I rarely open more than one browser window, so I just have to check the tabs in one place. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

If you have tabs, why open multiple browsers?

Hey Jeff, long time reader first time poster.

Umm... knowing that gmail is a website, wouldn't you first just look for any browsers you had open and see what their tabs say?

At most I have 2 separate browsers open because each one holds several tabs. That pretty much narrows my search down to 2 mouse click.

Like Chris, I keep only 1 browser open, or 2 at most (ff and IE) so looking for a site is as easy as opening firefox and looking through the tabs.

Another great program that can help is Enso. hold caps-lock and type in the name of the window/tab/program and it will find it and let you switch to it, and thats really only the basic capabilities of that program.

Hey Now Jeff,
Another good post, very interesting topic. Maybe you could followup with the memory usage using one IE window with 5 tabs open vs. 5 windows of IE open. I love tabs and constantly use the hotkeys Ctrl+Tab & Ctrl+Tab+Shift also Ctrl+Q to navigate though the tabs. I also really enjoy being able to open a group of tabs at once.
Thx,
Catto

With more than one monitor (and no self-respecting computer user should EVER have only one monitor), you need one instance of the browser per monitor. At least if you want to view things side by side.

I typically have at least 3 browser instances open at any given time. Sometimes many more.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, we only have one browser instance. That means 12+ tabs trapped inside that a single window. Any more and the titles are probably unreadable. And how do you deal with the dissonance between Alt+Tab (switch apps) and Ctrl+Tab (switch tabs within an app)?

1. I use TabMix Plus and force single browser working.
2. Why bother searching for an open tab? Just open a new GMail tab and close it when you're finished.
3. If you do insist on having one open, have a system e.g. tab 1 is http:/gmail.com , tab 2 is http://takemystuff.co.uk , tab 3 is http://slashdot.org etc. then protect those tabs to prevent accidental closing. Then you can go to your single browser instance and press alt-1 to get gmail.

I use the same method for screen 'tabs' e.g. tab 5 is mysql etc.

I'd encourage you to check out www.humanized.com
They have a product called enso which is pretty unique (PC only)

I agree with the previous comments about using a single window to reduce site hunting, however, I sometimes find myself opening so may tabs that some become invisible in Firefox. That leads me to being in Jeff's position as well. Perhaps when I'm doing research I should open a special browser window for it or something.

I for one am all for Tabs. In fact I don't know if I can live without tabs!

1. I couldn't live without tabs. It's much easier to find, say, Visual Studio when I only have to look through 20-30 app windows. If my 10-250 web pages each had their own app window, I'd be *doomed* (yes, I know I have a problem :P).
2. Of course, it would be terrible to look for gmail through 250 tabs, even with an excellently shrunken skin and tabs on the side -- that can typically handle only around 50 tabs (this is with Opera...Firefox and IE have no chance of holding up to my browsing style). Typically I deal with the issue by either closing gmail (or whatever) after each check, it being quick enough to reopen when needed, or by "tearing off" the tab into a separate browser window -- which you can do in Opera.
Sorry, this probably comes off as a fanboy post. I like Firefox, as it's got some fantastic extensions. I use it for my web development. It just can't deal with my (admittedly mental) day-to-day browsing :).

> Perhaps when I'm doing research I should open a special browser window for it or something.

Putting everything in one browser window seems a little crazy to me. Particularly if you have multiple monitors. Right now I have 9 instances of the browser open, a few on each of my 3 monitors-- so I can maximize the amount of the information I see at once.

I use tabs, too. I tend to open task-based browser instances, such that all the tabs in that browser are on a *related topic*. Thus, I'll have my bloglines browser (and related tabs).. my topic X research browser (and related tabs).. my communication browser (with twitter/hotmail/gmail tabs).. etcetera.

Tabs are great for organization, but it's so very hard to manage tabs. :(

How about you *remember* where you put your Gmail tab? Incidentally, even tabbed-browser-deluxe Firefox allows you to open what we in the business call a *new window* allowing you to put your Gmail into. The problem is not with tabs but with how you use 'em.

Incidentally, how about you use a stand-alone email application?

> It's much easier to find, say, Visual Studio when I only have to look through 20-30 app windows.

There is an important distinction between Visual Studio and web browsers, however.

The advantage of Visual Studio is that all the tabs are BY DEFINITION task-related, eg, they're tabs containing projects and files that are part of the current Visual Studio *solution*. Whereas a browser may have ten completely and utterly unrelated tabs open.

And if you need to open more than one solution.. you use multiple copies of Visual Studio, of course. Nobody would tell you to open five different solutions in one instance of Visual Studio. It's not even possible.

There's a natural container in Visual Studio, the "solution", which has "projects" and "files". There's no such logical grouping for the web browser.. although that is how I try to use my web browser. I group sites (tabs) by function, and per-monitor.

I love tabbed browsing. I open links in RSS feeds in new tabs(Strg+Click) and go through them one by one. If I want to get to the GMail tab, i can click on the little arrow button right to the tabs and see all my open tabs or I use Alt+1(hold always GMail) like Charles suggested.

Exposé for broswer - foXpose extension for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1457

I always believed (still do actually) that tabs were invented to reduce taskbar clutter.

If the number of tabs I use for work are reasnoble(sp), then I use a single window.
Otherwise, I tear them off to another window if it grows too large.
I sometimes have as many windows open as I have subjects to research.
But there is one window with my basic windows. GMail, Reader and Calendar, which I can always find.

If you allow Switcher, Flip, Expose to also show tabs, or even let the OS know of them, then you are instantly back to the taskbar clutter from hell.

> foXpose extension for Firefox:

IE7 has this built in, BTW, but I never use it.

Isn't it odd that we're duplicating what the operating system does inside the browser? (eg, Don't Repeat Yourself?) Isn't that symptomatic of the weird corner case we put ourselves in by relying so heavily on tabbed interface?

Jeff, I think any solution to this problem would have its scaling limits, since new organization issues would arise at any number of opened applications. Some might argue that the best long term solution is to keep the number of unnecessary open applications and browser instances to a minimum. At times I do have applications running that I really don't *need* running after all.

At times, it may be less productive to have 20 applications running concurrently that need to be found and switched to versus closing an application at the time it's not needed and then opening it again as need be.

I gotta agree with Winsmith--if you want Gmail to show up in the taskbar, open it in a new window. This gives you the flexibility to use tabs for most things and new windows for the few things you want quick access to.

Tabs are for grouping of actions.

I have one Chat-Window, One Browser, maybe even One Mailprogram opened. Expose and the Windows Taskbar make it easy to switch the Apps. And the App manages its instances with tabs.

The Problem starts, when you want to use two Browser-Windows. But if you need to do this, the app failed to provide a good experience with tabs. Or you do not use enough of it. Then you need to use no tabs at all.

I started to post something along the lines of "How about we just remember we opened gmail in the first place?" but that kind of violates the treat your users like they are idiots policy that most good UI's have. So, in theory, I agree with you, Jeff. However, in reality, I love tabbed IE and much like you I have several browsers open most of the time and they all contain related links.

.. the OCD minded might even always have gmail on their right monitor.

Tabs are for grouping of actions.

I have one Chat-Window, One Browser, maybe even One Mailprogram opened. Expose and the Windows Taskbar make it easy to switch the Apps. And the App manages its instances with tabs.

The Problem starts, when you want to use two Browser-Windows. But if you need to do this, the app failed to provide a good experience with tabs. Or you do not use enough of it. Then you need to use no tabs at all.

Why the heck would you need 9 tabbed browsers on 3 monitors? Even if you aren't using maximized browser windows you would need to have seriously crazy resolution and a microscope to view anything worthwhile on all 9 at the same time. I can (barely) see an argument for 1 browser window per monitor but 9 just seems silly. You have tabs, make use of them.

Even when i'm researching something I have 1, maybe 2 browser windows open, if I have to compare 2 sites...after that, things just get opened in tabs.

Mr Najmabadi's contention that the taskbar serves the purpose just as well also baffles me. Grouping kills the taskbar when you have multiple browser windows (or any application for that matter, try finding a particular remote desktop window when they are all grouped up) open since they all collapse into 1 taskbar entry. Turning off grouping just makes them shrink up until you can't read what they are anyway.

I suppose if you resist using tabs for what they are for or have really bad memory, tabs could be a pain.

Jeff, this post clearly shows that:
1) you multitasking too much
2) you need to find a better way of organizing your work environment

Usually like your posts, but this one is off for me.

P.S. You can install Gmail Notifier from Google - should save you some time.

FYI -- Safari 3.0 (beta) for Mac and Windows allows you to tear off a tab and either drop it on an existing browser window or it creates a new window.

Multiple browser windows aren't too bad in OS X because Expose supports just showing the windows for that particular application. I usually end up with 2-3 browser windows, and I use the 'Show all Windows for this App' hot corner instead of the 'Show all Windows' hot corner. Doing this, the tabs are quite readable in Expose and I can find the tab fairly easily.

I think the complaint about tabs is, whilst partly fair, missing the point.

The point (IMAO etc) is that the OS's application navigation is entirely incapable of managing large numbers of windows (I use XP, I let it occupy two rows of application buttons and above about 15 apps it becomes pretty miserable). Tabs exist largely because opening lots of browsers would not only cripple your ability to find the right web page, but also to find any other application. On XP, for instance, you'd have to either live with lots of taskbar buttons, or the (awful) cascading buttons which not only bring you back to the same navigability as tabbed browsing, but add the issue of finding hidden windows to *every* application, not just the web browser.

Browsers have been forced to take the law into their own hands, and the way in which they've done so is still little more than a nascent design: it doesn't, for instance, retain any semantic value from understanding links and domains, which could give a much richer structure to navigating the pages you have open.

As you suggest, the OS needs a more usable means of managing its applications (perhaps with features like search, reordering, renaming etc). Until then, tabs are a sensible response to an inadequate platform.

"Incidentally, how about you use a stand-alone email application?"

Because that only makes sense if you use one computer exclusively?

Another take on the "why would you EVER need more than one web browser" question, via comments on Cyrus' blog:

--
Because that's how I work. I'm often working on multiple tasks simultaneously, many of which need access to the web. For example, I might be browsing specifications on our intranet. I might be reading documentation on the internet. And I might just be reading news elsewhere around the net. These are three different tasks that i do *not* want one app holding onto.
--
(I agree-- the idea that there should only be The One Browser To Rule Them All seems faintly ridiculous to me)

> If you allow Switcher, Flip, Expose to also show tabs, or even let the OS know of them, then you are instantly back to the taskbar clutter from hell.

I'd argue we need a better/smarter taskbar then.

Or more/bigger monitors. :)

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much desktop display area! More and bigger (preferably both) monitors is an investment that pays off.

I seriously can't understand why you would want to have several browsers open at the same time even if you have 3 monitors. It's the whole point of tabbed interfaces. Just one browser for all the web-sites you have open. I normally have about 35 sites open and all is in one browser-window. I never have any trouble in finding one specific tab.

Jeff,

I don't see where the peculiarities of your browser usage warrant the kind of integration between the web-browser and window manager you're talking about. One browser per monitor is a defensible proposition, yes, but how hard can it be to switch focus to each instance and look, on your (presumably maximized) window for the gmail tab? If you have multiple browsers open, then I've got to question whether you're doing everything YOU, as a savvy user, can to avoid this problem (which is unlikely to occur for a less skilled user). This is not to say that tabbed interfaces are perfect - I, for one, would love to see tab drag-and-drop functionality between multiple instances of the same browser (I drag one tab from my left monitor's instance of Firefox to the right - especially easy since Firefox shares session info already). However, I think separation of concerns is the hallmark of effective software, and blowing that away just to make a highly unusual edge use case easier seems a poor trade.

> if you want Gmail to show up in the taskbar, open it in a new window. This gives you the flexibility to use tabs for most things and new windows for the few things you want quick access to.

I agree, but I have to remember to do this, every time. Sometimes I slip or forget.

Again, the disconnect between Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Tab-- it's highly modal, and users hate modes. It's so hard to remember which one you're in at any given time. Is this a tab? Is it a window? Why should *I* have to worry about treating them so differently?

> a plain-text search facility where I type "Gmail", and the OS would automatically highlight that tab (or window) and bring it to the front

Jeff, I had the same thought as I was reading your post as the one that you concluded with: via some text-based interface (something like a more powerful version of the Run dialog), the user should be able to type "gmail" and have their browser window and tab where gmail is already running be brought to the foreground and given the focus.

A few additions to, and caveats on, that idea:

- How does the OS (or whatever application is providing the "search" interface) know that "gmail" maps to "browser window pointed to: mail.google.com/mail"? Possibly through some user-defined set of mappings like Slickrun uses. It wouldn't be too painful to set up each mapping manually provided that you only have to do it once ever.

- What if I already have two or more instances of gmail running? Which one gets brought to the foreground; or do all of them?

- The feature would need to be smart enough to launch gmail if it isn't already running. Where would it get launched? In a new browser window, or in a new tab in one of my existing browser windows? Which browser window would be used for this?

- For some things, I might *want* to open a 2nd new copy when I type the keyword instead of having the interface find and activate my already existing copy. For example, if I already have a browser tab open showing a page of Google search results, and I type "Google", does that mean I want to find my existing Google tab, or does that mean I want to open a new tab pointed to google.com? Maybe this could be handled with the keystroke used to launch the search; Enter could mean "open a new instance", while Ctrl+Enter could mean "find my existing instance", or vice-versa.

