Tabbed Browsing/User Interface Design/Tab Overflow
Tracked by [http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=221684
Introduction
We need to find a better way of handling the "too many tabs to fit nicely on the tab bar" case. When users get beyond 15/20 tabs, depending on screen resolution, the tabs because almost unusable.
Goals
Support faster access to a larger number of tabs Preserve tab ordering Preserve keyboard navigation Preserve drag and drop reordering
Prior Analysis/Selected Opinions from others
Ben Goodger
I have covered this in some detail mentally before and here are my notes:
Given that the tabbed browser has these features: - drag and drop reordering - keyboard accessible navigation
... and that we want to try retain those even for overflowed tabs (dragging a tab back to the start of the set when it's at the end is occasionally useful):
Chevron Menu Only (Safari) - When you select an item from the overflow menu, the indication of selected tab vanishes from the strip, which looks weird and gives no indication as to what is actually selected. - D&D and keynav break, unless you want to implement various horrid hacks to show the popup menu and allow dragging/navigating into it, which almost certainly don't work on Mac.
Chevron Menu with Scrolling Strip - When you select a tab from the menu, the strip is zoom-scrolled so that the tab is visible. This solves the "no visible selected tab in tab strip" issue that affects the plain Chevron Menu solution. However when the strip is scrolled the set of non-visible tabs changes. There may be more non-visible tabs to the right and now left of the strip, meaning two menus need be shown, perhaps at alternate ends of the tab strip. This sounds cumbersome. - D&D and keynav probably work in this case though.
Chevron Menu with Tab Reordering (Visual Studio 2005) - LIFO ordering on the strip, sense of insertion is inverted. New tabs appear at the start of the strip and older ones move to the right until they are eventually evicted into a menu. Selecting an item from the menu re-inserts the item at the start of the strip. I have been using VS2005 for over a month now and this is a disaster. The delicate order of tabs that some users have is not only not preserved, it is actively destroyed. They should have left it the way it was. - Doesn't easily support D&D or keynav to non-visible items.
Scrolling Strip (buttons) (Visual Studio 2003 and earlier) - Supports D&D and keynav while maintaining a single static piece of UI (scroll buttons) - Setting the scroll speed correctly is likely to be a challenge. - No instant way of getting to a hidden tab - speed of access relies on scrolling and dexterity