When Firefox came upon the browser scene eons ago one of the things that set it apart from the others was the supposed introduction of tabs. In fact Maxthon (formerly called MyIE2) introduced the concept well before Firefox but because it was a niche browser popular in Asia Firefox got the glory. In the browser bitch slapping that started between the browser fanatics one of the main lines used was that Firefox made the user more productive because of the tabbed browsing ability.
Of course productivity is important so anything that accomplishes this is worth trying; but to suggest that tabbed browsing makes one more production in nothing short of a fallacy. Sure tabs are cool, tabs are neat and yes they make browsing easier and create less clutter on your desktop but that is about it. Now id browser were to be productive you’d be able to tile your different tabs, you’d be able to select which ones to tile and then independently zoom in each of them. That would be productivity.
Think about it for a second. How is having to tab through the different browser windows making you productive? Cognitively the human mind can compare better when things are side by side. The moment you switch views you are losing the thought processes.
To give you an example – lets say you are working on an article and you have three or four difference reference sites in different browser tabs. First you have to decide which of them is your starting point of reference, then you have to keep switching between the browser tabs to build up the thought pattern and to be able to grab the pieces you want. How is this productive?
Now lets assume you have all three or four reference sites tiled side by side; or some similar setup, and you can flow between them to build up your thought pattern. There is no wasted time having to click on tabs and re-orient yourself each time you change pages.
Look, there is nothing wrong with having cool features but unless they really enhance a person’s productivity don’t be misleading. Besides if you really want to be productive then do the best thing possible and go multi monitor because I can tell you from experience that a simple thing like running dual monitors will do more for your productivity than anything else and you will never want to go back to using a single monitor. That’s productivity and you don’t need tabs.
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I need tabs! I use them all the time. Heres how. I use an RSS reader (google reader at the moment). As I browse through stories, some I want to dive in a little deeper but not right away. For these I command or control click (depending on which platform I am on) and it neatly opens the linked pages off to a tab in the background. This lets me continue reading until I am ready. At that time I click on the tab and read the story. When I get to the end of the tab I close it with a keystroke and my next page is waiting there preloaded and ready to go.
This is also a great way to look at photos. Ever go to a flickr page that has hundreds of photos? Don’t want to go through the whole slide show just to see larger versions of a few? Control click the ones you want and they line up in the background in tabs. Then browse through them with no load time and only see the ones you want.
Greg:
Hey I think tabs are great as well .. they are damn cool and one of the best things to happen to browsers. The point I was trying to make is that to claim they make the user more productive is wrong.
Myself I use them alot and will quite often have any number of browser tabs open if I am working on a post. But having to switch back and forth between them as I try and develop my points or grab sections to quote is not productive as if all theose browser tabs were tiled so I could access them at a glance.
Steve, I think you’ve got it a bit sideways here mate. My experience is that tabs make my work a LOT more productive. I’ve got 7 tabs open at the moment, including Google Reader, your blog an a couple of others that I intend to comment on.
Tabs are far superior than the previous situation of having multiple browser windows open and having to minimize and maximize then or juggle them around as you required different content from different windows.
I think the point is that tabs do not increase productivity as much as the could. But saying that they don’t increase productivity at all is the major fallacy.
Paul:
simple question – how is switching between tabs any different that switching between windows?
I do agree with your second point and I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t some gains in productivity but the original claim by tabbed browsing proponents was that the feature was the best thing around to make your computing life more productive. that is the point I was trying to disprove.
Sure the title of the post might have been stretching it a bit but I still stand by the premise of the post.
From one point of view switching between tabs is exactly the same as switching between windows, but once the number of tabs and windows begins to increase it becomes increasingly more difficult to navigate between. Imagine your taskbar with 15 IE windows open.. Very difficult to navigate..
15 tabs on the other hand is a lot simpler..
Paul:
but with Grouping enabled for the XP Taskbar I can cycle through them just the same; or in Vista I can Win+Tab to cycle through them. While it is true there is some productivity gains it is still not the end all be all.
I guess my main point was that I felt it was disingenuous of the heavy breathing proponents to claim the degree of productivity that they do.
Just a sidenote for the sake of historical correctness Opera was the first tabbed browser.
to be a little more technically correct Opera wasn’t a “tabbed” browser in the beginning but rather used a MDI (Multi Document Interface) user interface.