With Community Help, Chrome Could Support Side Tabs Extension 117
jones_supa writes The lack of a vertical tab strip (or "Tree Style Tab" as the Firefox extension is called) has been under a lot of discussion under Chrome/Chromium bug tracker. Some years ago, vertical tabs existed as an experimental feature enabled with a "secret" command line parameter, but that feature was eventually removed from the browser. Since then, Google has been rather quiet about whether such feature is still on the roadmap. Now, a Google engineer casts some light on the issue. He says that a tree-style interface for tabs would be overly complex as a native implementation, but Google would back the idea of improving the extensions interface to support a sidebar-like surface to render the tab UI on, if someone from the open source community would step forward to do the work to drive the feature to completion.
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My biggest gripe with Chromium is that it does not conform to my UI.
That's a good gripe. It's mine too. My gripe isn't so much about appearance (which is increasingly familiar on the Mac) as it is about behavior and interaction expectations. I expect certain behavior of tabs ("move tab to new window"), keyboard (including accessing keyboard shortcuts and the rest of the document even if currently focusing a plugin "frame"), find (Chrome stops highlighting found results after a refresh, unless you cancel and reopen the find panel). I'm fine with the visual differences—
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I provided a bunch of reasons. Tab behavior, toolbar behavior being the most substantial.
Maybe we're talking past each other. I'm not aware of any Blink or WebKit browser that isn't heavily customized from its native environment (including Safari, which has the fewest excuses). Can you say more about what you expect and what violates those expectations?
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What does it mean to "conform to my UI"? Why are you listing rendering engines (which, apart from Firefox, are literally not involved in windowing UI at all)? Are you just talking about adopting appearance characteristics of a windowing theme? Because if that's the case, I definitely misunderstood. I was talking about browsers (all of them) adopting UI conventions that are at odds with (every) environment, often for the better but sometimes not so much.
But basically, I wasn't talking about appearance conven
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UI stands for "user interface", which are the visualizations you see when interacting with a graphical shell. If something does not conform to the UI, that means it has its own UI that doesn't fit in.
I beg your pardon. UI stands for user interface, which is the way a user interfaces with an application. Yes, that includes appearance, but it is far from only that. The behaviors of menus, cursor interactions, focus, stacking, direction of elements, language, are all factors in a UI. Even vague things like "feel" which includes such nit picks as which elements of an interface respond to interaction while in the background, how a caret moves through a text field, what portions of a window are draggable. All
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And all of those things are invisible elements that you require zero feedback from? Read what you said and get back to me when you figure out what is wrong with it.
Not all, but they're all expressing more than just a pixel configuration on a screen.
The only browser I have installed that looks unconventional is Chromium. Neither version of Opera, Firefox Nightly, Midori or QupZilla have this problem.
Yeah, okay. Glad we've reached the endless repetition portion of this conversation. Cheers!
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Yeah okay, "UI" just means how a thing looks and Chrome is uniquely terrible. Goodness forbid I try to expand the conversation a little without it being an all-or-nothing debate.
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Look. I won't even appeal to my own authority, as a software developer with over a decade of UI experience. I'm sure you're also an experienced developer with UI chops, and I don't want to have a bigger dick contest. Instead, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... [wikipedia.org] - it's actually a pretty decent article for Wikipedia, and may be helpful in understanding what I was talking about (if you have any interest in understanding what others are talking about, instead of just trying to be "right" on the In
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well the mac app-menu-at-top-of-screen is just stupid if there's multiple apps in view at a time...
Interface choices (Score:2)
well the mac app-menu-at-top-of-screen is just stupid if there's multiple apps in view at a time...
Why? You cannot physically perform actions on more than one app at a single time. The menu is active for the one you are presently using as indicated by where you have clicked the mouse pointer. It's not the only way to do things (or even necessarily the best) but it's perfectly sensible and logical and consistent.
What annoys me about the mac interface is that choosing the close window button on the window frame doesn't actually close the app if there are no windows left open. I have to either close the
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I have never once wanted to close all the windows of an app and still leave the app running. It' just not an interface choice I truly grok.
