how dumb is that

Hmm, Firefox are adding a pointless ‘preview’ thing when switching tabs, and changing the way it works to be more like windoze (ordering). According to a preview on ars technica.

Umm, wtf for? The preview thing is ok if your system takes forever to bring up the other application or it is iconised, but it makes no sense when it would be easier just showing the whole page. So I guess switching tabs will get even slower in 3.1 … sigh. The ordering thing is just dumb. People like using tabs because they aren’t windows, why make them act like them.

This entry was written by zucchi, posted on August 1, 2008 at 6:08 am, filed under General. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

8 Comments

  1. anonymous coward
    Posted August 1, 2008 at 6:31 am | Permalink

    they’re being added to arora too :|

  2. Pavel
    Posted August 1, 2008 at 10:10 am | Permalink

    Tabs are actually a workaround for the lack of window grouping functionality in the window manager. So they basically are windows. And tabs you currently dont see comply to iconised windows.

  3. James
    Posted August 1, 2008 at 10:20 am | Permalink

    I haven’t used it either, but I suspect it uses Cairo magic to be pretty fast, and switching tabs isn’t instantaneous either. Not that I’ll be using it if I have a choice (ie they have a pref to turn it off).

  4. Jack
    Posted August 1, 2008 at 11:29 am | Permalink

    Agreed. You would think they would leave this sort of thing to an add-on. It’s a bit superfluous.

  5. Erwan
    Posted August 2, 2008 at 12:51 am | Permalink

    I’ve played with it (because it’s an extension) and I hate it. It’s fast to render, but:
    1) you still have to look at a small thumbnail instead of the full page (with a horrible scaling algorithm on Linux, very pixelized)
    2) the order is completely messed up

    And they don’t provide a way to disable it… I guess I’ll have to get used to the ctrl+pg down shortcut.

  6. Craig
    Posted August 2, 2008 at 3:00 am | Permalink

    Personally I disagree about the tab order… for me it’s not about windows it’s about context. I open a number of tabs to jump off into another topic or do something, and when I close it, I expect to return to the previous context. If I have opened a number of tabs and close one at it goes to the tab to the left – what is that? Doesn’t seem to fit my flow.

    Is there another context that I should be viewing Tabs in other than last task context?

  7. John "Not Really" Sm
    Posted August 2, 2008 at 10:56 am | Permalink

    They don’t know how to disable the plug-in warning (seriously, you can’t remove that).
    They also don’t know about object focus.

    In other words: Epiphany + WebKit = WIN

  8. Jadd
    Posted August 2, 2008 at 8:53 pm | Permalink

    So, Firefox is resorting to copying even Opera’s useless features? The preview thing was introduced way back in 9.0 (currently, we’re in 9.5).

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