Talk:Tabbed Browsing/User Interface Design/Tab Overflow

Could you put buttons on the ends of the tabbar that, when pressed, would convert the pointer to an Acrobat-like grabby-hand scroller for pulling the entire bar left and right? Would this jibe with keyboard navigation? It seems like arrow key scrolling could still work with this.

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Currently, the Firefox UI breaks down when there are too many tabs in a single window. It's possible to end up with tabs which are more or less unreachable, and on Mac OS X the tabs can even spill into the tab close button's area. It'd be great to improve the situation for FF2. Interestingly, there's an extension that prototypes several different possibilities for tab overflow management: http://jomel.me.uk/software/firefox/toomanytabs/

It lets you select between several different behaviors including:

   * Tab scrollbar
   * Tab scroll buttons
   * Multiple rows of tabs
   * Tab overflow menus

None of these are particularly well implemented, but it's interesting to play with. (It's not very clear, but you can switch between these modes using the little down arrow next to the tab close button when the extension is installed.) Out of these, I'm most intrigued by the overflow menus (a little nicer than Safari's because choosing a tab in an overflow menu shows the tab and moves the overflow menu to the other side of the tab set) and the tab scrolling (though this implementation is horrendous and we'd need something much better).

The "Grabby Hand" idea above is interesting, but I'd be concerned about discoverability as well as the overloading with the existing drag-to-reorder-tabs functionality.

What's the current state of the design explorations for this?

jhughes 19:41, 7 Feb 2006 (PST)