... on the other hand, you could not use the browser tabs at all. If you consider the system taskbar as a tab-engine itself, then you could just open many windows as you need and still see it's contents.

> (I agree-- the idea that there should only be The One Browser To Rule Them All seems faintly ridiculous to me)

Ok, but then you willfully choose to destroy the whole point of tabs-in-browsers and would probably be better off without any tab-support at all. Use either one or the other. Not a mix. That just have to become a mess.

9 tabbed browsers on 3 monitors is not just faintly ridiculous but totally laughable...

Hello. My name is Peter and I'm a tabbing addict...

I always setup my browsing windows by topic, tabs then being the subtopics. For instance I've got gmail, work's web-mail, slashdot and this site open in one window, and some python/perl cruft open in a separate window, etc.

This can become a problem in the default Firefox without the TabMixPlus extension because of the "tab mash" as I call it. With the TabMixPlus extension you can modify how the tabs work in a number of different ways. I prefer multiple rows of tabs, so thats what I use.

This completely fails with Expose & Friends, but then I don't tend to use those methods very much - probably for that very reason. The best implementation of tabs I've seen is on Linux using the window manager Flux Box which allows you to take any individual window and stick it into a tab - aka system wide tabs. Then Firefox, or any program for that matter, can be tabbed and the individual program tabbing can be ditched. Flux Box is a light-weight window manager based of Black Box and therefore off of Window Maker and inherits that history.

I would really like to see this feature ported to other systems, it might be possible with OSX - at least for Aqua based programs, and should be easy for Gnome/KDE. No idea how flexible Windows is about such modification.

Alternately, Cyrus proposed this solution, which is intriguing too:

--
New idea: If I Exposé my windows then all browser tabs should fly out and be shown in the Exposéd view. I can then select a web page that I want, which will brought to focus with the appropriate tab selected. That would be *awesome*
--

Indeed, that would be awesome! But it'd have to somehow work for EVERY app that has a tabbed interface. Otherwise you'd be hard-coding this Expose / Switcher behavior in for specific apps.

For me, tabs are not a way to view a ton of web pages I have open at once, they're a queue. Usually only the first tab is something that is a long-running thing I want to look at (like GMail). Anything else is stuff that is "pending" my attention.

I start out in the morning reading through NetNewsWire; anything that looks interesting, I hit enter (to open in Safari) and then switch back to NNW to continue scanning the day's news.

When I have time, I start at tab #2 in my browser. (#1 is GMail), and then I read the stuff that interested me, hitting command+w to close the tab when I'm done.

Solution is simple: don't mix tabs with multiple browser windows. I only have 1 browser window.

tabs are to windows as threads are to processes.

You need a system where tabbed interface elements show up in your task switcher- basically, the default task switcher is operating at the wrong level of abstraction. It's switching between applications, and you need it to switch between tasks.

Is there a way to register individual aspects of a program on the task bar? Otherwise, you'd need to a) create a standard way for apps to register their tasks, b) convince some app developers to implement it, and c) write / improve a better task switcher to implement it. This level of innovation typically requires the platform vendor to drive it- anyone at MS want to fix the task manager in a way that blows doors off of OS X?

I'd like to second what David said. Stick to one browser window. If you need lots of tabs open, get Opera and move the tabbar off to the left side.

I've been using tabbed browsing in opera and firefox for so long that it's second nature to use them. You can ctrl + tab between tabs just like you alt+tab between applications - I don't even think about it anymore.

I dunno - I can't imagine NOT having tabs.

I use the tab bar as a 'tab stack' new tabs get pushed onto the right and popped off the right side. I have tabbar expandable to 3 rows (although you can still navigate to tabs which overflow via keyboard).

Close all right tabs option is great for clearing off a whole branch of a tab research session (you just need to remember to do a depth first search using this method).

If you really want to organise tabs, you can load and save your tab sessions into the bookmark. Or use tab groups: http://paranoid-androids.com/tabgroups/

If you have no system, and open multiple browsers, multiple tabs, don't order/structure your tabs and windows, it isn't entirely surprising you end up in a mess.

Tabs are powerful enough to provide order as long as you apply a systematic way of using them.

Jeff, Opera does exactly what you want.

First, Opera, unlike Firefox, does scale the tabs down to favicon-size, and doesn't hide them when there are too many. This way, if you had 1 window open with all your tabs you could have easily found the GMail favicon. It also lessens the need to use multiple windows.

Second, Opera already has what you describe - the "tab finder". It shows a list of all the tabs in all Opera windows you have open, and has a quicksearch-box at the top. Type "GM" and it will show any tabs that have "GM" in the title, which you can then click to directly go to the tab.

Check the screenies for how it works: http://img.crowdway.com/opera_windows_all.png and http://img.crowdway.com/opera_windows_gmail.png

Third. If you did close a window, you can make it come back at any time using the trash-feature. It saves everything you ever closed, including "back" and "forward" history. Even a quick CTRL-Z will undo your close.

Ho - those are the same reasons I'm starting to dislike tabs! Generally I open 20'ish tabs in each window, however tab management has however become a less complicated issue for me:

1. I use enso launcher, which lets you switch between windows and tabs by typing "go [any part of name]" of the webpage/window title you want. So you'd just type "go gmail"..

2. Quick Tabs is actually helpful. Its previews are not, but I read the titles beneath every tile and if two or more have same title, the preview helps a bit in differentiating them.

So, unsurprisingly we have come to the conclusion that we all use tabs in browsers, IDEs, email clients and so on in different ways.

For me, I have one monitor and many browsers, each with several tabs. It's the way I work. There, let's accept we all use them differently and have done with it (and stop saying "if you used them this way you wouldn't have the problem". I don't use them that way and I'm unlikely to change, I'm sorry).

If I'm browsing to a site I'll tend to open a new browser window, whether as I'll usually open links in a new tab. Each window thus becomes a "subject group" of tabs. Accordingly, it's generally easy to find the right window to look in.

It's interesting to see the multitude of different ways people are using tabs -- and a fine example of the problems designing a decent task switching UI will come across, as frankly they are all rubbish right now. That the verb "hunt" comes up when we're talking is very telling.

As an aside, for a lot of *websites* this point is moot. Sites are mostly stateless, so it doesn't matter whether you use an existing tab or a new one. For example, Gmail's auto-refresh means that the windows don't fall out of sync with each other. So, open as many windows as you like :)

The reason that there are tabs is that the windowing systems of all major OSs suck so bad that workarounds needed to be found.

If there was a reasonable way in Windows to have lots of windows open, then people would use it; since there isn't (wasn't?), tabs had to function as a workaround.

Your search idea is interesting... it sounds like something that Quicksilver would do already on the Mac (but it might not -- I'm not all the way through the learning curve yet).

Check out http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ and look at the screencasts, as it's tricky to understand from just text-based description. Basically you hit a shortcut key combo and type in the name of what you're looking for (often files, but extensions allow it to address everything, including menu items) then you type in what you want to do with it (or just press enter to activate the default action, which is usually 'open' or 'run').

As to Cyrus whereabouts: apparently he's working on the C# compiler team. Eric Lippert mentioned him on his blog a couple of days ago: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2007/09/05/psychic-debugging-part-one.aspx. Maybe Eric can give him a nudge for you!

This article isn't documenting a failure of the tabbed window paradigm. It's documenting the failure of operating system GUIs to deal effectively with tabbed windows. The two are definitely not the same.

Just my twocents.

It's only available for OS X, but Omniweb http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/ features a drawer with resizable thumbnail graphics of all open tabs. Very easy to scan and pick which window you're seeking.

Not that I'm one of those snarky kidz who earnestly suggests that everyone should switch to his favorite browser that happens to solve this particular problem, but I did want to point out a UI metaphor that helps this quite a bit.

The OmniWeb browser on the Macs approaches the same problem that tabs try to solve in a slightly different way. Instead of a small tab widget whose only identifier is a text-based label, OmniWeb instead uses a thumbnail for each tab (stacked vertically in a side-docked "drawer"). The size of the thumbnails can be dialed up or down at will by expanding the width of that drawer.

Ignoring the allowance this provides for dedicating more real-estate to each tab's "identifer", this has the huge advantage of leveraging the human brain's vastly-superior image-processing capabilities.

So while the brain doesn't have a prayer of reading (much less quickly scanning for) a text label "GMail" that Exposé has shrunk to a fraction of its previously already-quite-small size, I typically find that I can find which of my 3 or 4 browser windows is running GMail.

And, as you're so apt to point out - I can do this all in the same time (thanks to Exposé and my brain's evolutionarily-critical dinosaur-avoidance^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhigh-speed image processing capabilities) that it would take me to open a new GMail tab/window.

On the topic of tabs... I think the point is to only have one window of the tabbed app open. Then you aren't looking for gmail, you're looking for the browser (much easier to find).

A compromise would be to have things you *keep* open (such as web-based email or rss clients) in separate windows and *everything* else in ONE tabbed window. Best of both worlds?

Jeff, I get the feeling you'd be organizationally challenged whatever tool/solution you happened to be using. Some people are like that...

I've got a bit of a problem with this - I don't see why you need more than one browser/text editor/whatever window, if you have tabs? Surely if you had one browser window with some tabs open, you could just alt-tab to your browser and check the tabs?

The reason that this problem exists, is because you're not managing your windows/tabs effectively. This is not a problem that can be solved by any UI or tool, it can only be solved by mending your ways...

"Otherwise you'd be hard-coding this Expose / Switcher behavior in for specific apps."

Well, IE7 has this feature built-in, and Firefox can be expanded with it via Addons.

More than that, to check your Google (or other e-)mail there are desktop apps for this task, and Firefox addons that can show the inbox status on the status bar of your browser.

Of course, this is a data mining problem, and I assume your example of checking your mail was just an example. But still, I believe this is just a problem related to disorganization.

Stay consistent and organized in how you do things (always open your e-mail -tab in a browser on the same screen etc) and life will smile on you a little more every day.

Jeff -

I have a gmail account as well - assuming that you also use Outlook - why not setup outlook to check your gmail account as another pop account.

I would also recommend using the IE7 Expose like feature - alt-tab to the correct browser and CTRL + Q and you should be able to see your gmail if you prefer opening it in a web browser instead of outlook.

Cheers

On my laptop as I am bound by the available retail space on this 15" widescreen I typically have one or two browser windows open throughout the day.

As for finding the designated website available in a tab, I agree that there is a 'hunt' process to determine which browser is associated with the tab you are looking for.

I exercise two swift shortcuts typically, alt-tab and ctrl-tab just like you do in order to find the site (typically recorgnized by the under-appreciated favicon).

* On an off-topic related note, where can I get your desktop wallpaper Jeff? Thanks in advance *

Separate windows (thus taskbar items) or Tabs? Why not both?

Why not let the user cluster windows/apps into either tab groups or into single windows with tabs?
It would require the windowing and organization aspect of apps to be moved into a basic OS feature, and the ability to over-customize would be a rather strong productivity loss for some, but sounds like the right way to go.
Letting the applications manage their own windows and decoration seems to have led to inconsistent and jarring user interfaces (particularly in the audio player space). I'd rather have more consistency thru the base OS windowing system (and, of course, central and consistent CONTROL at the same time).

You should just use tabs the sane way, keep stuff you're researching that's actually _related_ in one tabbed window, but do other stuff elsewhere. you can't go round blaming tabbed interfaces for your own incompetence keeping your tabs organised... :p

P.S. i obviously have the same problem

So the sequence is

Win 3.1
The tasks you are running are windows switch with Alt-Tab or find the window
Problem : Alt-Tab is uninformative and it's hard to move the windows to find the one I want

Windows 95 The tasks you are running are Windows and on the taskbar switch with Alt-Tab or by selecting the program on the taskbar

Problem : Alt-Tab is still uninformative and the taskbar is cluttered and so the window names are hidden

Windows XP The tasks you are running are Windows and grouped on the taskbar switch with alt-tab or by selecting the group and then the window on the taskbar

Problem : Alt-Tab is still no better and the most of my taskbar consists of groups so I cannot see any window names

One Solution get the apps to have their own taskbars (tabs) rather than separate windows

Windows Vista The tasks you are running are Windows and grouped on the taskbar switch with alt-tab or by selecting the group and then the window on the taskbar

Problem : Alt-Tab is now much better but now the apps have their own tabbars you can't see them in the preview

It seems that the problem is task switching is broken and always has been so ad-hoc partial solutions were put in place that break the solution when it finally arrives .... Sounds familiar

From my experience I use tabs in browsers so that I don't have multiple browser windows all different sizes scattered all over the screen .. tabs are tidier

Well, I use 2 monitors on my workstation and I've came to realize that having one browser instance for each monitor is the best solution for me (Like Jeff's). I group similar tabs in the same browser instance and can do some comparisons quickly. As for getting lost... I've gotten used to my setup and I'm very picky about where I put my windows and tabs. This allows me to quickly know that on the left monitor is my "researching" browser with Tabs open to all the open source websites, search results, and so on. I usually keep one instance of FireFox open also for comparison when building a web application. Gotta be compatible, right?;) As far as the aggrivation, I can see where it comes from, but if you're as organized as you lead on to be, you shouldn't have any problem finding the window you want. You know that you have one window for communication, therefore, wouldn't GMail be in that browser window? And you know that in your communication browser you keep hotmail, twitter, ect. This makes it even easier, you could scan the taskbar for one of the "common communication" sites and when you see it, you know that that's the browser instance with the tab for your GMail. This method has worked for me since I made the jump into Tabbed browsing. Great post, Jeff. Keep 'em comin'!

