I’ve thought a little over the last few months about user interface design, specifically as relating to browser interfaces. Over the last several years, we’ve seen tabbed browsing become the norm–I remember that more than a decade ago I used NetCaptor with Internet Explorer to achieve this, and now we can all enjoy it.
But, just supporting tabs isn’t enough. There are numerous Firefox extensions to help manage tabs. Some of their features have made their way back into Firefox itself, and others remain exclusive to users of the appropriate extensions. I’ve just seen a page about Tab Candy, which looks like it may be a nice way to organize the many tabs that so many of us use. My current solution to that problem is a little more all-encompasing: I use several desktops, and put windows containing related groups of tabs on desktops depending on their purpose. So, browser tabs related to studying Japanese go in browser windows on desktop 2, along with Tagaini Jisho, Anki, and any other related stuff.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t just how to deal with many tabs. The problem is how to deal with many independent–but possibly related–items, be they browser tabs, applications, directories full of files, or whatsoever else we may envision. Which leads me to my conclusion: all these tab-extensions, and even the fact that browsers support tabs at all, are just making up for a failure of the window manager. On Windows, of course, there’s no choice of window manager, so this must be done if you want to provide a nice interface to your users. But, Linux allows you to use whatever window manager you like. The taskbar in windows and others is more or less the same as the tab bar in firefox. You get some nice bit of continuity in the interface by letting the application handle the tabs, but that shouldn’t be necessary.
Well, I don’t have a solution. Are there any window managers that offer a multi-level tab like functionality? My current desktop/window/tab system works well enough, but I can’t help imagining there’s a better way.
