is pretty scary.
[ 02-24-2003: Message edited by: rok ]
[ 02-24-2003: Message edited by: rok ]</p>
Speaking for the majority of Mac users who use Explorer, I personally found the inclusion of AutoFill in v62 to be the one feature that will cause Safari adoption to spike, and ultimately kill IE for OS X.
It's the only feature I'm waiting for to make the switch.
<strong>okay, having palyed with build 62 for a bit, i can say that those who hate tabs are full of crap... the same crap that those who LOVE tabs are full of.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Go shoot yourself