> whatever happened to Cyrus?

I think initial reports indicated that The Warriors had shot Cyrus. But that was later found to be incorrect and one of The Rogues was identified as the shooter. In fact, it was The Rogues that spread the false accusation from the beginning.

I've never had a problem finding just exactly where i have put my gmail tabs before, and i usually run 2-3 Firefox instances at once. I usually put gmail as the first or second tab, and then i just remember which window i had open, if you're not using the group-task feature, you can usually remember which window had the gmail page up for you. While i dont use multiple monitors, I do use multiple desktops. It is for me a lot better than a multiple monitor setup, especially because I'm poor, and I dont have a lot of deskspace. Expose and all the other utilities i've seen for window management aren't really effective if you ask me, if anything its for the rediculously small nature of the thumbnails. If you work with half the programs open that i do, when you tile all your windows on your screens to tell what you're doing, you'll be looking at 250x250 pixel representations of the windows.

Honestly i've always hated expose and all of its clones, such as your registry hack, and the strangely done version in beryl. Though iirc beryl is the only one that will zoom in on the window when you move over it. At any rate, i find it very hard to effectively use. Since if i have my taskbar, and my virtual desktops set the way i want them, everything is organized quite well.

I've enjoyed the small touches of the Firebox sibling SeaMonkey. They have a nice feature where if you hover over a tab heading you get a mini-preview image of what the tab looks like. Great for knowing what is there, but also for checking on a slow loading website.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en&answer=6594

First of all, let me say that I really love the tabbed interface. However, what I find frustrating is that so far I have run across 3 separate tabbing paradigms that require me to change how my mind thinks of them.
1. Early Firefox/VS 2003 model.
The X is to the right of all tabs and static. To close a tab, click the X.
New tabs appear to the right of all previously opened tabs.
I can see how this annoyed people that wanted to close a tab in the middle: click the tab to activate, then move the mouse all the way to the right to close.

2. Firefox 2.x/IE7(?)
The X is on the tab itself. Click to activate the tab itself, and the X is right there.
New tabs open to the right of existing tabs.
I found that having the X on the tab itself difficult to get used to, because the tabs resize, and when I found myself wanting to close tabs quickly, I found myself searching for the X, because the tabs resize as more or less of them appear.

3. The Visual Studio/SQL Server 2005 model.
Single X to the right of the tabs.
New tabs appear to the LEFT of existing tabs, and push all existing tabs to the right. For some reason, I found this behavior very very confusing.
4. Any others???

So in 4 pieces of software that I use on a regular basis (sometimes all in the same day!), I have to force myself to remember what kind of tabs I'm working with.
What are your experiences with this? Which tabbing model do you prefer?

My biggest complaint to firefox's tab handling is that if you have 2 windows, you cannot drag a tab from one window to another one : it behaves like if it was a completely different browser.

Opera does this the right way though.

Enso (http://www.humanized.com/) is an application launcher. One if it's features is a task switcher, so you can use its CLI to "go Word" etc. A nice extension of this is that it understands Firefox tabs, so you can type "go Gmail" and you would find it instantly.

One important thing is: *either* use tabs *or* windows on Firefox. It's useless and inscrutable to me why one would mix them together. So I have only one Firefox window will some tabs in it, where I need to hunt for a certain open page. And one should use an add-in like "Firefox Showcase" to see all opened tabs at a glance, so switching to the correct tab is done in a sec.

I also hate tabs in the web browser (which is why I turn them off immediately). On the other hand, I like the tabbed MDI interface in Visual Studio (and SQL Management Studio) because, there, I'm thinking about a collection of things that belong to a common project.

3 instances of firefox with multiple tabs in each. What are you some kind of super human web crawler? Maybe you should stack three more monitors on top and setup another box just to run all your web browsers.

This post is just silly. Why have multiple browser instances when you can have tabs? If you have multiple instances for logical grouping, then you'd know where your email accounts are. Hard as I try, I can't see the problem.

In Gnome I use gmail-notify to provide Outlook style alerts for incoming e-mail. Clicking the alert opens a new tabbed instance of GMail. When I'm done reading, I close the tab. I know this type of alert can be annoying, but it helps me keep my Firefox tabs to a minimum. Perhaps an Exposeish extension for Firefox would be a good idea? Hovering over an area on the browser could provide a icons (favicon) of each of the tabs?

I have to agree with quite a few of the comments here. I think that you're a bit too disorganized. Learn how to work with two monitors before you rush into losing yourself with 3.

If you can't find where you left something on your computer desktop then shame on you. What hope for the mess of your real desktop?

You don't need 3 browsers - one of them is just giving you distractions anyway. Sure you want to compare things side by side. Open a new window and close it when you're done. Move the browser from screen to screen if need be (you can find with Alt-tab).

Forgetting to open your email account is another cop out. (Dog ate your homework as well at some stage). Set it as a homepage so it starts when the browser does (this is a new feature in some browsers).

You can be too thin! I guess that you can have too much desktop as well.

I use two monitors and two browsers (different ones). Both with tabs. No pages identical in either (unless I'm testing how things work on each browser).

Maybe you need a PA? Could be a little animated one that would tap on the screen when you're trying to find something. "It's looks like you're trying to find your shoes."

I agree with everything else you said.

Terrible article, Jeff, I'm disappointed in you. Why would you open multiple browsers? The problem is you're still trying to use the OLD paradigm of multiple windows and half-ass integrate tabs. One browser window, multiple tabs, get with the new paradigm.

Would I be right in guessing that the several respondents who seem incredulous that side-by-side browsing could ever be useful are people who use single monitors?

There are many times when it's useful to view information in one application whilst typing into another. Often these are two different applications, but if they're web-based then they'll both reside in web browsers. I can fully understand the requirement (or desire, at least) to manage tabs across multiple browser windows.

On a single screen, this style of working is almost prohibited by the lack of real estate, but once you have multiple screens this sort of thing suddenly becomes a no-cost option.

The use of big multiple screens is what windowing operating systems have been waiting for since whenever it was they were invented :)

As far as not being able to see the tabs, it's not a problem in Firefox. There is a drop-down at the far-right of the tabs. Click it and you get a select list of all tabs with favicons.

---- Jeff wrote ----
The only thing I can think of is a plain-text search facility where I type "Gmail", and the OS would automatically highlight that tab (or window) and bring it to the front. That presupposes a very high level of integration between the application tabs and the operating system, however.
----

There is an application out there that already has this kind of functionality, namely you hit a short-cut key (CAPS in this case) and then type 'go' and then part of the name of the tab/window you're looking for, instantly on screen a complete list of windows/tabs that match your search are listed on screen. If the tab/window you're looking for is already selected you just release the short-cut key and the window is automatically focused, you don't even need to type the full name!

They have some other nice features as well, like searching google using the same mechanism of the short-cut key to search interface.

Check it out here (warning the product is not free but is low-cost, they have a 30-day free trial):

http://www.humanized.com/

P.S. I have no links with this company, I just found the software recently myself and have been finding it quite useful.

Cyrus isn't dead, he's just sleeping.
And posting over on Ars Technica's programming forums as Metasyntactic. ( http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve?a=profile&u=5880993965 )
If you want to find him, just player hate on IntelliSense in VS 2005 and *he will appear*.
Nominally back on-subject, I hated tabs when I started using tabbed browsers for the same reason - I'd be using multiple browser instances and finding the tab I wanted became an infuriating game of hide-and-seek. When I cut back to a single browser and oodles of tabs, I started to see the point of them.
That said, tabs can be used for evil - VS 2005's "open new tabs on the left instead of the right like everyone else in the world" and "let me show you the directory name instead of the file name" tab handling leave me wanting to throttle whoever made the call on that all.

Umm, I either didnt get a point with multiple browsers if you have a tabs, but its up to your own work style. In your case Ctrl+Q can help - leave your browser window in "Quick Tabs" mode before switch and I think you can easily fing Gmail window even in tabs :)

I would rename this article.

The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces ON THREE MONITORS

Most people run one browser with many tabs, on one screen.
That is 95% or more of users out there.

Umm, I either didnt get a point with multiple browsers if you have a tabs, but its up to your own work style. In your case Ctrl+Q can help - leave your browser window in "Quick Tabs" mode before switch and I think you can easily find Gmail window even in tabs :)

Why do you care so much about opening another instance of gmail? I just timed it, it took about 4.5 seconds on my system to open up a new tab with gmail in it. If you have 30-40 browser windows open, it'll take much much longer than 4.5 seconds for you to find gmail (unless you use a organizational system, as other have suggested)

I'm definitely not saying that tabs are the best solution to the problem. And the taskbar is definitely not the best method to organize windows. But the specific example you use shouldn't be an issue. Use a favorites bar and put gmail there, or, like me, use gmail notifier for firefox, which gives you a status bar button. If you have a tab already open in gmail, it'll even switch to that tab instead of opening a new one. Then simply click on that. Any time you want to go to gmail, click on the button. It's simple, it works, and it doesn't hurt to have multiple instances of gmail open.

If it hasn't already been mentioned, 'Tab to Window' is lighter weight than tabmixplus and provides you with 'Move to New Window', 'Copy to new Window', and 'Join to Window' when you right click on a tab.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2062

sorry for doublepost - I thought my browser didnt send first time =( (and fixed typo :) )

>>Would I be right in guessing that the several respondents who seem incredulous that side-by-side browsing could ever be useful are people who use single monitors?<<

Side-by-side browsing is one thing, 9 browser windows on 3 monitors is something entirely different. I use 3 monitors myself and find that thought of having 9 browsers open across them terribly inefficient.

You mean you can't navigate tabs using window navigation techniques? Ummm.... OK.

Website? Browser window.

sounds like someone should write an extension for launchy which indexes any open browser window tabs.

I use launchy at the moment to index all the .cs files in the branch I am working on. Rather than scrolling through the horrific solution explorer, i just think of the source file, ctrl-alt and voila!

I guess I'm wondering what the problem is.

In IE 7:
Tools > Internet Options > Tabs > Settings button
Uncheck "Enabled Tabbed Browsing"
Restart IE

In Firefox it looks like this is the closest you can come:
Tools > Options > Tabs
Select "New pages should be opened in a new window"
Uncheck "Always show the tab bar"
Click OK

Unfortunately even with these changes if you hit CTRL+T in Firefox (but not IE 7) you still get a new tab. There may be some way in about:config to completely disable tabs, but I was too lazy to Google for it.

But honestly, if tabbed browsing doesn't suit your work style, then simply TURN IT OFF.

I doubt Jeff's work style is typical of most computer users and so as an atypical computer user, he should expect that, from time-to-time, the default options in software (such as tabbed browsing being enabled) will not suit him and he should expect to have to modify those settings.

To all the debate about whether tabbed browser is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or the spawn of Satan I say DO WHATEVER YOU WANT. The two most popular web browsers provide a way to (mostly) disable the feature, or enable it, or even customize the behaviour. So set it up the way that suits your work style and let everyone else do the same.

I saw Cyrus back in April. He is doing well. =) Great guy.

I think you're just a little disorganised :)

I never have less than 30 web pages open, along with all the other crap I need constantly, and I always know exactly where everything is due to having a very simple and easy "filing" system regarding where windows and tabs go. Firefox's Ctrl-{1,2,3,etc} for fast tab negotiating also really helps. For example, my Gmail is always open at Ctrl-3.

Tabs have truly helped me organise my busy desktop, but only because I keep things organised.

Uhhh, Jeff, just like you should never try to juggle more balls than you can handle (in my case 2), you should never open more windows than your mind can easily cope with.

I love FF tabs. If I try to close a FF browser window with > 1 tab, it warns me.

Switcher 2 has some searching capabilities built in. Check out the video.

http://lifehacker.com/software/featured-windows-download/manage-your-windows-with-switcher-2-296324.php

Indeed, Cyrus is one of my coworkers. I will tell him that you miss him. (And yeah, I wish he would blog more too.)

Hey, for what it's worth, I think a lot of posters are missing the forest for the trees. Whether Jeff's way of working makes sense to you or not, tabs are great but have some problems. What should we do about them? I think the idea of a search capability has the potential to solve a much larger class of problems. I'll also bet money Google's got people working on it. :)

The tabbed browsing feature should only be used by those more comfortable with computers. It would be a nightmare explaining tabbed browsing to a first time internet user.

What I do so that my browsing does not get out of control, is only open one copy of my favorite browser (Firefox) at a time. That way, I know all my browsing is done in one place. So, to look for my G-mail I open that window and find the right tab. Doing this limits the amount of windows listed on the taskbar (making it easier to find other windows as well as my browser).

"The only thing I can think of is a plain-text search facility where I type "Gmail", and the OS would automatically highlight that tab (or window) and bring it to the front."

Jeff - Why the need for more complexity for the OS. At what point does the search madness end. If we start having searches for everything, we're just adding more complexity to the OS.

I propose a much simpler solution. Tooltips! Currently, when a user positions their mouse over the browser (IE/Firefox/Opera/etc) in the taskbar, it generally shows the name of the webpage that is active. Why not have the tooltip enumerate the tabs open such as:

1. Coding Horror: The Problem With Tabbed Interfaces
2. Welcome to Gmail - Windows Internet Explorer.

The simplicity of this is that now, if you have a number of browser windows open, its just a matter of looking at the tooltip text with a mouse over. Not only that, but the tooltip can now be managed by the browser itself rather than the OS. I would prefer my OS to delegate this task to the browsers.