Think of it like being in MDI mode all the time, in every application. Because that's how the MacOS GUI has worked since time immemorial. You can close all the documents without exiting the app. Back then, it was common for application menus to be provided as a numbered list of options in the middle of the screen, the menu bar is the same thing but now it's at the top of the screen and still available while documents are open. But hey, there are lots of apps which behave the way you seem to want them to beh
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well the mac app-menu-at-top-of-screen is just stupid if there's multiple apps in view at a time...
Why? You cannot physically perform actions on more than one app at a single time. The menu is active for the one you are presently using as indicated by where you have clicked the mouse pointer. It's not the only way to do things (or even necessarily the best) but it's perfectly sensible and logical and consistent.
What I hate about the menu location is that on a big screen I have to drag my mouse all the way to the upper left corner, even if the window I'm dealing with is in the lower right corner. Combine that with the lack of decent keyboard navigation for the menus, they are pretty much useless for anything else than looking up the keyboard shortcuts.
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Think of it like being in MDI mode all the time, in every application.
1. MDI doesn't make sense with every application. It works for programs where you have multiple content items and some common tools for them (like an image processing program) or if the application needs for some other reason to have multiple windows open. MDI stands for "Multiple Document Interface", so it's not a coincidence that it works well for such usage, since it was designed for it.
2. Even MDI applications can be closed by the closing the main window, which you don't have in the OS X applications.
Because that's how the MacOS GUI has worked since time immemorial.
Ju
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There's a difference: The user closes the last window, the application closes vs. the user closes the last window, the application opens a new window. That is just counterintuitive.
Well, once upon a time I might have made many of the same arguments. But now, RAM is cheap. I don't mind having the applications lurking around in the background. Not that I even use OSX, but last time I did (for a job) it was not a big deal, because the system had lots of RAM. And it was only 8GB, but it was plenty at the time and for the stuff I was doing, hint, not video.
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That isn't what I meant by native menus, and Firefox does actually use *those*. What I meant is that menus rendered for selects/dropdowns/context are fakes that neither look nor behave as a Mac user expects.
As far as where a menu bar in an OS belongs... More often than not, it doesn't belong anywhere. If your application needs to provide so many operations that it needs to hide many of them in a multi-dimensional listing, your application either does too much or is poorly designed for user interaction. Ther
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Oh please. Unless you want a world full of foolish "apps" instead of honest to goodness software that can actually do more than three things, getting rid of menus is woefully stupid. It's not "hiding" commands to put things in menus. The menu system is an extremely efficient triggering and referencing system, as efficient to use with a mouse as a keyboard. It makes everything easy to find, not hard.
That is not to say that every program needs a menu, but they are the exceptions. Serious software with anaemic
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Funny, when I download software with lots of stuff in menus, I usually view it as stuff like this: http://www.uxdesignedge.com/wp... [uxdesignedge.com]
I'd much prefer many small programs that do very few things, very easily and very well; versus large programs that try to be everything to everyone. Incidentally, that is also the unix philosophy.
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Yes, but as you know, that philosophy of a thing doing one thing well, is a statement on the scope of any particular piece of software, not its depth or capabilities. A program can, and likely should, go to whatever depth is necessary within its scope. If I want to do some serious text editing, I want a deep text
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My text editor (I prefer TextMate, but Sublime shares a lot of its roots with TM) is another one with lots of menu stuff. Truth be told, 90% of it could go away and I'd never notice (because I am only coding in a handful of languages and don't need a universal editor all of the time). But I think these complex tools are an exception, and I would not provide tools like that to the vast majority of people who are better served by a simple editor like TextEdit (which is far simpler, but also far more powerful
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That's fine, nobody is saying that everyone needs Maya. You were saying, however, that menus are a sign that a program is "too complicated", and to that I strongly disagree.
Menus are an important aspect of a program's accessibility, this is especially true on a
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Slashdot hates all screens. Gotta love that horizontal scrolling!
Tabs on side?? How about tabs on BOTTOM. (Score:4, Insightful)
Meanwhile, Firefox takes away the choice for users to have tabs on bottom (below the menu bar and bookmark bar) , like many want. Since Mozilla now has SUCH a desire to be EXACTLY like Chrome, it should be no surprise they would remove user choice, and even add an annoying and identical menu button on the right.
Thankfully, for now, you can get sane behavior back with the "Classic Theme Restorer" add-on. Yet again, Add-on's save the day and show off one of Firefox's main strengths. Back to Chrome- who knows, maybe they will start adding user choice?
