HIG: tabwidgets

[Gábor Lehel]

On 3/10/06, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 09 March 2006 10:37, Gábor Lehel wrote:
> > - Close button on each tab, on the righthand side, with an icon on the
>
> perhaps we can leave this in as an option for users to turn on if they wish
> (as we already currently do) but it seems like a poor general default. opera
> doesn't exactly have the same target market we do =)

Could you elaborate on this? If your insinuation was meant to be that
it's for power users, well, myself I have it turned off -- when I
actually use the tab bar I middle click to close, but usually I just
ctrl+w or use the mouse gesture (down-right, for what it's worth).

Way too often, though, I see people right clicking the tab, and then
painstakingly locating and aiming at the 'close tab' entry, every time
they want to close a tab. And I grimace with imagined pain. Having a
single close button at the right is better, but it's still not up
there with being able to click on the tab itself to close it. And it
doesn't let you close non-active tabs. (To make an analogy: imagine
having to click a button on kicker to close a window -- and only the
active window.)

The one issue I can imagine is people accidentally clicking the close
button when they didn't mean to -- I think the many pros outweigh this
potential con, but then I also suppose it's not an accident that the
undoing of closed tabs got added to Opera at the same time.

> > - Drag & drop reordering of tabs. If you drag to outside of the tab
> > bar, though, it works just like normal drag & drop.
>
> seems we have consensus on this one.
>
> > - You can click on the active tab to 'minimize' it*, like with a
> > taskbar -- this means it won't be the tab that gets activated after
>
> power user feature? i'm wary of "magic clicks" to be honest.

How come? It's a bit of a niche feature to be sure, but it's pretty
useful, and I don't see a drawback. I think it's a good idea to
exploit the tabbar <-> taskbar similarity where reasonable, for
consistency and familiarity if nothing else.
(Although, tabs are an amalgation of taskbar entries and window
titlebars, as they fulfill the purposes of both.)

>
> > - When you open way lots of tabs. instead of excess ones scrolling off
> > the righthand side into oblivion, all of them shrink to fit (the text
> > is ellipsified, then hidden, but below a certain size the icon itself
> > is also scaled, and then hidden). This works usably up to around a
> > hundred tabs or so, beyond that it might be worth starting a second
> > row of tabs (which Opera doesn't do).
>
> we scale up to ~17 on my laptop screen which is 1024x768 .... not 100, though
> 100 seems pretty over the top.. =) 100 tabs @ 1024 pixels is less than 10px
> each. tiny targets == not so good?

Yeah, tiny targets == not so good, but tiny targets > no targets at
all. 100 is just my estimated maximum where you could still reasonably
click on the targets (my screen is 1024x768 too, btw). So when (if) to
start a second row of tabs is debatable, but the point is, just about
anything is better than extra tabs going off the edge of the screen
(imo).

--
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.