critique: how ie8, firefox and opera handle browser tabs
Posted by jonathan - 16/03/08 at 02:03:38 pm
My friends and colleagues from work just got back from the land of sin, Vegas, and posted their review and redux of Mix08. A couple of post about ie8 got me wondering if Redmond has been watching opera and did anything with the tab in ie8. After being burnt on trying to double install ie between 6 and 7 I have yet to download it, but since I now have four machines at work lets sacrifice one for the sake of experiment.
On my box affectionately know as sub-prime, ie8 shows me that the wordy tab instructions of ie7 has been replaced, but only with web 2.0ish gradient language telling me the obvious, “you’ve opened a tab”. This weak phrasing reminds me of the oldie but not so goodie aol phrase turned movie, “you’ve got mail”. Sorry IE8 team, but this is pathetic. Both ie7 and ie8 do not give me anything useful when I hit ctrl+t.
I am going to skip over firefox and delve right into opera because firefox is even worse than ie in that ctrl+t simply gives me a blank address bar and blank page. No instructions nothing useful. Simple, yes, useful, no. In this case the KIMAC has not been met.
My superb memory, ha ha, has faltered since I’m not exactly sure how I came across Opera again, but somehow I heard an interview with one of the oldest players in the browser space and downloaded their operamini to my phone. In general it had a nice feel to it so I recently decided to stuff the pipes of the old laptop with yet another program and download the latest opera. For the most part it has been a good experience. Its tab implementation absolutely rocks.
Opera is on the forefront of the tab. They have a feature called speed dial, invoking the paradigm from a phone where when you instantiate a new tab, ctrl+t, rather than being presented with a blank page like in firefox, or a page which explains tabs (only useful once), opera gives you a 3×3 grid of thumbnails with which you can add your favorite sites. Like a mini favorites/bookmarker it allows you to throw in a reasonable number, nine, sites you might use. The paradigm is easy for non-techies, the number of options is kept manageable and the thumbnails give you visual cues for easy nav. I love this feature.
Click here for a side-by-side comparison of the implementations.
The second tab feature of note is a thumbnail of your other tabs. We have seen this on other sites, such as ask.com, and on the windows powertoy alt+tab switcher, but opera incorporates a thumbnail of the webpage into the hover state on other tabs. This gives you a nice preview of non-focused tabs in a mouse-friendly way, if you are not a master ctrl+tab switcher.
Click here for a view of the thumbnailing feature.
I have had a few crashes most notably when trying to add cookinglight.com to the speeddial, but overall it has taken over as my default browser for everything but web development. There are probably ways to manage this better, but ff has become clogged with development tools, firebug, webdev toolbar, yslow etc that impede on my general surfing not to mention the memory creep.
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wasn’t sure how to reach you, buddy… but talked to Ian over here @ clearspring, and asked if i’d throw a shoutout to ya.. if you know anybody looking for a change, send ‘em over to clearspring.com (refer me, “foo”)
you know where to reach me ;)
Comment by foO — March 18, 2008 #
Internet Explorer 8 seems to be better than any previous version of IE. IE8 is very stable and rarely crashes or cause blue screens.
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Comment by Bruce Stoner — December 6, 2009 #