There seems to be something missing that would solve this. If in windows, I can hover my mouse cursor over the taskbar and get the title of the window. How hard would it be to extend that for browsers, etc., that have tabs.

Instead of just seeing the title of the main window, how about seeing the title of the tabs each on their own line, and the active one in bold?

Something like this (one window- five tabs):

Internet Explorer-
-IGoogle
-CNN.com
-<B>Coding Horror: The Problem...</B>
-Yahoo.com
-etc.

Instead of this (one window- five tabs):
Coding Horror: The Problem...

To each his own but I LOVE tabs. I HATE 8,000 open windows all over the place.

While I don't seem to have such a hard time remembering where things are, I think the search idea is a good one. Why couldn't Vista search also include running processes, and/or select attributes such as the title of a browser tabs, and include them in its result set. That way the search would become the alt+tab functionality if the result selected is already a running process.

I really don't see what the big deal is. Forget about finding GMail in the tabs. Just open a new instance of GMail in a browser somewhere, read your email, then close it when done. There's nothing wrong with having multiple instances open.

Definitely don't get your point here. How can you have a need for 9 open browsers? Don't you close things when you're done with them? They'll still be there, you know, if you need to get back to it later...

Like my grandma used to say, sometimes it's not the car, it's the nut behind the wheel.

Jeff, tabs aren't the problem. The taskbar is; the only time everything goes all to hell is when you start becoming dependent on the taskbar for your navigation.

I rarely maximize my windows. I prefer to leave them cascaded - they're much easier to find that way. The screen looks more "cluttered", but so what? If you want to use one app without distraction, then maximize it while using it, and restore it when finished. I typically leave certain apps in the same place on the screen all the time, and I develop patterns. If I have to re-arrange my windows for some reason, alt-tab is a much faster way to find what I'm looking for than tabs are. I only occasionally go to the task bar.

> I wish I could "tear off" tabs into standalone windows on demand, too. That might be a reasonable workaround in the meantime.

Safari 3.0 has a "Move Tab to New Window" context menu on each tab that does exactly what you want. In Firefox, you can open a new window and drag a single tab to it, accomplishing the same thing in 2 steps.

You could try being a little more organized with your windows. Each morning on computer 1 I launch Outlook, Firefox, then my QA directory. Then from there any programs, docs I'll be working on throughout the day that will be constantly closed and re-opened, yet never touching the first 3 that I opened. In Firefox, in tab 1 I launch our internal website then our issue traking system, once again never touching those two tabs and opening/closing new tabs throughout the day. I'm a bit obsessive compulsive and like things in order. I've found it works for me and that's it's easier to find what I need quickly and I'm more efficient. I used to do this working in a manufacturing environment. All my tools were lined up in the order I would be using them and I just applied that concept to working on a computer. But I do like your idea of being able to tear off a tab into a standalone browser. That could come in handy.

Oh gosh and golly, people sure are good at making problems. I mean i can understand people whose computer experiences are some what limited, but i'd expect people who deal with computers on this level to be able to form some kind of consensus with the surrounding they're "living" in. Sorry for lashing out, but come on! You gotta say when sometime.

the problem you outline has me wondering about a related question:

why is launching an application any different from finding it on your screen? why should opening gmail be any different from finding your open gmail application?

i think the notion of starting up applications is a quaint architectural compromise. if you start something already launched, you should just be directed to that window. if you close an application, opening it again should be the same as "minimizing" it. there isn't any reason to make these separate actions.

My own two cents: Jeff seems to be able to work with 12+ different "documents" open at the same time. Having worked with a Mac a few years ago, I know that 7 or 8 is the max number of windows for which Exposé is the quicker solution. Above that, I just stare blankly at a crowd of rectangular figures, and it's Where's Waldo all over again.

GMail is in a tab, which is in a browser. 3 browsers, that's at most two clicks to know in which browser GMail is. It's like a search tree: above 8 documents, it's quicker for me to first go to the browsers and look through the tabs than to just linearly scan all the windows. Your mileage may vary.

Jeff, in the grand tradition of Context Switching Considered Harmful, may I suggest you took it as an exercise in mental focusing, and tried to only have documents related to the task you're currently dealing with open. That should reduce your tabbing problems.

Cheers!

Carl

For Windows, at least, it seems like it might be a nice feature if each browser instance in the taskbar expanded to show all of its tabs (a la the Start Menu). This way, a tab could be found AND selected from the task bar.

I try to keep open as few applications as possible that I need at one time. That way I don't get into the problem of multible tabs on multible browsers so often. Also I keep all the tabs of one functional matter on one browser.

But sometimes the problem does occur. Then I curse the feature, because I loop click apps, but I realize soon I need to loop the tabs too. When I use my computer, I want the using to be most effortless.

For example I have a vague image that I want to read news. I am tired and sleepy and I start looping apps, but then I have to keep track when I near the end of the apps. That tracking increases the effort. It would be better that all the tabs of all the browsers (or other programs) were looped with some other key combination.

Also I have found another annoying tab-feature. Some web programs open a new tab for example for an image. But then some other web programs open the image into the same tab. I have used to close the extra tab, but with some programs there is no extra tab. That way, I end up accidentally closing the actual tab. Keeping track of did the program open a new tab or not increases the amount of effort too. I don't say that its crucially critical to solve this "bug", but its still a kind of thing that could be made more innovative.

On Visual Studio or maybe SQL Management Server they have changed the loop order of tabs. Usually loop goes from the first to the next and so on. But now it goes from the latest to the second latest or so, and I don't care what pages I have used when. For example I see all the tabs, but looping doesn't follow the tab order but seemingly some mystical random looking order. Then when I want to go from a tab to the next, it instead loops into the second latest and so on.

"If we start having searches for everything, we're just adding more complexity to the OS."

Or, if you're from the Jef Raskin school of thought, having *a* search for everything removes complexity from both the OS and the applications that run on it :)

"i think the notion of starting up applications is a quaint architectural compromise. if you start something already launched, you should just be directed to that window. if you close an application, opening it again should be the same as "minimizing" it. there isn't any reason to make these separate actions."

Spot on.

"The only thing I can think of is a plain-text search facility where I type "Gmail" .... That presupposes a very high level of integration between the application tabs and the operating system, however."

This may be a dumb question from a non-tech person, but why do you have to go under the information to re-index and create a search function? Couldn't you write a plug in display type of thing which points at specified info (or the action of starting/opening something) in the browsers and the Task Manager(s)? It might be a little clumsy visually with several levels of location info, but maybe it could be viewed in a collapsible horizontal bar at the top of one screen rather than a sidebar. Kinda like a personal feed aggregator offline.

If this can't be done in Windows or Vista, I'm interested in understanding why. :)
Tim Howland's comment talks about a new level of abstraction in the task switcher, but this seems (to me) halfway between the first and second above. Also it seems to me that you'd actually have to plug into the different browsers themselves to identify tab location by layer. Once you had a basic protocol might it be easier to adapt to any browser?

Yeah Jeff, I'll be like the tenth guy with the same idea...

Don't open multiple browsers. If you have a tabbed browser and then open a new browser, you're defeating the whole Tabbed (or MDI) paradigm. At least the office MDIs forced you into one "application", but IE/Firefox don't do that.

Of course, Office lets you see multiple "tabs" as if they were actually separate apps. T

I've created a two browser approach to managing my life. I love Firefox and the extensions it provides, so I use Firefox for my main browsing tasks and checking Google Reader. But then I also have a single instance of IE7 running, with Meebo, GMail and Yahoo Mail open in tabs. This IE7 instance is my home base when I want to read IMs or catch up on emails. There are still some issues (links sent from friends open up in IE7, rather than where I want them in Firefox), but overall this system has been working quite well for me! I go into the reasons why I like Meebo over traditional IM clients here:

http://www.xanga.com/monsur/610344631/i-have-been-assimilated.html

> How can we integrate tabs with the existing navigational features of the operating system, such as the taskbar, and Exposé?

One elegant solution: web browsers (and other software which support tabs) could go automatically into their internal exposé mode whenever they are minimized or goes to background. This way, when a user is searching for the right tab using the OS level Exposé (or similar), they could see the thumbnails of the tabs inside the thumbnails of each window.
Of course the thumbnails would be very small, but big screen sizes and multiple monitors are becoming more popular, and one don't need to actually read what is in each thumbnail: just a small representation of the page will be enough to recognize the page you are looking for in most cases (that's what I think).

Just another observation: for me, pages like Gmail are different than traditionally 'surfing' the web.. I always leave a browser window dedicated to gmail, and uses other different windows to surf the web opening multiple tabs. This way I always have the Gmail entry in my taskbar (showing the new email count).. When I need to find it, it is not like "looking for the gmail page that is opened somewhere", but it is "looking for my mail application", with the only subtle difference that it is hosted by my web browser. This difference will fade away even more in the coming years when the web apps really become part of the desktop.

Sometimes I feel some people make their lives unnecessarily more complicated.

If you can't find out which browser window and which tab has gmail, you just have too many of them open. You should mentally also be more organized.

- My task bar has two lines so that I can see all my taskbar buttons clearly at all times.

- grouping similar buttons is off. Grouping them makes it harder to find a window.

- There should be a way to program a hotkey to get the gmail tab to pop infront on demand. I use slickrun and I probably can program it so that whenever I hit 'G' in it, I get gmail instantly.

There are many ways to be creative to be more productive. Life shouldn't be that hard. If you have 3 monitors and still get stressed over little things, think about the millions of people who walk miles to get drinking water.

It's sad that the more technology we use, the less tolerant we become in our lives.

Another thought is a better taskbar. The technology is over a decade old and the best Microsoft can do is throw worthless crap in there that most people don't use (DoD disables the advanced Start Menu by default anyway). Not only is the advanced Start Menu less than helpful, it actually pushes the traditional start menu down one more click, so to get to an app that I don't use that often, which for someone with diverse computing needs is a common occurence, I have to click one more time to get to all of my stuff. The "Start" button itself is totally deprecated. I'm sure in the old days coming from DOS and 3.1 the idea of a button that leads you to everything on your computer was a great idea, but our capabilities and screen-space have grown beyond the original constraints of a 640x480 13" monitor. I have tons of wasted space on my desktop because I'm anal about the icons on it, I usually only allow the Recycle Bin. This isn't because I think the desktop should be empty by nature, but because I HATE the way the icons look, it's cluttered and annoying. Maybe if there were a more attractive way to present the desktop and organize it other than "alright we'll have icons with text below them and we'll snap them to a grid, oh and if the text is too much we'll abbreviate it until the user clicks on it and it will annoyingly overlap other icons," then I would actually use my desktop. The personal computing GUI is in desperate need of a rethinking.

(to continue)...The problem is two-fold: you're using the tabbed browser incorrectly AND the OS doesn't mesh correctly with the Tabbed/MDI concept.

It should be "easy" for the OS to provide an implementable interface that can allow "tabs" to appear as separate apps when "alt-tabbing", which is really the "solution" he's talking about.

It hasn't been done yet, b/c the tabbed vs. MDI paradigm is still in flux here, Word doesn't implement tabs but VS and IE do. Even SQL server 2005 has tabs, and Excel has had a different kind of "tab" for years.

I'm sure that these differences will be resolved in the next couple of years (though Mac will likely figure out the answer first).

This sort of thing is why QuickSilver is extremely popular on the Mac.

I switched to Mozilla quite a while ago and never will go back to IE. Mozilla has a drop down menu on the right listing all open pages. Two mouse clicks to go anywhere.

Regarding tabs on Mac OS X, some of these issues were covered here:

http://watchingapple.com/2007/05/more-on-leopard-windows-and-tabs/

Basically, at some point the OS will need to adopt a new paradigm entirely, now that tabs have become so popular.

> I wish I could "tear off" tabs into standalone windows on demand, too.

While it doesn't solve the problem everywhere, if you use Firefox, then you have that option with the "Tab Mix Plus" add-on.

Without reading other people's comments, I must ask how many tabs to you usually have open within one browser (say Firefox). Maybe I'm just *really* used to using my browser tabs, but I think they are invaluable to my daily tasks, at work and at home.

I can't stand having things in the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. I usually don't have dozens of tabs open so I can see at least 70% of the page title and the little favicon. In the taskbar, as I have more apps open - which I usually have more apps than tabs - the taskbar gets completely obscured.

You only need one browser instance open at a time. So anything that is web-based *will be* in that instance if it's on a tab. No need to Alt+Tab because everything is in the browser. If you have more than one browser instance running then you're not using tabs well anyway.

I find it strange that so many commenters seem to get very personal and critical of your behaviours. You work the way you work and that is that. I have a dual monitor setup, and covet your triple ;)

To throw one more suggestion into the mix. I came across the WebRunner project, which is essentially a stripped down mozilla core running a single site in a single window with no chrome. This way, I can have GMail running, or GCal, or whatever, and it looks and behaves like an application. Including your custom app icon on the taskbar. While this does not address the nature of your post directly, it may help you with your gmail open multiple times issue.

