Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

I really like tabbed browsing and tabbed interfaces. They allow me to manage a large number of windows and make me feel productive. But what is it about tabs that make them so useful?

When I have lots of tabs, a common task is to find a specific tab. I normally cycle through my tabs until I find the one I’m looking for. Cycling is pretty easy to do either by poking tabs with my mouse or by using ctrl+tab. Compare this to cycling through windows. In Windows XP, the default behavior is to group together windows by application. This helps to narrow down the number of windows to consider, but if I pick the wrong one, it slows me down since I have to re-open the popup menu before selecting again. It would be nice if I could cycle through the windows in a group until I found the one I wanted.

There’s also the possibility of using alt+tab to find a specific window. In fact, alt+tab works great when I want to flip back and forth between two windows, but whenever I’m working with more than two windows, I feel like the list of window reorders itself randomly. Of course, it’s not really random (I think it’s a least most recently used list), but it often feels random and knowing the algorithm doesn’t make it any easier to predict the behavior. With tabs, if I want to toggle back and forth between two windows, I use ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab. It’s not quite as simple as alt+tab, but it seems to fit my mental model better.

OS X seems to address this by having alt+tab cycle through applications and alt+~ to cycle through windows of an application. Even then, it feels like a two step operation. Fortunately, exposé remedies this problem.

Which seems to beg the question, would an exposé like preview of all tabs help in finding a specific tab? I was pretty excited when I learned about foXpose and Reveal, but it turns out that I don’t use them much. Part of the reason might be speed— cycling through tabs is already fast. I see the tab as I press ctrl+tab rather than when I release (alt+tab’s behavior). I suspect that the other reason is because I can direct my cycling behavior. That is, by looking at site favicons and titles, I often pick which tab I’m aiming for while I use the keyboard to cycle. This is different from exposé which seems to place windows in different locations depending on position and z-order and ruin any memory of the last time it was used.

The speed of switching to a tab also seems to make tab previews less useful. It sounds like a cool feature, but it’s actually faster to click on the tab then to wait for a preview tooltip.

That isn’t to say that tabs couldn’t be better in Firefox, in fact lots of tab changes will be in Firefox 2, rather it’s an area that offers big wins in productivity.