I seriously can’t understand why you would want to have several browsers open at the same time even if you have 3 monitors. It’s the whole point of tabbed interfaces. Just one browser for all the web-sites you have open. I normally have about 35 sites open and all is in one browser-window. I never have any trouble in finding one specific tab.
Jeff,
I don’t see where the peculiarities of your browser usage warrant the kind of integration between the web-browser and window manager you’re talking about. One browser per monitor is a defensible proposition, yes, but how hard can it be to switch focus to each instance and look, on your (presumably maximized) window for the gmail tab? If you have multiple browsers open, then I’ve got to question whether you’re doing everything YOU, as a savvy user, can to avoid this problem (which is unlikely to occur for a less skilled user). This is not to say that tabbed interfaces are perfect - I, for one, would love to see tab drag-and-drop functionality between multiple instances of the same browser (I drag one tab from my left monitor’s instance of Firefox to the right - especially easy since Firefox shares session info already). However, I think separation of concerns is the hallmark of effective software, and blowing that away just to make a highly unusual edge use case easier seems a poor trade.
if you want Gmail to show up in the taskbar, open it in a new window. This gives you the flexibility to use tabs for most things and new windows for the few things you want quick access to.
I agree, but I have to remember to do this, every time. Sometimes I slip or forget.
Again, the disconnect between Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Tab-- it’s highly modal, and users hate modes. It’s so hard to remember which one you’re in at any given time. Is this a tab? Is it a window? Why should I have to worry about treating them so differently?
… on the other hand, you could not use the browser tabs at all. If you consider the system taskbar as a tab-engine itself, then you could just open many windows as you need and still see it’s contents.
(I agree-- the idea that there should only be The One Browser To Rule Them All seems faintly ridiculous to me)
Ok, but then you willfully choose to destroy the whole point of tabs-in-browsers and would probably be better off without any tab-support at all. Use either one or the other. Not a mix. That just have to become a mess.
9 tabbed browsers on 3 monitors is not just faintly ridiculous but totally laughable…
Hello. My name is Peter and I’m a tabbing addict…
I always setup my browsing windows by topic, tabs then being the subtopics. For instance I’ve got gmail, work’s web-mail, slashdot and this site open in one window, and some python/perl cruft open in a separate window, etc.
This can become a problem in the default Firefox without the TabMixPlus extension because of the “tab mash” as I call it. With the TabMixPlus extension you can modify how the tabs work in a number of different ways. I prefer multiple rows of tabs, so thats what I use.
This completely fails with Expose Friends, but then I don’t tend to use those methods very much - probably for that very reason. The best implementation of tabs I’ve seen is on Linux using the window manager Flux Box which allows you to take any individual window and stick it into a tab - aka system wide tabs. Then Firefox, or any program for that matter, can be tabbed and the individual program tabbing can be ditched. Flux Box is a light-weight window manager based of Black Box and therefore off of Window Maker and inherits that history.
I would really like to see this feature ported to other systems, it might be possible with OSX - at least for Aqua based programs, and should be easy for Gnome/KDE. No idea how flexible Windows is about such modification.
Alternately, Cyrus proposed this solution, which is intriguing too:
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New idea: If I Expos my windows then all browser tabs should fly out and be shown in the Exposd view. I can then select a web page that I want, which will brought to focus with the appropriate tab selected. That would be awesome
Indeed, that would be awesome! But it’d have to somehow work for EVERY app that has a tabbed interface. Otherwise you’d be hard-coding this Expose / Switcher behavior in for specific apps.
For me, tabs are not a way to view a ton of web pages I have open at once, they’re a queue. Usually only the first tab is something that is a long-running thing I want to look at (like GMail). Anything else is stuff that is “pending” my attention.
I start out in the morning reading through NetNewsWire; anything that looks interesting, I hit enter (to open in Safari) and then switch back to NNW to continue scanning the day’s news.
When I have time, I start at tab #2 in my browser. (#1 is GMail), and then I read the stuff that interested me, hitting command+w to close the tab when I’m done.
Solution is simple: don’t mix tabs with multiple browser windows. I only have 1 browser window.
tabs are to windows as threads are to processes.
You need a system where tabbed interface elements show up in your task switcher- basically, the default task switcher is operating at the wrong level of abstraction. It’s switching between applications, and you need it to switch between tasks.
Is there a way to register individual aspects of a program on the task bar? Otherwise, you’d need to a) create a standard way for apps to register their tasks, b) convince some app developers to implement it, and c) write / improve a better task switcher to implement it. This level of innovation typically requires the platform vendor to drive it- anyone at MS want to fix the task manager in a way that blows doors off of OS X?