It helps if you have the right technology to assist you. I use KDE with Konqueror so I have multiple desktops (on a single monitor) with which I can group tasks logically. Admin tasks I do on desktop 1, media players live on desktop 4, programming is done on 2 and the rest on desktop 3.
Konqueror is an internet and filesystem browser so I basically have an (one) instance open all the time. That's more tabs in a single application since it's basically 'explorer' and 'internet explorer' in one but it's easy to find the tab I'm looking for and reorganize tabs if things get too complicated. Konqueror has the ability to 'split screen', next to and/or above eachother, regardless whether I'm looking at the local system or a website. Launch a tab in a separate instance is just as easy and instances can be dragged to other desktops.
As far as I'm concerned, most of the browsers are still in their infancy and simply inadequate for power users, Konqueror is an example of what a browser can be(come).

Still around Jeff :)

My post was probably more inflamattory than it needed to be. I've come to accept tabs, and only be mildly disgusted with them ;-)

If you want to chat, drop me a line. Cyrus.Najmbadi@microsoft.com.

My solution is to close stuff I'm not using.

It works really well. Even uses less memory. :)

I don't want to keep my email open all the time regardless because it is a time sink.

I'll keep up to 10 tabs for things I'm working on in parallel, but I'm religious about hitting Ctrl-W when I'm done with something.

I also try not to keep multiple windows of the same app open, so it isn't as big of a problem.

Wow. I use taskbarshuffle and always keep my gmail window in the same exact place on my taskbar (far left position, second row). If gmail is open, it's there. If it's not open, I know instantly to launch a browser window.

Client apps can enforce cardinality through mutexes, etc. so that you only end up with, for example, 1 instance of Photoshop.

Web apps just can't enforce cardinality, or even provide a facility for configuring it. Sounds like a good feature for the next version of all the browsers :)

You're blaming the computer for your lack of organization.

I use tabs extensively (in Opera). Heck, I've got 12 open right now. Sure, the labels on those tabs are getting too small to read as more and more of them pop up. But I can quickly see what tabs I've got by hitting CTRL-TAB, I get a little list of all open tabs in the browser window.

And guess what? This is my only open browser window. That's the entire point of having tabs? Why would I want multiple tabs AND multiple windows? That's disorganized.

And like you, I've got 3 "desktops" ("workspaces" in Linux land). I know that my web browser is always on workspace 2 (in the center), my email app is always on workspace 3, and my terminal windows are always on workspace 1. Organized. Easy to find.

You can't rely on the tool doing the entire job for you. It's a tool, not a worker. You have to use the tool correctly in order for it to be helpful.

You seem to think that because you've got a powerful computer and three screens you're entitled to have a magic solution to juggling dozens of web pages open in the background. I hesitate to sound hostile but I think you're being a bit concieted.

I never find myself hunting for GMail like that because I have the page closed by default. Opening a new page is so quick it isn't an issue.

An industry speaker came to my university last year to talk about managing large software projects, he said (and I paraphrase):

"If someone offered my a five year project with a twenty million pound budget and a hundred staff in three countries I wouldn't take it. Some other idiot can try to manage THAT. Give me ten staff in one room for a year with a £100,000 and I'll consider it."

I would do the same. The basic point is that you can't arbitrarily increase organisational complexity and throw technology at it and expect a happy ending. You seem to be suffering a similar effect.

Remove the problem. Close your tabs.

>Web apps just can't enforce cardinality, or even provide a facility for configuring it. Sounds like a good feature for the next version of all the browsers :)

No No No - then you cant run two webapps side by side ....

there are reasons to use tabs, reasons to use multiple browser windows, but stopping users doing what they want is evil ...

Try comparing 2 spreadsheets in Excel you have to use the broken Excel MDI windows and not the operating systems perfectly ok system ...!

Wow! You clearly touched something here! (c:

Personally I think (as it seems seem you do to) quicksilver alikes are the best option to this kind of problem. Imagine just having to type "expose gmail" or "exp g" and bam it is selected! Still needs integration though. Now imagine the plugin can read the content of each screen, it could know at least that gmail is present here and there without showing you the specific tab.

This solution would expose two problems though, user need to remember the command name and know what he is searching for exactly. Brings back to the CLI problems for users that are only uses their computer once in a while.

> Isn't it odd that we're duplicating what the operating system does inside the browser?

No. It's *unfortunate*, but not odd. Window management in Windows has always been terrible, and there's been precious little effort on the part of Microsoft to actually improve it. So you end up with 3rd-party tools like your Expose clone, but with a few exceptions app writers can't depend on them or even take advantage of them.

Think about it: the last major improvement to window management was the task bar. A system-wide tab bar that has almost all the faults of app-specific tab bars, without the advantage of being tailored to the specific needs of any given app. When it became clear that many users kept so many windows open that the task-bar tabs were reduced to little icons in a *scrolling* tab bar, we got "grouped" tabs - now you've got the worst of both worlds, you can't see all of your windows at a glance anymore (you have to expand the group) but they're still all together in a big jumble at the bottom of your screen (or whereever...)

Imagine this: window *and* session management managed in a consistent fashion for all apps. Group the windows you want together, show / hide / close / re-open them with a single operation. Now, *that* would be something worth having...

Another good solution would be to force the closing of unused tabs with maybe a warning...

Another simple one: do not allow to mix tabs and windows for the same application. Easy to configure, removes a lot of pain. Then you can use extensions like expose for Firefox to continue on in the same way you currently do your stuff.

A combination of the two above + textual search would be the best thing. I think.

Another one again...
MacOS uses the same icons to lunch and bring to front. No need for a task bar with dozens of buttons.

Finally, I think you try to eat the microsoft food here, where plenty of good solutions already exists out there.

Windows UI is kind of fundamentally broken when trying to multitask. Have you ever tried using wmii or ion? Have a look and come back. Task switching can actually be quite easy. Windows is not made to multitask.

Ten years from now, all the nay-sayers here will say Jeff's and Cyrus's concerns and solutions are reasonable and obvious. Mark my words. This is how all significant innovations are treated.

I'm in favor of OS-level support for multi-document thumbnail rendering for any app, multi-tabbed or even MDI (ick!), perhaps with an optional stacking metaphor for tabbed items. This way any app can participate in visual discovery in a consistent way with the rest of the OS, and you can customize the look and feel in a consistent way for all apps if you so choose.

Safari lets you drag tabs between windows, and it would be nice to be able to drag tabs/documents between windows from a higher-level view as well.

Heck, why not make a generic tabbed document shell that lets you put a browser, a command line, an RDP session, a C# file, and anything else within the same window? We've already got multi-tabbed hosts for all of these... It'll be the new alternative to virtual desktops!

Even with today's fancy browser's AJAX and WebTwoDotZero features, the Web itself has become obsolete. HTML it's OK for STATIC content, and to some extent some cool website effects.

But let's be honest: GMail sucks.

I'd love to se real push on some 21st century standards like XUL and alike, so we developers can leave the ancient "web developing" ritual and start coding some internet based applications.

Something in between Java Applets and DHTML/AJAX/etc. will really solve your "browser tabs" problems.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4086

There can be only one... ...tab for each url!

When you click a link to an url that's already open in another tab then you'll switch to that tab instead of actually opening the link. However, some sites using heavy javascript may not work correctly with this, so the extension also offers a whitelist of urls not affected and the ability to disable the extension at the click of a button. The whitelist supports wildcards, * is the wildcard character and will be interpreted as any character zero or more times.

Sorry, don't have time to read every comment right now, but would love to contribute...

It was mentioned atleast once above, Opera already has most if not all of these features your looking for, you just need to learn how to use them. I'm still learning myself... but as a user who generally keeps 50 - 100 web pages open at any one time, I think Opera is the king, since each tab shows the favicon for the page.

I find it's fairly easy to find stuff based on this premise and a little remembering the order of things. Secondly, I did not know this but posted above said that Opera has a seach for tab names. I know there is a way to preview the tabs, but I have too many for it to be of use, the favicon is enough for me.

Secondly, for your multiple instances, no problem, you can have several, and even drag tabs between the multiple instances. Aint that sweet? Close a tab by accident and ctrl-z will bring it back... or you can go dumpster diving to find one closed awhile ago.

And my all time favourite feature from an unstable laptop, when you close the browser (or crash your laptop) it remembers what tabs you had open, so if your system crashes or you want to reboot, next time you load opera it can reaload everything you previously had open.

I can't stress enough, I use this browser for all of my web viewing with the exception of IE for any intranet sites (automaticly use domain login) and firefox solely for javascript debugging.

Also, there is speed dial... so for those 9 most used site's, a simple ctrl-t then ctrl-{1-9} opens the corresponding speed dial site. Also saw on slashdot today, it's about 50% faster then firefox out the gate, but on occasion there are rending problems on sites that don't care about opera.

Opera is a great browser, skinnable (minimalistic interface anybody?) with all the features a power user wants, give it a try.

*sorry for my ramblings, had to be quick.

Listen to the smart people who tell you Opera is the way to go, or wait another 3-5 years until Firefox/IE steal Opera's window+tab management functions and proclaim they were the first to invent it.

I cannot understand people who use something other than Opera (except if it's for debugging stuff, where Firebug comes really handy).

Okay, I disagree with your (Jeff's) assessment of the usefulness of tabs because I work differently than he does, but I'll suspend that for a second.

What I don't get is why you make a huge jump to suggest a search-based windowing interface. You've gone from a quick, visual inspection issue to one requiring metadata, indexing, and a host of other issues (SEO?).

Wouldn't it be a better solution to your visual problem to wish for someone to make an extension that busts tabs out ala Expose while you alt-tab? If we're suggesting interfaces why not one that fits to your problem domain (the problem of visually finding what you want when it's hidden)?

Or perhaps someone could produce an extension for Firefox that merely lists the URLs during an alt-tab inspection? But searching as a solution here seems way off.

I use the firefox minimize to tray extension to make certain windows in firefox that are always open go to the tray. That way if I need to open gmail or pandora I know where to look for it. It's in the tray.
Beyond that I think browser windows work best when used to group a certain task. I might have one window where all the tabs are news articles I intend to read, another for documentation on a project, and another for another task. That way It acts almost like a tree format. If I'm looking for one particular page I know what category it's in and start by finding the browser window it fits into then I search the tabs.

And even after firefox and IE copy it, they can only do so at 2x or 4x the load times.

Jeff, I totally agree with you. I've run into many of the same problems.

I think that tabs are just a way of overcoming some of the limitations of the overlapping window and taskbar model. Maybe the answer is not to rethink tabs, but to rethink overlapping windows? I wrote a post on my blog about this: http://dubroy.com/blog/2007/09/07/rethinking-overlapping-windows/

You are fundamentally missing the point of tabs. The idea is to do just what you are complaining about: hide the specific list of contents in each window.

The "right" use of tabbed browsing, IMHO, is to separate context. In one window I have all the tabs related to a particular line of thought, in another set of tabs I have blog catchups, etc.

Why isn't gmail in it's own window? Seems like it should be it's own task. Taking part in a forum? Shouldn't that also be it's own window?

In my desktop, I rarely run across the issue you describe, because I have my windows divided (manually). The fly in the ointment is when I open a link from another application: it by default goes as a tab in one of the windows I have open, and most of the time that's the wrong window (simple odds). Thankfully with Safari 3 I can just drag the tab over to the "right" window.

In short, if you frequently finding yourself wondering if you have a particular site open and can not narrow your search down to even a subset of windows, it seems you have a workstyle issue, not a tabs/windows issue. You'd be JUST as lost with 75 tabs in your Windows task bar, where each tab has nothing visible other than the IE icon, or with IE windows all "grouped" into a list with no apparent or logical organization. Tabs can help you, if you use them right!

That all being said: one thing I'd LOVE to see is the ability to LABEL MY WINDOWS. I don't care nearly so much about the specific tab selected in a particular Safari window so much as I do that that window houses my blogs, and the other one is related to a particular forum I'm looking at, and the other one is LaTeX reference materials, and the other one has bug tracking, and the last is the company's development wiki. Instead, I have to guess the window designation based on the TITLE attribute of the particular tab which is frontmost! It's a bit insane and makes tabs less useful than they should be.

> I think initial reports indicated that The Warriors had shot Cyrus.

Heh. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080120/

> Switcher 2 -- http://lifehacker.com/software/featured-windows-download/manage-your-windows-with-switcher-2-296324.php

This is truly an excellent link-- looks like Switcher 2.0 will be a big improvement! However, to address the tab issue, the search function has to be extended to work inside the tabs-- or the tabs somehow exploded out temporarily so they are visible and clickable.

> http://watchingapple.com/2007/05/more-on-leopard-windows-and-tabs/

Watching Apple, great link. That's *exactly* what I'm talking about. We could postpone this problem when tabs were rare, but now that tabs are everywhere, we definitely need a better way to deal with them.

> The "right" use of tabbed browsing, IMHO, is to separate context

I agree. Unlike Visual Studio, there is no strong theme connecting any given browser tab to another. I'm three clicks away from opening a page about Kevin Bacon at any time.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_problem_with_wikipedia.png

Sure, I should have discipline and not have the "wet t-shirt contest" and "william howard taft" pages open as tabs in the same browser, but the very nature of the internet makes this difficult.

Despite their problems, tabs are (usually) easier to deal with than full-blown windows. I'm starting to think the problem is the way windows themselves work..

http://watchingapple.com/2007/05/leopard-could-introduce-a-radical-change/

For some reason, my OS supports folders. Instead of just throwing every document I ever create or download into a simple "Documents" folder, it actually *encourages* me to make sub-folders based on some categorization and throw them there instead!

