[SOC] Improvements to the Camino tabbed-browsing experience

delliott · Post by **delliott** » June 2nd, 2006, 2:06 am

phiw13 wrote:I had the same thought there... Other problems with this: probably quite hard to make it accessible through keyboard interaction.
But a good reason to have a 'undo close tab' option .

Can you create a list of motivating reasons for having undo close tab as a feature?

phiw13 · Post by **phiw13** » June 2nd, 2006, 7:16 am

delliott wrote:Can you create a list of motivating reasons for having undo close tab as a feature?

Quick recovery from user errors:
* accidental slip of the mouse when moving around.
* with multiple tabs open, title is truncated, closing the wrong tab, hidden or background tab.
* with some of the propositions floated in this thread (resizing the tab comes to mind), there are more possibilities to close a tab by error (slip of the mouse again).
* closing tab when trying to drag the url to the Bookmarks Bar

I know one can get that tab/page back by accessing the Go/history menu. It is more cumbersome however, the user has to scroll trough a long (long long ?) list of URI.

The same arguments could be made for a undo-close-window. There is a difference as that the Camino tabs are rather small, with the various controls close to each other.

[* recovering the history of that tab could be an advantage as well.]

cflawson · Post by **cflawson** » June 2nd, 2006, 9:13 am

All of the above are pretty good arguments for making this part of session saving, and for Desmond not to worry about it

cl

the Falcon · Post by **the Falcon** » June 2nd, 2006, 10:49 am

cflawson wrote:
delliott wrote:
computerdude33 wrote:Undo closing tabs... that might be useful.
Also, a Bookmark All Tabs menu item would be pretty nice, and a stop-gap until something like Workspaces is (hopefully) introduced.
Undo closing tabs is an intriguing idea but can you really justify the need for it?
Yes. We have requests for this all the time, and I think we even have an extant open bug on it. I'm not sure if this is really a "tab" bug or if it's more related to session saving (which isn't, as I've noted, related to tabbed browsing at all).

Well, if you're going to have "reopen closed tab" (or something like that), why not go for the full monty and offer "reopen closed window" as well? So no, I don't think this is really tab-related bug either.

nufferkay · Post by **nufferkay** » June 2nd, 2006, 2:43 pm

delliott wrote:You make a valid point that some users might not want to use tab-overflow and so there should be an option that allows a user to disable the new overflow control. What would you propose happens if they don't want to use overflow control? A new window would be automatically created? Tabs would be implemented as they currently exist (the tabs become tiny until you cannot read what is in them and is IMO difficult to use)?

You do have a point there. I'm tempted to go back and dig up a circa 2003 copy of Chimera to try to remember what overflow used to do before the current implementation. I think it was new windows, which was equally annoying, just in a very different way. Firefox's implementation seems to be even worse - extra tabs just run off the screen, with no way to even tell they're there.

So I guess maybe unlimited tabs before overflow isn't such a good idea. But being able to set a minimum tab width or a max number of tabs would definitely be nice, and allow a person to have more (or, I suppose, fewer) tabs in a window than is currently possible. Maybe you could also implement something to make it possible to know at a glance how many tabs are overflowed?

One more issue with not being able to see tabs for overflow, which I'd forgotten about - it makes dragging new bookmarks into the bookmarks manager a real pain in the butt. And since using the bookmarks dialogue to add bookmarks is not a reasonable option for people with more than a couple dozen folders, bookmarking an overflowed tab could drive a person mad. So I guess that's just one more reason to make it possible to view actual tabs for overflowed tabs, rather than a menu.

Can I please put in a request that any new overflow implementation be easily keyboard-navigable?

Uncle Asad · Post by **Uncle Asad** » June 2nd, 2006, 8:08 pm

nufferkay wrote:I'm tempted to go back and dig up a circa 2003 copy of Chimera to try to remember what overflow used to do before the current implementation. I think it was new windows, which was equally annoying, just in a very different way.

You just have to go back to 0.8.x; it was 16 tabs in the window and then *each* new tab went into its *own* new window....

phiw13 · Post by **phiw13** » June 2nd, 2006, 8:34 pm

cflawson wrote:All of the above are pretty good arguments for making this part of session saving, and for Desmond not to worry about it

cl

The underlying code is probably closely related (me:not[programmer]).
The immediate action is different however.
Of course, no need for Desmond to work on code that will already be handled elsewhere. Just need to keep the feature in mind when working on tabs.

nufferkay wrote:Can I please put in a request that any new overflow implementation be easily keyboard-navigable?

vote +100

Also keep in mind users with various disabilities (moving things can be hell for people with cognitive disabilities).

PS - I had my geeky 77 years old neighbour over at my place this a.m. One reason he prefers to use Firefox over Camino on his iMac: the tabs are much bigger (vertically), making it easier to hit with the mouse.

