[dietmar1]

hi there

somewhere i´ve seen a cool GUI idea where the tab view o pages is hierarchial. So if u go on a webpage the startpage is the mainpage and if u go on a subpage from this page u can see this in hierarchial way in the tab drawer. (like in apples finder a folder with a subfolder, the mainfolder is left and the subfolder has a little space to the left windowborder and so on) It would be much cooler if one can see the tabs which are subpages of an also opened mainpage is are in a kinda folder of the mainpage. So u can open or close a lets call it "maintab" by clicking on a triangle and than see the hierarchial "subtabs".

That way u don´t have to opne that many tabs just for ione mainhomepage.

Maybe for version 6.0?;)

Would be really great;)

Grets from austria, vienna

[JKT]

iRider - watch the demo movie.

[dietmar1]

irider is just for windows and it´s gui is not that beautifull as Omniwebs GUI;)

Pleaaaaaaaaaase add those feature in a feautre version, i would love that;)

[pjb]

How about having a pane similar to the way the site preferences are available in a temporary pane that would, for a given browser window, display a complete hierarchical history and anatomy in an organization similar to Finder's column view or interactive graphical bread-crumb trail view (and leave the simple tab drawer in place for less complicated navigation).

I use the current tab drawer to collect sites in Workspaces that automatically load and sit ready to read. I would like the detailed history and site anatomy function not be overlaid on that interface device but can see it as a useful power feature.

[Bob Williams]

Originally Posted by JKT

iRider - watch the demo movie.

A lot of the movie is a flashy demo showing little that is new to folks who aren't stuck in the dark ages of Win IE. However, there are three features there that I really like:

- The smart association of tabs with the tabs that opened them. I filed a formal feature request a while back that asked for a way to have background tabs open behind the current tab, rather than at the end of the list. I think this feature is essentially the same thing, though iRider's indentation of tabs is definitely a plus.

- The ability to drag through the list of open tabs to see them all quickly. I think a dedicated drag region or required use of a modifier is best for this (so as to not impede dragging of the tabs themselves), but I can envision myself using it quite a bit.

- The ability to quickly open all the links within a selection. Again, I think iRider's way of doing it is less than ideal--perhaps a simple contextual menu command would work well along with dragging the selection to the tab drawer--but the feature is solid. Of course, this would mean, at the very least, that content selection on a page would have to seriously improve. For some reason, this has been a big deficiency in every single Mac browser since the beginning. For added points, allowing rectangular selection would be way-cool.

[Handycam]

Originally Posted by Bob Williams

The ability to drag through the list of open tabs to see them all quickly.

Opera 9 does this. Hover over a tab to see the tab's content.

Of course, in OW the contents of the tab is always visible.

And FWIW, irider isn't opening tabs per se, it's visually displaying the browsing history. This would quickly drive me insane. I personally think OW's tabs are more than sufficient.

A "tab" is a page you want to hold on to while viewing another page, keeping a few pages handy for switching back and forth faster than bookmarks. OW puts them in a handy drawer, so that they don't impinge on the browsing area, which stays the same size. It further (optionally) shows thumbnails of the tab content, so you can quickly see what was what. And you can re-order them, open each in a new window, etc. You can drag links to the drawer to make a tab. You can drag an image to the drawer to open it separately.

IMHO it's a well-thought-out and nice setup. Just my 2 cents.

[Bob Williams]

OW's tabs are definitely better than most browsers' tabs--especially in the area of management--but that doesn't mean they couldn't be improved. And one problem is that the thumbnails are small enough that you can't differentiate between similar pages. For example, if I open several product pages at a shopping site, or several articles at a news site, the pages will typically look exactly the same except for some text content and maybe a different picture (but often in the same spot). Shrink the pages down by 98%-99% (as required to fit on my 12" PB's screen and still allow enough screen width to browse--and yes, I just did the math so that ratio is accurate), and "differentiation" leaves your vocabulary. And more often than not, the titles are even more useless, since you can only see the first part.

In fact, right now, I have a few different OG forum pages pulled up. The thumbnails all look virtually identical, so I can't tell them apart visually, and the title text underneath every thumbnail is "Omni Group F...", which is also useless for navigation. How do I tell them apart? By looking at each of them in succession. Right now, that means either clicking on each of them or using the keyboard to move through them - but either way, it's an action repeated for each one, and that makes it tedious. To be able to simply drag the mouse over the tabs (preferably with a modifier held down) and rapidly see the content of all the tabs would let me find the one I want that much quicker.

Hmm, even better would be a modifier-activated mode where you could simply mouse-over a tab to see its contents full-size. That way, you wouldn't have to hold down the mouse button. All of this assumes, of course, that OW could handle the display changes as quickly as they appeared to be handled in the iRider video; if it were too slow, the tedium would immediately return.

[Handycam]

And one problem is that the thumbnails are small enough that you can't differentiate between similar pages.

You do know they can be made as large as you like, right?

[Forrest]

Originally Posted by Handycam

You do know they can be made as large as you like, right?

He did say as required to fit on my 12" PB's screen and still allow enough screen width to browse

And I think that's the source of the issue. Much of Apple's own web site wont fit into 1024x768 if you have the dock on the side. I have a 12" PB as well, but I recognize I'm sacrificing usability for size.

I have found that if screen real estate is an issue for me, I just get a bigger screen.

[Bob Williams]

Originally Posted by Handycam

You do know they can be made as large as you like, right?

More accurately, they can be made as large as your available screen real estate will allow. And, bigger costs more....

On my desktop where I have multiple giant screens, big tabs themselves aren't a problem. On my 12" PB, however (or any other similarly tight screen - and there are still a *lot* of 1024x768 screens out there), you just can't make the tabs too big. Even without the tabs visible at all, it can be a challenge to read some sites that are designed for bigger screens, or even sites designed for smaller screens but which for some reason overflow their normal width (e.g., forums where people post wide images, often causing the whole forum to be just as wide). And let's not forget folks who may have bigger screens but who choose to keep their window sized less than full-screen.

Plus, even on bigger screens with full-size windows, bigger tabs come at the expense of the number of tabs you can display in one screen-full. Since I generally have at least a dozen tabs open in a given window, and often many more than that, this is important to me as I don't want to spend too much time scrolling up and down looking for a particular tab.

The bottom line: for light users with no more than a handful of tabs open at any given time and a big screen, their ideal solution is to make the tabs giant and be done with it. But for the more power-surfer type, this solution entails some major usability compromises. And in the case of OW, the only major pay-for browser remaining on the Mac, I suspect most users are of the latter type.