Considering how important browsers are to a user's computer experience, I fail to understand why Chrome is so hostile to customization and why Mozilla is following that same path now. Let users put things where they want them (at least without artificial limits), and don't take away existing customization options!
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Use SeaMonkey. It's the same Mozilla codebase, but with traditional features like built in HTML editor, email, newsreader.
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Use Netscape Communicator, for bonus retro points!
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Seriously, it's better.
Umm no its not. It's a hacked together outdated fork that is slower and more crash prone than Firefox plus a ton of add-ons do not work with it.
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I just defected to Pale Moon [palemoon.org] two month ago.
Absolutely brilliant. Firefox as it used to be. Configurable like it was in the good old days, with that Australis interface ripped out. (And even returned to a sane version numbering scheme lately).
TreeStyle Tab works for vertical tabs (in contrast to SeaMonkey, where it doesnt), and with "Firefox 3 Theme for Firefox 4++ Reloaded" it works, looks and behaves exactly as the Firefox did in its best days. I finally feel "at home" again on the Internet without being i
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Although I agree with a lot of what you said, the issue is that the code was already there to put the tabs on bottom. They removed it for no good reason except to enforce their vision of looking exactly like Chrome. First the changes to the URL bar, then the style, then the addition of the menu button, and now removal of tab location choice. It is a sucky thing to do. If we wanted Chrome, we would use Chrome.
If they want to remove crap and bloat and simplify the base browser (like it is SUPPOSED to be,
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Chrome needs load tabs on demand. (Score:2)
My favorite feature of Firefox is load background tabs on demand, its a shame other browsers do not have this. I can start up Firefox with 200 tabs from the previous session and it starts up nice and quick, with other browsers if I did this I could go make a pot of coffee and it browser would still be loading when I came back.
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In fact, it stopped happening about the time I uninstalled all plugins (flash, Java, etc). Probably not a coincidence. I use Chrome for the few things that need Flash, which is thankfully getting even rarer these days.
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i used to do that
i discovered chrome has a "bookmark all tabs..." option if you right click on any open tab
pick a location for the folder (i have a top level folder full of 9 numbered folders, so it's chronological)
done
so after 20-30 open tabs, i bookmark all, flush all open tabs, and move on with a much saner life
you should as well
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I use Tab Snooze for that in Chromium. It works much better than Firefox's solution because it frees up all of the RAM used by the tabs until they are needed.
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I use Tab Snooze for that in Chromium. It works much better than Firefox's solution because it frees up all of the RAM used by the tabs until they are needed.
Does Firefox allocate the memory for tabs before you click on them? It doesn't seem like it.
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a company stepped up to do it (Score:4, Interesting)
I see a company stepped up to do it. Google decided it wasn't what they wanted to spend their time on, but they were willing to accept it if someone else found it useful enough to do do it. Benjamin said his company will do it, so it should happen.
https://code.google.com/p/chro... [google.com]
Neat Idea (Score:1)
Tree-style browser tabs are a neat idea. It's not very often where I'm searching for a piece of information and end up with more browser tabs than I can keep track of, but I could see how this would be a very useful feature.
It is too bad that the Firefox project has been derailed by "developers" more interested in "contributing" UI changes than actual bug fixes to the point where I'm no longer willing to use it, or I'd go fire up Firefox and check out the tree-style tab plugin.
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I use it all the time. Scan through Hacker News and right click open all the interesting headlines and comment sections then browse the fully rendered pages at my leisure. This is much more practical with a hierarchical vertical strip.
Typical abuse of unpaid opensource devs. (Score:4, Insightful)
if someone from the open source community would step forward to do the work to drive the feature to completion.
Google/Chromium paid devs can then take all the credit. One sided deal if you ask me.
Re:Typical abuse of unpaid opensource devs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds more like "if you want it do it yourself" via extensions.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable approach for something a company doesn't want to focus on.
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if someone from the open source community would step forward to do the work to drive the feature to completion.
Google/Chromium paid devs can then take all the credit. One sided deal if you ask me.
This is a sad response to read on slashdot.
What do you think would be a good reason for a company to opensource their development if not for stuff like this? It fits perfectly in the matra "If i had the source, I could make it work the way I wanted."
