I think you’re just a little disorganised 
I never have less than 30 web pages open, along with all the other crap I need constantly, and I always know exactly where everything is due to having a very simple and easy “filing” system regarding where windows and tabs go. Firefox’s Ctrl-{1,2,3,etc} for fast tab negotiating also really helps. For example, my Gmail is always open at Ctrl-3.
Tabs have truly helped me organise my busy desktop, but only because I keep things organised.
Uhhh, Jeff, just like you should never try to juggle more balls than you can handle (in my case 2), you should never open more windows than your mind can easily cope with.
I love FF tabs. If I try to close a FF browser window with 1 tab, it warns me.
How do you lose a tab in multiple windows? I mean - why do you even HAVE multiple windows? That’s what tabs are for.
People who complain about not understanding tabs are no different than people who complain about how they “don’t understand” cell phones or cable television. Just because your brain is stuck in 1976 doesn’t mean technology or the rest of its users are.
Switcher 2 has some searching capabilities built in. Check out the video.
Indeed, Cyrus is one of my coworkers. I will tell him that you miss him. (And yeah, I wish he would blog more too.)
Hey, for what it’s worth, I think a lot of posters are missing the forest for the trees. Whether Jeff’s way of working makes sense to you or not, tabs are great but have some problems. What should we do about them? I think the idea of a search capability has the potential to solve a much larger class of problems. I’ll also bet money Google’s got people working on it.
The tabbed browsing feature should only be used by those more comfortable with computers. It would be a nightmare explaining tabbed browsing to a first time internet user.
What I do so that my browsing does not get out of control, is only open one copy of my favorite browser (Firefox) at a time. That way, I know all my browsing is done in one place. So, to look for my G-mail I open that window and find the right tab. Doing this limits the amount of windows listed on the taskbar (making it easier to find other windows as well as my browser).
“The only thing I can think of is a plain-text search facility where I type “Gmail”, and the OS would automatically highlight that tab (or window) and bring it to the front.”
Jeff - Why the need for more complexity for the OS. At what point does the search madness end. If we start having searches for everything, we’re just adding more complexity to the OS.
I propose a much simpler solution. Tooltips! Currently, when a user positions their mouse over the browser (IE/Firefox/Opera/etc) in the taskbar, it generally shows the name of the webpage that is active. Why not have the tooltip enumerate the tabs open such as:
The simplicity of this is that now, if you have a number of browser windows open, its just a matter of looking at the tooltip text with a mouse over. Not only that, but the tooltip can now be managed by the browser itself rather than the OS. I would prefer my OS to delegate this task to the browsers.
There seems to be something missing that would solve this. If in windows, I can hover my mouse cursor over the taskbar and get the title of the window. How hard would it be to extend that for browsers, etc., that have tabs.
Instead of just seeing the title of the main window, how about seeing the title of the tabs each on their own line, and the active one in bold?
Something like this (one window- five tabs):
Internet Explorer-
-IGoogle
-CNN.com
-BCoding Horror: The Problem…/B
-Yahoo.com
-etc.
Instead of this (one window- five tabs):
Coding Horror: The Problem…
To each his own but I LOVE tabs. I HATE 8,000 open windows all over the place.
While I don’t seem to have such a hard time remembering where things are, I think the search idea is a good one. Why couldn’t Vista search also include running processes, and/or select attributes such as the title of a browser tabs, and include them in its result set. That way the search would become the alt+tab functionality if the result selected is already a running process.
I really don’t see what the big deal is. Forget about finding GMail in the tabs. Just open a new instance of GMail in a browser somewhere, read your email, then close it when done. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple instances open.
Definitely don’t get your point here. How can you have a need for 9 open browsers? Don’t you close things when you’re done with them? They’ll still be there, you know, if you need to get back to it later…
Like my grandma used to say, sometimes it’s not the car, it’s the nut behind the wheel.
Jeff, tabs aren’t the problem. The taskbar is; the only time everything goes all to hell is when you start becoming dependent on the taskbar for your navigation.
I rarely maximize my windows. I prefer to leave them cascaded - they’re much easier to find that way. The screen looks more “cluttered”, but so what? If you want to use one app without distraction, then maximize it while using it, and restore it when finished. I typically leave certain apps in the same place on the screen all the time, and I develop patterns. If I have to re-arrange my windows for some reason, alt-tab is a much faster way to find what I’m looking for than tabs are. I only occasionally go to the task bar.
I wish I could “tear off” tabs into standalone windows on demand, too. That might be a reasonable workaround in the meantime.
Safari 3.0 has a “Move Tab to New Window” context menu on each tab that does exactly what you want. In Firefox, you can open a new window and drag a single tab to it, accomplishing the same thing in 2 steps.
You could try being a little more organized with your windows. Each morning on computer 1 I launch Outlook, Firefox, then my QA directory. Then from there any programs, docs I’ll be working on throughout the day that will be constantly closed and re-opened, yet never touching the first 3 that I opened. In Firefox, in tab 1 I launch our internal website then our issue traking system, once again never touching those two tabs and opening/closing new tabs throughout the day. I’m a bit obsessive compulsive and like things in order. I’ve found it works for me and that’s it’s easier to find what I need quickly and I’m more efficient. I used to do this working in a manufacturing environment. All my tools were lined up in the order I would be using them and I just applied that concept to working on a computer. But I do like your idea of being able to tear off a tab into a standalone browser. That could come in handy.
Oh gosh and golly, people sure are good at making problems. I mean i can understand people whose computer experiences are some what limited, but i’d expect people who deal with computers on this level to be able to form some kind of consensus with the surrounding they’re “living” in. Sorry for lashing out, but come on! You gotta say when sometime.
the problem you outline has me wondering about a related question:
why is launching an application any different from finding it on your screen? why should opening gmail be any different from finding your open gmail application?
i think the notion of starting up applications is a quaint architectural compromise. if you start something already launched, you should just be directed to that window. if you close an application, opening it again should be the same as “minimizing” it. there isn’t any reason to make these separate actions.
My own two cents: Jeff seems to be able to work with 12+ different “documents” open at the same time. Having worked with a Mac a few years ago, I know that 7 or 8 is the max number of windows for which Expos is the quicker solution. Above that, I just stare blankly at a crowd of rectangular figures, and it’s Where’s Waldo all over again.
GMail is in a tab, which is in a browser. 3 browsers, that’s at most two clicks to know in which browser GMail is. It’s like a search tree: above 8 documents, it’s quicker for me to first go to the browsers and look through the tabs than to just linearly scan all the windows. Your mileage may vary.
Jeff, in the grand tradition of Context Switching Considered Harmful, may I suggest you took it as an exercise in mental focusing, and tried to only have documents related to the task you’re currently dealing with open. That should reduce your tabbing problems.
Cheers!
Carl
For Windows, at least, it seems like it might be a nice feature if each browser instance in the taskbar expanded to show all of its tabs (a la the Start Menu). This way, a tab could be found AND selected from the task bar.