Logical hierarchies are a critical way the human mind operates. While the case might be made that most objects belong in multiple places in any given hierarchy, organizing and working off that organization can and should be second nature to a functioning adult.

If you have a hard time putting "gmail" into it's own window every time, how often do you lose your car keys? How do you ever find your Christmas decorations the next year? For that matter, how do you manage to dress yourself in the morning without ramsacking the entire house looking for a pair of socks?

It really just comes down to simple, mindless organization. I can guarantee you: if you put your mind to it, then you will be able to do it. I'd also wager that you'd spend less time training yourself to put gmail in its own window and operate with windows-as-tasks/tabs-as-details than you have already spent complaining about tabs!

"Logical hierarchies are a critical way the human mind operates. While the case might be made that most objects belong in multiple places in any given hierarchy, organizing and working off that organization can and should be second nature to a functioning adult."

Classic bad-UI Stockholm syndrome. Hierarchies are an obsolete artifact of the physical world, where an object can't be in more than one place at the same time. Tags are the future.

Jeff, "no self-respecting computer user should EVER have only one monitor." Seriously? And, "the disconnect between Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Tab-- it's highly modal, and users hate modes". Honestly, Give it a try, - it will less than 2 days for your fingers to get used to it (maybe a little more to overcome the mindset). [Tip: Switching between thingies atop your screen (tabs) use Ctrl, switching between thingies at the bottom use Alt.]

I run dual monitors, and usually group the different tasks I have consistently between the 2 monitors, so I know left is this, right is that.

I don't mind CTRL+TAB that much since I hate ALT+TAB between so many apps. I have developed a hierarchy in my mind as to if something deserves a SHIFT+mouse1 or a mouse3 style click, and I run a vertical taskbar on the widescreen to keep things neat. Here's an image to illustrate:

http://efarchives.com/desktop.jpg

At the time I screen capped that I was encountering a bug with UltraMon where the 2nd monitors bar wasn't wide enough to display text, it was a dated version.

Eventually I will pickup another 4:3 monitor for the other side, but for now, this works.

I just takes practice to keep things clean. If you recall a few years back to how horrid things were before tabs at all, its a worthy compromise at the end of the day.

Good article. =)

Searching is overrated, as it's a seperate process, and URL-based detection relies on the webapp to be constructed in a certain way.

I wonder how you go about opening your GMail, Jeff?
http://tailguard.blogspot.com/2007/09/tabs-hmph.html

Jeff,
After reading all the posts & thinking of this today another great way to use tabs is to click the scroll bar on links & it opens the link in a new tab. This is good since the original page is still open. All the comments proves how strongly people feel about this topic.
Thx again,
Catto

> Again, the disconnect between Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Tab-- it's highly modal, and users hate modes. It's so hard to remember which one you're in at any given time. Is this a tab? Is it a window? Why should *I* have to worry about treating them so differently?

Frankly, I don't have a problem. There is a logical distinction between stuff on the web and stuff on your computer -- if nothing else, there is a certain level of unreliability to stuff on the web. I don't "hate" switching between the modes at all.

Then again, I'm a vim user ;)

Today, I wanted to compare 2 powerpoint slides on office 2003 (a new fad my company just installed 6 days ago. Yes, that's not a typo, office 2003.). I opened one .ppt, I opened another. I saw two windows in the taskbar. However, when I wanted to compare them, they were one window. Clicking the taskbar did nothing but bring the other window to front in the MDI. However, their MDI is so screwed you can't even unmaximize windows, you'll have to do that via a menu...

Eh, sorry — I find it a bit lame.

The advantages of tabs for collecting lots of information far outweigh the disadvantages. Opened up two copies of Gmail? Whoop-dee-doo — not exactly the end of the world.

The only time have 20 different windows opened at once is "easier" is when you use something like Expose. As it is, if you are looking for a webpage, it's usually easier to just Alt-Tab and get to the _browser_, at which point you can usually narrow down the likely place of the page in no problem. Sorting through all of your possible interfaces when you _know_ it is going to be in the domain of only one program is rather inefficient in itself.

In any case, it's not like it's _hard_ to disable tabbed browsing and go back to the old way.

My big MDI-annoyance, if you cared, is the way that different Word documents are handled in OS X. I can't Alt-Tab between them at all -- it jumps me into a different program. This is a pain in the neck, since it _often_ the case that one needs to be looking at more than one Word document at once, and jumping between them. (And Expose is little help either if your documents all look pretty similar as thumbnails; in any case, it certainly isn't very fast in the switch-back-and-forth sort of way). In this response, I wish Word handled a bit more like it did in Windows than it currently does in OS X.

I'm going to agree with the "Just don't open more than one browser window" camp. Isn't that kind of the whole point of tabs? The only time I use more than one window is to separate a reading list from work related resources, so i can skim through closing tabs quicker, or if my Wife's machine is broken and we are sharing a desktop.

@Jeff "Cliff's Notes" Atwood:
I don't think this is a scalability problem with tabs so much as it's a scalability problem with you.

I think you're simply opening far too many Windows. If you have so many that (a) you're not totally sure if you have GMail open and (b) it takes a significant investment of time to find out if you do, I think the bottleneck is your forgetful, squishy human brain.

One app that really helps me manage the complexity is TaskSwitchXP. It allows one to right click on the minimize button to send any window to the tray. Great for windows that basically act as background services (such as PuTTY for SSH) or when you're trying to hide something (such as porn). Doing this has become second nature to me, and it's always a bit jarring to use computers without TaskSwitchXP installed.

On another note, I think the argument for tabs (and the associated ctrl+tab shortcut) is essentially the same as the argument for search trees. You don't want to search linearly through 20 windows when you can pick "Internet" or "Visual Studio" out of a small number of top-level choices. Also note that because I have so many code files in my project, I can never remember which Visual Studio tabs I have open.

@Alex Chamberlain:
"Classic bad-UI Stockholm syndrome. Hierarchies are an obsolete artifact of the physical world, where an object can't be in more than one place at the same time. Tags are the future."

Excuse me if you're being sarcastic here, but I'm going to have to assume you're serious...

...are you serious?!

Sure hierarchies are often misapplied in user interfaces, and the Windows TreeView control is clearly the result of a drunken bet between spastics, but hierarchies are in no way an "obsolete artifact".

Browser tabs are an example of a hierarchical organization (OS handles the browser window, browser window handles the separate tubes) that has been immensely successful. Before IE7, the Mozilla/Opera/whatever crowd were (I assume literally) wetting themselves over how much more tabby their browsers were, and with good reason I think. Tags definitely work well with e-mails, blog posts, and other items of the sort, but beyond that they're just "a polite way of helicopter peeing" (to quote the great Hani Suleiman).

How do you lose a tab in multiple windows? I mean - why do you even HAVE multiple windows? That's what tabs are for.

People who complain about not understanding tabs are no different than people who complain about how they "don't understand" cell phones or cable television. Just because your brain is stuck in 1976 doesn't mean technology or the rest of its users are.

my jaw has dropped from reading how you, jeff, as well as many others who have posted here work on their pc. i have 2 monitors and i always know where every single window is that i have open. this is because i only keep open the essentials at any given time.

visual studio is open and maximized on the left monitor. thunderbird is open on the right monitor as the first application (always the left most task on ultramon's smart taskbar). firefox is the second, ie is the third, and foobar2000 is the fourth.

taking it one step further, gmail is always the first tab open in firefox, so it's always the left most tab. the second tab is the webpage i am currently working on, and any additional tabs are used for research (w3schools is pretty much always the third tab), general browsing, whatever.

all applications on the right monitor are pseudo-maximized in that they are the full window height but only about 80% of the width. the remaining width holds all my yahoo widgets and my im contact list. all my im chats are also tabbed and are in the top right corner of the right monitor. if my company would allow me a third monitor, i could put all the widgets, im windows, and email on the third monitor so the second could be used for just firefox and ie (foobar2000 is always minimized since i just use global hotkeys for all its functions).

if i have to do any other task, like open a word document or browse the file system, i can do that on top of visual studio and then close it when i'm done.

i can't recall a single instance of using alt-tab after getting my second monitor.

am i alone here?

Gotta say, I could not disagree more. 1 browser and CTRL+TAB. When I just wanna check something out I shift click to spawn the new browser and prompty kill it when I'm done. Having said that I would like to be able to drag a tab off and drop it on the desktop to make its own window and vice versa.

Good grief Jeff, the long and short of this comes down to too much desktop has convinced you that productivity comes from being scattered to the winds.

Ask anyone about context switching costs and you will find that having this much going on at once is simply reducing your productivity... searching for tabs or not. We all like to think we can multi-task far better than we actually can.

Closing a few windows and refocus on the task at hand. The costs of opening a task up later is far lower than the lost productivity caused by switching at a high rate.

It baffles me how so many people seem to think having everything in tabs in one window is an appropriate use of tabs.

If you rarely change the size and location of the window (e.g. keep it maximised) then there is no difference (other than accessibility of other tabs and memory consumption, the second of which is only theoretical) to separate instances. If you do, then you're probably micromanaging your windows too much.

Once you have more than a dozen tabs open, the accessibility bonus is more or less gone. It's very difficult to scan the tabs for an open one without some other aid, all of which could also be implemented for non-tabbed multiple instances.

To me the benefit of tabs is that you can, as Jeff does, group related tasks and manipulate them as one. I'm working on a project, I have a browser instance open with documentation and the likes. I go on a break, so I open up a new instance and generally browse. I'm finished with that so I close that instance and switch back to the documentation and resume working. While I am generally browsing I come across and interesting series of articles, so I open that up in a new instance so I can read it later on. It's not cluttering up my current browser instance and the tabs I have open there, which means I can find what I want much easier.

The biggest problem with this method is the one Jeff described, finding a specific ambiguous (in that it's difficult to pinpoint the exact task it relates to) tab. There are many solutions which would benefit both Jeff and I's way of working, as well as the "lump everything together" methodology, namely the search he suggests. I've been using it in Enso for a while and it works well.

I suppose I should quantify that with the fact I've never really needed to have more than two dozen tabs open max split between 3 browser instances. And that's a rarity. Why do you people have so many websites open at a time?

QUOTE:

1. I inadvertently open multiple copies of a web site, because I can't see that I already had that web site open in an obscured tab of an existing browser window.
2. I accidentally close a browser window containing information that I needed, because the information was in an obscured tab of that particular browser window.

END QUOTE

That's simply because:

1. You don't look at the tabs before opening a new one, don't blame it on the tab system.
2. Again, you don't look at the tabs before closing the window.

If you are not used to tabs, don't blame it on them.

As mentioned, the solution would be to extend the search functionality to search active windows/tabs it really suprises me when I think about it that Microsoft didn't realise this.

This would be a great feature enhancement to put into the all mighty Vista SP1 but they have already said that there wont be any new features so I guess not.

Some original tabbed apps like Opera for example will not allow you to open a secound instance. There for, when you search a webpage you will switch to the big red O and then switch to the right page.

Perhaps the real problem with tabbed browsers is, that most of them allow multiple instances!?

It's a question of minimizing pain. Is it more painful to have many windows and fight with the primitive overlapping window systems that most GUIs insist on, or to get your windows listed in a predictable, fixed place for at least some of them?

The task bar is not a valid alternative, because when you change tabs, the window can have a completely different shape and position. Tabs garantee no surprise about location.

I think a variation on larswm offers the only sensible way of out this. Dedicate part of your screen, usually the left half, to the active window, and line up the others on the right half à la Exposé. For side by side comparison, add zoom-on-mouseover to the inactive windows.

I've been using a vertical task bar in auto-hide mode for probably 10 years now. It makes finding applications much easier when you have a lot of applications because the buttons don't get shortened, and you can always read the labels. (I'm sure there's a number of windows at which a vertical taskbar will run out of room, but at a vertical resolution of 1200, I've never run into it.

The whole point of tabs as an organizational paradigm is that you only need one browser open for any number of websites you'd like to view. Looking for Gmail? Don't look at your taskbar, look at your web browser. Why on earth would you be scanning three desktops and any number of thumbnails when you know it's in your browser? And if you have multiple browsers open... well, why?

That said, your idea of the search paradigm, along with Alan Post's comment about direction above, could eliminate the problem if searching could find tabs. Still...

Good post Jeff. I think this will be development into more a nuisance as more and more apps switch to tabbed interfaces.

I always find it funny how so many users react to blog posts like this saying "OMG Why don't YOU remember ...". Realistically Jeff shouldn't have to remember jack-shit about his UI layout while working away. It's all unnecessary excise.

All that say, I use the permanent tab feature in Firefox, and set GMail to be the permanent in position one. That way I can flick to any browser, press Ctrl 1, and Bongo! I'm in email. Unnecessary duplication? Waste of bandwidth, memory, and processor time? Sure, tell someone who cares though :)

CyrusN posts regularly in the programmer's area of a forum I frequent. He uses a different alias there, though.

I think your argument against tabs is flawed. You are caliming that the fact that you dont know which browser your Gmail tab might be in. the thing is, you shouldnt be browsing with more hten one browser open any way, it defeats the idea behind having tabs in the first place.

I do know what you are on about, I have taken to leaving tabs open rather then book marking. Im sure this is not the best of ideas, but thanks to opera I have been aloud to get lazy like this. It can always restore my last use of the browser. so if i close opera by accident, dosent matter.