I’d like to second what David said. Stick to one browser window. If you need lots of tabs open, get Opera and move the tabbar off to the left side.
I use the tab bar as a ‘tab stack’ new tabs get pushed onto the right and popped off the right side. I have tabbar expandable to 3 rows (although you can still navigate to tabs which overflow via keyboard).
Close all right tabs option is great for clearing off a whole branch of a tab research session (you just need to remember to do a depth first search using this method).
If you really want to organise tabs, you can load and save your tab sessions into the bookmark. Or use tab groups: http://paranoid-androids.com/tabgroups/
If you have no system, and open multiple browsers, multiple tabs, don’t order/structure your tabs and windows, it isn’t entirely surprising you end up in a mess.
Tabs are powerful enough to provide order as long as you apply a systematic way of using them.
Jeff, Opera does exactly what you want.
First, Opera, unlike Firefox, does scale the tabs down to favicon-size, and doesn’t hide them when there are too many. This way, if you had 1 window open with all your tabs you could have easily found the GMail favicon. It also lessens the need to use multiple windows.
Second, Opera already has what you describe - the “tab finder”. It shows a list of all the tabs in all Opera windows you have open, and has a quicksearch-box at the top. Type “GM” and it will show any tabs that have “GM” in the title, which you can then click to directly go to the tab.
Check the screenies for how it works: http://img.crowdway.com/opera_windows_all.png and http://img.crowdway.com/opera_windows_gmail.png
Third. If you did close a window, you can make it come back at any time using the trash-feature. It saves everything you ever closed, including “back” and “forward” history. Even a quick CTRL-Z will undo your close.
Ho - those are the same reasons I’m starting to dislike tabs! Generally I open 20’ish tabs in each window, however tab management has however become a less complicated issue for me:
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I use enso launcher, which lets you switch between windows and tabs by typing “go [any part of name]” of the webpage/window title you want. So you’d just type “go gmail”…
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Quick Tabs is actually helpful. Its previews are not, but I read the titles beneath every tile and if two or more have same title, the preview helps a bit in differentiating them.
So, unsurprisingly we have come to the conclusion that we all use tabs in browsers, IDEs, email clients and so on in different ways.
For me, I have one monitor and many browsers, each with several tabs. It’s the way I work. There, let’s accept we all use them differently and have done with it (and stop saying “if you used them this way you wouldn’t have the problem”. I don’t use them that way and I’m unlikely to change, I’m sorry).
If I’m browsing to a site I’ll tend to open a new browser window, whether as I’ll usually open links in a new tab. Each window thus becomes a “subject group” of tabs. Accordingly, it’s generally easy to find the right window to look in.
It’s interesting to see the multitude of different ways people are using tabs – and a fine example of the problems designing a decent task switching UI will come across, as frankly they are all rubbish right now. That the verb “hunt” comes up when we’re talking is very telling.
As an aside, for a lot of websites this point is moot. Sites are mostly stateless, so it doesn’t matter whether you use an existing tab or a new one. For example, Gmail’s auto-refresh means that the windows don’t fall out of sync with each other. So, open as many windows as you like 
The reason that there are tabs is that the windowing systems of all major OSs suck so bad that workarounds needed to be found.
If there was a reasonable way in Windows to have lots of windows open, then people would use it; since there isn’t (wasn’t?), tabs had to function as a workaround.
Your search idea is interesting… it sounds like something that Quicksilver would do already on the Mac (but it might not – I’m not all the way through the learning curve yet).
Check out http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ and look at the screencasts, as it’s tricky to understand from just text-based description. Basically you hit a shortcut key combo and type in the name of what you’re looking for (often files, but extensions allow it to address everything, including menu items) then you type in what you want to do with it (or just press enter to activate the default action, which is usually ‘open’ or ‘run’).
As to Cyrus whereabouts: apparently he’s working on the C# compiler team. Eric Lippert mentioned him on his blog a couple of days ago: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2007/09/05/psychic-debugging-part-one.aspx. Maybe Eric can give him a nudge for you!
This article isn’t documenting a failure of the tabbed window paradigm. It’s documenting the failure of operating system GUIs to deal effectively with tabbed windows. The two are definitely not the same.
Just my twocents.
It’s only available for OS X, but Omniweb http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/ features a drawer with resizable thumbnail graphics of all open tabs. Very easy to scan and pick which window you’re seeking.