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November 09, 2005

Browser tabs usability

Browser tabs usability: Ben Goodger, Mozilla developer who is now supported by Google, writes of testing how people actually use tabbed browsing. The focus here is putting a close-window button on each tab. I've used this in Safari and it's handy for closing background tabs without re-rendering them, although it cuts down on the number of pixels available for the title. I'd really like to consolidate two windows worth of tabs too... right now I CTRL-C, click, CTRL-T, CTRL-V to consolidate two windows with three remaining tabs each. Would be good to be able to name windows too....

Posted by John Dowdell at November 9, 2005 03:33 PM

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Comments

Why not drag the tabs between various browsing windows? You can do that in Opera, on Mac as well as on Windows and Linux.

Posted by: Rijk at November 10, 2005 06:09 AM

Looking up at my Mozilla tabs I think - how about a close X that only appears when you roll over the tab, safely on the right side.

As you open more tabs the constant close X would take up more of the tab. Maybe that would be good.

Posted by: Chris Lowery at November 10, 2005 11:04 AM

I like the firefox scroll wheel click method of closing tabs without re-rendering the page. Very intuative once the user figures it out.

Posted by: Greg at November 14, 2005 11:51 AM