And what makes opera even better for browsing, is a feature called speed dial. when you make a new tab (ctrl+t) you get 9 panels you can click to take you to a super favorate of yours. or you can be in any tab you want and ust whack ctrl+(1 to 9) and it will go that speed dial page.

This means that I very rarely keep certain tabs open, such as gmail. I open it up, look at my mail, then clsoe it up again.

While multi-tasking is a great skill to possess, having 3 browsers open with 20 tabs each - along with IM, email, development, and document programs, should be a highly inefficient way to work or play. You preach that Applications should 'Do one thing' to keep things simple, yet you seem to be making things very complex for yourself.
I'm aware that this system probably works for you fairly well - but the majority of 'tab users' would not be running into the same problems you may encounter.

No wonder you love search so much. My advice would be to close at least one of the browsers.. and only maintain a maximum of 10 (or a number that allows you to read the title of each tab) tabs in each at any one time. One browser for news sites that can be read at leisure, and another browser for sites that you'll be accessing regularly.

A drop down vertical list of tabs would be highly beneficial for you - haven't seen it done yet but I'm guessing firefox has an extension that'd do it. There's an extension for everything..

Another way that application and tab management could be improved? Custom titles in the taskbar and tab-bar for each app and tab. Name your browsers as 'News' and 'Work', and have your work bookmarks customly identifiable. Allows you to access resources in no more than 2 clicks, after a very quick scan of the taskbar and tab-bar.

In relation to previous post

I am an idiot. Forgot about tab drop down list in latest versions.. But still my main point is custom names of app/tab bar items.

..just when you thought Jeff had already complained about EVERYTHING..

No, seriously, I enjoy the technical posts much more than the "here's a random thing that I have decided to hate and a list of halfass reasons why" articles. Of all the things going on in the technosphere, this is the best topic that came to mind today? Tabs suck? Just get rid of them and move on, don't bore everyone that can google for a plugin that quickly and silently disables tabs:

http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/confirm.cgi?tabkiller_en.xpi

Hi Jeff. I didn't read all the comments (toooooooo many :)), so forgive me if I repeat a concept...

I tipically use one instance of FF, with something like about 20 tabs or more. I have only one monitor, so it may be a different case from you, but whzt I mean is that I usually know were the tab I need is. I have a standard tab positioning, so I can retrive the tab i need really quickly. It become, however, a little confusing when I open some other tabs, 'cause I don't want open a link in te same tab. But the concept is that I know were are my first 20 tabs...

this might have promise for you... maybe you (or one of the many reading this, or even myself) could chip in to bring about some launchy+tab goodness.

https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1702810&forum_id=677087

Sorry if some of the below has already been said, too many comments to take in!

While I think that those saying "Jeff, you're over-multitasking" are correct, I do think we should consider this as a design problem that's going to become more and more common. We're all having to juggle more and more data at any given time and soon coping with this amount of information will be the norm. It was only a few years ago that I couldn't imagine a tabbed browser, much less having 5-15 tabs open in one.

Amazon.com infamously had a flurry of navigation tabs for every product category until they reached a sort of tab critical mass and have now scaled down to only 3 tabs in the top nav - one of which simply says "See all 41 product categories". On hover, this reveals a box of neatly arranged categories.

This is just one solution. But I'm worried our interfaces are not catching up with the amount of data we're generating and consuming.

Uhm... I'd miss a point...

If going through tabs is difficult, why you don't simply use the little down arrow on the most right of the tabs? By clicking it you can select the tab on the fly, with a good visibility of what you're seeking...

I certainly agree with the search option you propose. I think that having a mechanism by which you can search the active user interface space would be fantastic. Regarding the taskbar, window grouping is enabled by default in XP (Vista too if i recollect correctly) and most users would have this enabled (lets not forget that the tabbed browsing is designed to solve certain UI problems for the majority of users (who happen to be standard users)), making your argument about looking in the taskbar redundant (as web pages would be grouped into one item). Clumping related objects together is a great way of avoiding information overload, tho it does involve changing the way you approach the collections, previously operating systems were not overly focused on UI and hence we were presented with pretty, albeit cluttered workspaces. Event os x i find tends to clutter up easily.

great article, you highlight that the UI of an OS is still quite lacking and does not provide a very natural method of interaction, yet.

What you want is the correct solution in my opinion. You **almost** get it for free on OS X with Quicksilver, but not quite (not yet). But I agree, search should be the dominant UI metaphor on desktops as well as on the Internet.

To some extent this is request for solutions to a largely artificial problem.

Why not just use a standard e-mail program such as Mail or Outlook - you're gauranteed a single instance and new e-mail notifications come at you and find/open that instance in one go as soon as you click on the notification - no searching whatsoever.

Maybe I'm being thick here, but if you get confused by tabs, why not abandon them? IE and FF will work just fine with one tab per browser instance?

Personally, I like tabs because I have only one browser instance open at a time. Yes, I know this is not maximizing my two monitors' real estate, but I don't mind, as I rarely am comparing two web pages. More often, I'm comparing a web page with code in Visual Studio, or a web page or Visual Studio with a Word document.

My point is, some people prefer tabs, some people don't like 'em. Rather than trying to create a single solution that makes everybody happy, why not just let us tab-loving people love our tabs, and non-tab loving people can live with having a bajillion windows in the task bar?

"I tend to open task-based browser instances, such that all the tabs in that browser are on a *related topic*."

Tab Groups [http://paranoid-androids.com/tabgroups/] is an amazing extension for that. No more needing to guess which browser had what content, since you can name each tab group.

I think you chose a bad example with GMail Jeff. Those who suggest use a separate email client, fine. Now how about finding the tab for an article you were reading earlier?

Echoes my thoughts from awhile back (not as long ago as Cyrus, though :) ) regarding the annoyance of having applications hidden amongst the tabs of your web browser. I look forward to platforms like AIR enabling these applications which are replacing some of our desktop apps to rejoin their older cousins on the desktop :

http://blog.wioota.com/2007/08/08/is-tabbed-browsing-working-against-us/

Oh and as others have suggested - try Enso.

Why didn't you open gmail in a new tab? There's nothing wrong with having more than one gmail open. It works perfectly fine.

Using tabbed browsing in Firefox, I limit my browser to just a few windows with related tabs in each. The very first window's first tab is always GMail, followed by other sites I keep open throughout the day.

I do agree that at a certain point, as you open more tabs, you actually end up reopening sites that are already in a tab in another window, or even in the same window! Of course, there are Firefox extensions to manage these things, though it doesn't hold true for all apps using tabbed UIs.

And just like you Jeff, I'll take tabs over MDI for almost everything.

Are you saying I am disrespecting myself because I only have one monitor? That's so 1337...

There *is* a partial fix to this problem that I've found. The firefox add-on "Tab Catalog" shows a graphical display of all your tabs open in every browser window you have open.

So, in the near future we'll be opening a web browser so we can use google (well, what dinosaur would write an application that doesn't run in a web browser?) in order to search our open web browsers for the website we know we were looking at but have lost?

Wonko The Sane had it right all along.

One of the few times I have to disagree with you. It just seems to me that your very unorganized
"I have 9 instances of the browser open"

That is your issue I don't see why you would want more then one firefox open per monitor. I almost said one browser but you might want an IE open and a firefox for some testing reason.

As another user said I use tab mix plus, so if i have to many tabs open I get a second row of tabs. I normally stick with one firefox instance and have anywhere from 10-15 tabs open in it. I only have a second instance open when I'm comparing something.

You either need to use tabs more and have less browser windows or use tabs less with more specific organization.

Your very much nit picking get yourself organized.

All you really need is for a window with multiple tabs to change its display style in alt+tab mode (or expose, switcher, etc.). If the browser window showed tiled icon of each open website - just the icon and not the page - you'd see a relatively large gmail icon when you alt+tabbed and could avoid the problem.

Not perfect, but it's better

My brother absolutely refuses to upgrade to IE7 or use Firefox because it has tabs in it. I think that is a pretty silly standpoint, they are a feature which you don't really have to use if you don't want to.

I also find that having task-related browser windows open is the best bet so I tend to have Twitter, GMail, Facebook, Meebo and Google open in one browser and then launch into a new browser whenever I start wandering off on a tangent.

One thing which annoys me doing this is organizing Tabs. In Firefox I can drag a tab from one instance of the browser to another allowing me to group a disparate collection of tabs together. In IE7 I can't do this. Unfortunately when doing it in FF the page is reloaded (new session and all) rather than transferring context around. This is no doubt for security reasons but damn if it wouldn't be useful.

Also, isn't the TaskBar just a tabbed interface? Do you really want 150 windows in your alt-tab list? Wouldn't it be heaps better to be able to name items in an Alt-Tab list somehow (ie. Firefox (Comms), Firefox (Research))?

I always have one browser window for personal websites, as opposed to all the other browser instances that are for "actual" internet browsing (most of the time, only one or two windows).

So anytime I need to go check my gmail accout, I just need to find my browser that says things like "gmail", "google reader", "google docs", "facebook", "hotmail", and other personal stuff like that. I know it's going to be there, because I don't mix internet browsing with personal websites.

<old_guy_alert>

I'm so used to the old days where OSes weren't good at multitasking applications. The old days were so bad that if you were dumb enough to have more than one application running then your whole computer ground to a halt and you had to press the reset button to get back to work.

From that time I have the habit of only ever having one application up at a time. It's such a strong habit that I actually shutdown Visual Studio in the process of launching email. I know that it's crazy but this habit was force on me during my informative years. It's a habit that I struggle to break.

I just can't get used to these new computers. No matter how much ram I have I still have the instincts that computers work poorly at multitasking and limit the tasks that I have running.

What this meahs is that in the end I only have a few windows open at the most. I can even arrange them such that I can see enough of all of them at once so that I can see at a glance what I have running.

I have no need of the task bar - it is hidden and doesn't clutter my vision. And I have no need of alt-tabbing as it's quicker to bump the mouse a little distance and click.

I'm so old and senile that I can't seem to multitask better than the old computers that I used all those many many years ago.

</old_guy_alert>

Every time Jeff endorses maximizing, I ask how he switches tasks. The answer is even grimmer than I thought.

I never use tabbed browsing or maximize. I just have a double-row taskbar, I make use of the screen edges, and I don't reboot so that I can remember where all my stuff is.

It ain't the greatest system you could imagine, but it's the best way I've found with the tools that exist.

Jeff,

Long time reader, first time poster.

I use Firefox. When I'm working on multi-monitor systems, I keep one browser open for personal stuff, one browser open for work stuff like research, and additional browser windows for other task groupings. Within each browser I have multiple tabs.

This allows me a) to take advantage of all the extra screen space, and b) to use tabs while still being able to find what I'm looking for.

It's just one approach.

I'll note that every "suggestion" of how to avoid this problem all really boil down to one thing: Modifying your behavior to work around the limitations of the technology.

The worst part is, it becomes hard to figure out what the alternative would be.

Okay, I've encountered this problem before, and it can be really annoying. But I've discovered a really simple solution:

1. Remember that you already had GMail open
2. Go to your fucking browser, dumbass.
3. Click on the GMail tab and stop bitching about it.

How many browsers do you use at one time? When I look at your taskbar, I see only one. Since you're using the web interface, the obvious place to go (whether you already have GMail open or not) is to your browser. There you should be able to locate the tab if it's visible.

Hey, look at that. It turns out that just fucking looking for it takes half as long as wanking around with every stupid gadget you've got. I wonder why!

Use convention.

Tab #1 of my FIRST browswer window is ALWAYS yahoo mail. Tab #2 is ALWAYS netvibes.com. If a second browser window is open, I *know* that it won't have either of those in it because of my convention.

Its like always putting your keys in the same pocket so you don't have to search every single pocket for them.

Hi there,

I've read through most of the comments and don't have a solution to the problem discussed, but have realised no ones mentioned one of the most useful applications - using the list of tabs as a queue.

E.g scanning down the comments in this article I middle clicked on 4 or 5 links opening in new tabs to read later. Once I finish on this page I can Ctrl+W to close this tab and move onto the next one, opening more links as I need to and closing pages when I finish.

Obviously, browsing habits can't stray too far from this or the pattern breaks down - e.g I can't place links I consider more important higher in the queue and I can't open a link in a new tab and focus on it immediately, but the system works very well when just browsing blogs or doing research.

Also if anyone's interested, I first saw tabs being used like this in Dungeon Keeper, though they probably weren't the first!

I've never been a fan of tabbed browsing.
All of your complaints are certainly valid but I don't think there is any way to escape tabbed browsing.
IMHO tabbed browsing is forced on users of the current browsers because opening a new window takes a noticeable longer time than opening a new tab.

In fact no tabbed browsing is why I (almost) prefer IE6 to IE7. IE6 has a noticeably faster load time when it comes to opening a new window; It's pretty much instant or about as fast as opening a new tab in IE7. Both IE7 and firefox(which I currently use) take over one second to load fully when creating a new window. Tabs are instant and so I use them. Some obvious reasons I don't use IE6 is because it doesn't have any security or support for extensions.

I can understand having one browser instance per monitor for comparing things. But how hard would it be to keep gmail open in the one on your main (or left, or right) monitor? I always have a quick tab order in my main browser instance. Gmail first, then a text game I play, then any open tabs, etc. Then I just know where gmail is.

