Tab Kit 0.5.5
One thing I miss about Firefox 1.5 is the ability for tabs to become gradually smaller as the user opens more of them. The tabs could get a little scrunched, but at least they were all visible on the screen.
After Firefox changed to scrolling tabs from 2.0 on, it became clumsier for me to navigate through the 40+ tabs that I usually keep open. The tabs were no longer visible at once, and the slider arrows accelerated at an uncomfortable rate if I clicked them too fast.
If browsers had options for visualizing tabs, such as placing them vertically on the screen and using a tree structure, my experience would be so much less frustrating and time-consuming.
Now that wide screens are the norm, the pixel space taken by a vertical tab structure is a reasonable trade-off for the increased usability of being able to see all tabs—including titles—on the screen at once. Vertical tabs also make sense in high-tab-count situations; if the tabs go off the screen, the user can use a standard vertical scroll bar to browse through them instead of the less familiar horizontal scroll buttons.
Using a tree structure makes sense because the user will often want to open several tabs pertaining to the same category, and they should be able to collapse that category when they move on to another.
Luckily for me, I found Tab Kit, which implements both vertical tabs and a tree structure. See CyberNet’s video below:
While Tab Kit has already saved me plenty of time navigating, I did find a few major usability problems with the add-on. They turned out to be changeable through the extensive preference options, but they could still use some tweaking:
1. Poor visibility of selected tab. The currently selected tab is barely distinguishable from the others. This is especially important because Tab Kit designates sub-tree tab groups with random colors, so the eye is drawn to the colors and must spend a few seconds identifying the selected tab.
Solution: Go to Tab Kit preferences > Tabs > Appearance and enable Emphasize current tab in black.
Another solution could be to make the selected tab actually look like a tab, i.e., appear in the foreground and have its edge come up against the side of the web page that it represents.
2. Scroll wheel does not control scroll bar. When the vertical tabs extend beyond the screen, a vertical scroll bar appears. The user expects to be able to control that bar with their scroll wheel. Instead, the scroll wheel cycles through the open tabs at an uncomfortably rapid pace.
Solution: Go to Controls > Mouse gestures > Scrollwheel tab switch and disable While mouse is over tab bar. This will make Tab Kit follow the standard of letting the scroll wheel control the vertical scroll bar.
The up and down arrows on the keyboard would be more usable controls for cycling through vertical tabs (i.e., activated after the user clicks inside the vertical tab area).
3. Too many preferences. One issue with free and open source software is the plethora of options that they give the user. Having control is great, but Tab Kit’s five full menus of preferences are overwhelming. A simple solution would be to pick reasonable defaults, and hide or remove most of the non-critical options. For instance, emphasize the current tab more clearly by default, and remove that option from the Appearance section.
Update. Since this post came out, Firefox has improved tab interaction. I’ve switched back to the default tab management, which has in turn made me manage tabs more effectively by myself, i.e., only having a few open at once, and opening a new window if I need a new branch of tabs.
Tags: Web