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I doubt it, if they are asking for it to be made as an extension, then the extension writer would get the credit.
Google in deep poverty, needs community funding (Score:1)
I have a different idea: how about Schmidt putting slightly more pocket change into his browser team instead?
It's been extended already (Score:1)
Er, I've had this solution (at least as a UI) in extension form: https://chrome.google.com/webs... [google.com]
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Seperate window.
It's an ugly work-around which disrupts focus workflows.
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I'm more partial to Tabs Outliner [google.com]. It's also a separate window, but it's modeless so it just lives to the left of my browser window.
It's still an ugly work-around, but when stuck with Chrome it's better than nothing.
Get with the times (Score:5, Interesting)
After using Tree Style Tab (combined with Tab Mix Plus) for over three years now I can't imagine going back to tabs-on-top on a widescreen monitor *shudders*.
Never mind the better use of real estate, the hierarchichal nature of the tabs (the "tree" in the name) is just brilliant.
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Sib AC is correct. I have been using palemoon with tree style tabs for well over a year. No problems.
Palemoon overall has been a good experience. It is relatively stable (maybe a couple of crashes in a history of heavy heavy use) and speedy. It is worth checking out if you haven't already.
how about smooth scroll + W3C standards (Score:2)
IE 11 you hit up or down arrow keys. Smooth as butter like a phone. Firefox mostly as smooth as its XP hooks limits hardware acceleration.
CHROME? Blip blip blip tear in image when you hit up and down. Slashdoters on Windows reading this try it? Surprised?
First Chrome had it. Then you had to go into about::flags. Now it is not even available? WTF. IE 8 in 2009 had this and Firefox in 2011. I can't even use it anymore as it feels like I am on an old computer. I hope someone from Google is reading this.
Last
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Ugh - god no. Smooth scrolling hurts my eyes.
I want my computer to be instantly responsive. I want my scrolling to be immediate. I do not want to waste that 0.2 seconds it takes for the page to animate into position whenever I use my scroll wheel or click in the scroll bar or press pageup/down. The page content should completely update in between monitor refreshes in my opinion. For all the reasons I hate Chrome, a lack of smooth scrolling is not one of them.
If I wanted a smartphone experience - I'd grab mi
Worse is better, so Chrome won (Score:1)
There once was a browser which supported this out-of-the-box several years ago.
RIP, Presto-Opera
Side tabs should be default (Score:2)
I used the side tab in chrome before it was dropped. As soon as it was dropped I deleted chrome from my system. Every PC I setup for anyone has Firefox with side tabs. I can have over 50 tabs open and it's the only sensible way to navigate on a 16:9 screen. There is a forum that discusses this, and the engineer who dropped it says very few used it. Well duh: you had to execute obscure commands to even enable it. Side tabs should be the default mode for any browser.
What about faceted tag clouds for bookmarks? (Score:2)
How do you folks deal with thousands of bookmarks? You do tag them right? Firefox's tagging facility has been able to do this for awhile, but then how does that reduce the sheer quantity, to something user-friendly? There's a decent but semi-broken extension for this also, called Tag Sieve. There's also been a feature request made to build it into FireFox native, and I hope the original developer gets the job. In the meantime, having read the user-comments, I've made the extension work, and it is wonderful.
"Thousands of bookmarks"? Why? (Score:2)
How do you folks deal with thousands of bookmarks?
If you "need" to deal with thousands of bookmarks you are Doing It Wrong. Help me out here because I honestly cannot even imagine a (sane) use case or work flow where I would actually need (much less want) to deal with that many bookmarks.
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No, I'm not doing it wrong. For example, I see tech-notes and answers all the time on stackoverflow.com, so I bookmark and tag them for future reference, so I CAN forget about them. Other forums too, since I am a developer. These add up and can overwhelm quickly otherwise, and become un-useable. Tag Sieve plus the native tools for sorting bookmarks in FireFox make my clippings very manageable and useful.
FWIW, Scrapbook is a FireFox extension that saves selected HTML from a web page to my local disk. These l
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How do you folks deal with thousands of bookmarks? You do tag them right?
What? I organize them hierarchically, like I've been doing since Netscape Navigator.
This isn't enough (Score:2)
Why use Chrome at all? (Score:2)