Despite having multiple monitors, I usually only have more than one browser open if I need to be using firefox instead of opera (for tor, or for testing something) or to make sure IE hasn't managed to mangle my code somehow. Any comparisons I make are usually between a desktop app and the web, not from one site to another.

And for the accidental closure issue, your solution is to use opera. The tab trash can lets you recall any recently closed tab from the cache, so you can reopen sites even offline.

And what about Do One Thing? I guess that only applies to programs and not programmers :)

The problem with not tidying up is that it's a vicious circle - the more windows/tabs you have open, the more likely you are to open the same thing twice - as it will be quicker than scanning for the existing instance.

People also have differing list scanning speeds. I can usually locate the three existing instances in my colleagues 3-layer task bar before he has had time to click on the Start menu to open the 4th.

Even so, I am an aggressive closer. With browser history, 'undo close tab', Recent Documents and 'save before close' dialogs, I'm very rarely caught out. (The only frequent exception being pre-2007 Excel, where it closes all your windows when you just want to close one, and you click 'No' thinking it's asking you about the one you closed - ARRRGGHHH!!!)

It is fascinating how many people employ what Jeff called 'The One Browser To Rule Them All' mentality. Tabs and windows are two different ways of orgaizing your information, and to me it seems limiting to choose to ignore one method in favor of the other all the time.

I use multiple browser windows, each with a series of tabs to represent a single train of thought. One window collects the digg/slashdot/reddit pages that I am looking at (15 tabs), one acts as an inteface to mail (3 tabs), and another is used for my Wikipedia search trail(10 tabs). If I have a new thought, say, I want to find the best way of doing something strange in php. I will open a new window and perform my search, the whole time leaving tabs open like bread-crumbs to follow back on. When I have found what I was looking for, I close the entire window in one keystroke.

I see no reason that these different tasks should be gathered together into one window simply because they all require The Internet. That seems to me like wanting your Text Editor and your mp3 player to share a window. My organization theory is that different tasks deserve different windows, whereas different thoughts require different tabs.

Have one browser open and u are sorted all your tabs are housed under one browser. U can simply close the tabs your not using and if u do need to reopen a site its not like the internet is slow - the page will load quickly. I would also advise u to ditch windows and go for linux. Install beryl or compiz and u can easliy flick between 4 different desktops all on one screen. Beryl also so provides many other useful functions for screen previewing windows. Oh and i completly disagree with oune of your comments that any self respecting computer user needs more than one monitor. An organised linux user would have none of these problems using only one monitor.

Hey there..

What are you doing with browser? Sit down and write code :))

I always like the "You are doing it wrong.... Do it this way only.." style of posts. The point isn't how you managed to get around this issue, it is that the issue exists at all. I don't use tabbed anything if I can avoid it because of these issues.

> One window collects the digg/slashdot/reddit pages that I am looking at (15 tabs), one acts as an inteface to mail (3 tabs), and another is used for my Wikipedia search trail(10 tabs).

Exactly.

Not that this is the "correct" way, mind you. However, I definitely think the logic of "you must limit yourself to only one window for tabs to work properly" is incredibly limiting. That can't be true. It certainly isn't true for Visual Studio.

Your suggestion reminds me of Emacs. With iswitchb enabled (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/IswitchBuffers), the predominant method of switching buffers (roughly analogous to a WM's windows) is Ctrl+X, B, then type a few characters which appear in the buffer name. As you type non-matching buffers are eliminated, you can cycle through the list of matches at any time with the left and right arrow keys, and pressing Enter switches to the selected buffer. (Also, pressing Ctrl+K kills the selected buffer, which is pretty useful. Icicles (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles) extends this to allow you to enter a regexp, among other things.)

To point 1:
Why don't you just open gmail in a seperate window and always put it on specific monotor at specific spot?

I don't mean to be harsh, but the computer is never gonna take away that last bit of work from you. If you don't know where stuff is you have to search for it. Thats how it works.

Another thing you can try is just closing the tabs you don't need immediately. I always find myself holding on to tabs that because ... I really have no idea. Why not just close them right away?

As far as point 2 goes:
In Firefox you can press CTRL+SHIFT+T to "unclose" a tab and bring it back to life.

TaskSwitchXP is the best Alt-Tab replacement I've found (as the name says, for WinXP)

Slightly moronic article.

Solution:
1. If you use tabs, only use one window
2. If you have a taskbar and it confuses you, hide it
3. In Firefox, you can get "expose"-like functionality through extensions

Good luck not confusing yourself.

Jeff,

You said it yourself:

"There's a natural container in Visual Studio, the "solution", which has "projects" and "files". There's no such logical grouping for the web browser.. although that is how I try to use my web browser. I group sites (tabs) by function, and per-monitor."

If it's true that you group sites by function and per monitor, then I would kinda think you'd also choose a consistent place to put them on your screen real estate. For instance, maybe your browser window for email would always be on the first monitor. Then the search heuristic would be simplified so the "where's waldo" effort has a much reduced area to look through.

If I want to brush my teeth, I look for my toothbrush in the bathroom. I wouldn't put it in the garage after I finish. Same with my browser window for email. I use a virtual desktop manager on linux, giving me 6 desktops, and I find it very managable if I keep my email browser on the first desktop all the time. No confusion where to look.

I think you made this post so that you could brag about having 3 monitors. :&thorn;

http://tan-com.com/jatecblog/files/3split.png

I'm not entirely sure how to do that in Firefox, but that should solve all of your problems.

Anyway, welcome to the Internet. You'll learn tabs in time, don't worry.

Browsers show the active tab name in the tool bar. But if I am looking for a browser by the main function that the browser was opened for, I might see only supporting tab names.

For example, I have few browsers open and each has it's own path of function. Like with one browser I do some work and other browser is supporting that work with a different function and so on. Then each browser has many tabs, one main function tab and several supporting pages. Now if many of the browsers use the same site as helping pages and if the helping pages are currently selected, then I don't see anymore, what browsers contain which main functions.

I've made an expose-clone for vista - Windorama (website unavailible atm).
In the next version i'll try to send a ctrl+q message to all IE-windows and then you'll at least get a 100*100px preview of the website instead of a 50*10px preview of the icon+text.

The problem with expose is that all windows usually look the same, i pretty often have 3 instances of Visual Studio running(one for server-sollution, one for client-sollution and one for editing a website). If i fire up alt-tab or expose they all look exactly the same when they are scaled down to 350*350px.
Same thing with the new built in tab-preview in Visual Studio 2008. How are you supposed to tell the difference between two code-documents when they are scaled down to 100*100px?!

There is a much better solution than search or tabs.

I'm heading up a team that's working on a program to let people access their windows easily. Jeff -- would you like me to let you know when it comes out? (Should be next month or so.)

Greg

I hate to join the "Jeff, just get a mac already" crowd, but Quicksilver DOES solve this problem quite perfectly.

It's this easy for me:

apple-space (my shortcut for quicksilver)
gm (it suggests "gmail")
return
(If GMail is already open, it goes to that tab. If not, it opens a new tab in my most recently used Firefox window.)

You really can't beat that with any kind of expose magic. It's the speed and simplicity of a command-line, but with all the multi-tasking and visuals of a GUI. Of course, there's a bit of a learning curve to do more advanced stuff, but even the most basic "better spotlight" use-case is a big benefit.

It seems to me that what we really need is a much smarter browser 'history' in browsers with better visual clues. The browser history would of course need to aggregate the history links from different vendors browsers so should actually work as a cross-browser plug-in.

The links in 'history' should hint which links are still open and perhaps present a 'mouse hover' thumbnail. Clicking one of the 'open history' links should then make that tabbed page the active tabbed page of the relevant browser.

The links in 'history' would naturally show a link for each page position open for a specific URL in a nested way. The history would be refreshed each time focus was switched to another tabbed page or the page was closed. Different views and sorting options would be available.

It would be great too, if the history was recorded on some internet site so I could pick up where I left off from another machine. The history would have to be text searchable as well and perhaps also include desktop 'recent documents' events also.

Just wanted to add my two cents even so late in the play. Opera is a great tabbed interface as another user mentioned. It even has a trash can to pull out those accidental tab closes. I'm running two monitors so I'm not in the mega monitor circles that Jeff is. My main monitor is for reading and typing, my smaller monitor is for opening/browsing files and leaving outlook open in.

I find XP's merging together the tabs of the same program together furstrating (you can turn this off though). It'll be interesting to see how HCI changes as more people get bigger monitors. The tabs model was an answer for single monitors which has some life for small dual monitors. It appears it doesn't extend well into the much grander scales multi-monitor setups that many who read this site have.

these comments are giving me a severe case of user-spite. theres 9 people who prop opera, yet the only one who actually mentions the solution to Jeff's problem is:

David V. on September 7, 2007 05:58 AM

congradulations for addressing the question!

in opera, control shift win 0 opens the panel and displays the window tab (alternately, just use f4 to toggle the panel and leave windows activated), which gives you a list of all opened tabs in all windows. there is very sadly no way to keyboard navigate to the quick find textarea from there, but usually its pretty easy to find the favicon.ico you are looking for from the list without having to resort to a text search.

why do 4/7ths the opera proponents talk about control-tab? its hardly unique! otoh i dont see anyone lamenting that 1 & 2 are no longer default enabled keybindings. rather than navigate tab history, they navigate tab position: far more useful for cruising adjacent topics. if you are going to provide non-solutions, at least provide interesting non-solutions, not the same non-solution every other browser has.

user-burn!

I use tabs as a form of grouping. I have Webcomics and Blogs, Mail and News, Work Data, and Social Networking.

Of course, eventually this goes to hell as I follow links, but at least there's a way of tracing how I got where. It's all a matter of mixing the "easy locate" advantage of windows and the "compact" advantage of tabs.

There is one advantage of tabs that this doesn't take full advantage of. If you can barely detect what tabs you're looking at, your boss doesn't stand a chance. For example, I can conceal Order of the Stick behind Coding Horror

Ok, so let me get this:
you are complaining that you can't find a tab in the multitude of tabs you have, especially that you have several browser windows opened.
Good. What kind of user does that?
You are viewing this from the wrong angle. Let's make a parallel:
Let's say you have 10 cars, each with 10 drawers where you can put your keys to your house in, and you drive all the cars every day, and you park the cars randomly in your parking lot. Then you go to the roof of your house and you say: 'hey, these drawers make my life more difficult: I can't see my keys!'.
Do you really expect to find your keys when you have no system of organizing your cars, or, even better, no place to put your keys in?
Tabs solve exactly the problem you are referring to: they don't clutter your desktop with unnecessary windows.
You are missing an important concept here: tabs GROUP multiple browser windows into one browser window, so that you can easily find OTHER windows on the screen. Notice: not other tabs, other windows, from another application. So, presumably, if you are searching for the MS Word window, all your 20 browser window won't get in the way, because they'll be grouped into 1 browser window.
So it all boils down to this: ORGANIZE your tabs.
Do not blame tabs for your poor organizing skills or for the lack of interest/time in keeping things organized.
Let's say you agree with me and you keep all your tabs in one browser window and you can easily find that browser window amongst other windows on your desktop.
Great, you have reduced your search algorithm's complexity from BW*T to just T, where BW is the number of windows you have and T is the average number of tabs per browser window. In other words, you now only have to find your browser window (i.e. 1 operation) and then find find the tab in that window (Tn operations at most).
Unless you are superman, batman, ironman or any other super-incredible hero, you won't be able to simultaneously work with more than,say,10 tabs at the same time. That's 10 different websites. If you believe that's a small amount, increase it to 20. In my biased opinion, that ought to be enough for anybody. Beyond this number, you have to do the following: DON'T OPEN ANOTHER BROWSER WINDOW, but instead, use BOOKMARKS to save the address and open it when you need it. Resembles the swapping mechanism a bit.
So if you make sure that you always get rid (i.e. bookmark and close that tab, or, in other words, swap it out) you should be able to keep your 10-20 tabs to contain only the active sites you keep using every few minutes or so. And thus, you will end up with searching through 10 tabs (or 20 if you are closer to a super-hero).
That's not so bad, is it? Click on the Browser window (you'll only have one), look at all the tabs, select the tab you need. There, no need to get annoyed by looking for the Gmail window. The trick is that your brain is able to process all the tabs at once, it's 1 relatively simple operation. Your brain does not use binary, it's not limited to only 0 or 1, or found/not found.
And then there's some more. Keep your tabs in an order.
I use GMail too, pretty frequently actually, and I keep the GMail tab the first one in my browser. Thus, I don't even have to search. Click on the Broser, Click on the GMail window. 2 operations and you're done. No frustration, no annoyances (except when you have 10 tabs opened on a small monitor, and you have to scroll back to the first tab. But that's a hardware issue :) ).
So, the key here is to get organized. No software will get you organized automatically, without your intervention. We are not yet in the AI era. Computers cannot read your mind and determine your character. They can only help you GET organized, but it is you who has to be willing to GET organized.
The concept of tabs is just a tool. If you can't use it, because you don't realize you're too disorganized and messy, you will do what every frustrated novice user does: blames the tool.
And it's valid for virtually anything out there, not just tabs.
So acknowledge the fact that your way of using a computer is cluttering the taskbar with multiple browser windows and each browser window with multiple tabs. There is nothing that will help you to get organized, so your brilliant workaround is by bruteforce : integrate the operating system with my mess, so that I can search through the mess I have created. Sure, I can now see why Torvalds, Gates and Jobs are having daily meetings to solve the issue of disorganized users.