Uncle Asad · Post by **Uncle Asad** » June 2nd, 2006, 11:16 pm

phiw13 wrote:PS - I had my geeky 77 years old neighbour over at my place this a.m. One reason he prefers to use Firefox over Camino on his iMac: the tabs are much bigger (vertically), making it easier to hit with the mouse.

At the very least, our tabs need to grow a few pixels so we don't have funky 13x13px favicons

(bug is filed here)....

DrawingBusiness · Post by **DrawingBusiness** » June 3rd, 2006, 10:32 am

cflawson wrote:
delliott wrote:
DrawingBusiness wrote:I'd like to be able to hover over the border between any tab while holding the option key, and drag-resize all the tabs so that I can squeeze more in, or read long page titles.

An interesting hack that might be worth looking into since I'll be doing things with resizing tabs. Could be resource hungry or cause weird boundary conditions that could make things ugly.

This is absolutely genius, IMO, and if we implemented it, we'd be the first tabbed browser to do anything nearly this friendly for setting tab sizes.

cl

Wow, I'm so chuffed my idea has legs. I imagined that hovering over the gap between tabs would show the little "vertical bar with arrows each side" cursor that you get when resizing the mailbox list pane in Mail.app (and others). Whether it only shows when option is held down, or whether option resizes all tabs verses resizing just the active tab is for more knowledgeable folks to ponder.

delliott · Post by **delliott** » June 4th, 2006, 4:29 am

DrawingBusiness wrote:Wow, I'm so chuffed my idea has legs. I imagined that hovering over the gap between tabs would show the little "vertical bar with arrows each side" cursor that you get when resizing the mailbox list pane in Mail.app (and others). Whether it only shows when option is held down, or whether option resizes all tabs verses resizing just the active tab is for more knowledgeable folks to ponder.

It's a good idea and it is pretty closely related to stuff that I will be doing already. It's a feature that makes sense for Camino to offer and hopefully Mike Pinkteron can be convinced that it's a worthy addition to my project.

nufferkay wrote:Can I please put in a request that any new overflow implementation be easily keyboard-navigable?

That would without a doubt be my intention! I am sure that Håkan will insist that from an accessibility point of view that anything I do this summer accomodates the needs of all of our users. I met with him a couple of weeks ago in Edinburgh and he is really focused on making all Mozilla products accessibility friendly.

Hudsong · Post by **Hudsong** » June 4th, 2006, 7:48 pm

Option to switch to tab on mouseover with a delay variable (in ms). This is probably the only reason why I can't transfer to the Camino browser, I am so used to it in Firefox.

cflawson · Post by **cflawson** » June 4th, 2006, 8:00 pm

Hudsong wrote:Option to switch to tab on mouseover with a delay variable (in ms). This is probably the only reason why I can't transfer to the Camino browser, I am so used to it in Firefox.

You're kidding, right? This isn't default Fx behaviour, and it sounds like AWFUL UI, no matter how much you individually love it.

cl

phiw13 · Post by **phiw13** » June 5th, 2006, 12:05 am

Uncle Asad wrote:
phiw13 wrote:PS - I had my geeky 77 years old neighbour over at my place this a.m. One reason he prefers to use Firefox over Camino on his iMac: the tabs are much bigger (vertically), making it easier to hit with the mouse.

At the very least, our tabs need to grow a few pixels so we don't have funky 13x13px favicons (bug is filed here)....

Oh, I vote for this... I don't particularly care about the favicons personally (they are hidden at my place), but, besides increasing the 'hit' area, increasing the size of the tabs by a few pixels will make them much more readable for not-so-young eyes, especially on 10.4.6 with the unified look. A tiny bit of white-space can do wonders to increase readability.
(it is less of a problem on 10.3.9. The gradient on the unified BM bar gives the whole thing a more 'packed' impression.)

Hudsong · Post by **Hudsong** » June 5th, 2006, 2:52 pm

cflawson wrote:
Hudsong wrote:Option to switch to tab on mouseover with a delay variable (in ms). This is probably the only reason why I can't transfer to the Camino browser, I am so used to it in Firefox.

You're kidding, right? This isn't default Fx behaviour, and it sounds like AWFUL UI, no matter how much you individually love it.

cl

Yeah, it comes in a few FF extensions. Don't say it sucks until you've tried it though. It is a much faster and easier way to switch through tabs than having to click on them.

cflawson · Post by **cflawson** » June 5th, 2006, 2:55 pm

It sucks. I don't need to try it. It's completely unexpected behaviour, it's not how the Mac OS cursor has EVER worked, and it would confuse the crap out of 99.99999% of Camino users. (That 0.00001% who wouldn't be confused consists of...you.)

You, on the other hand, would love it. Camino is open-source. You're welcome to code your own patch for this behaviour.

Also, the keyboard is a much faster and easier way to switch through tabs than using the mouse for ANYTHING.

cl