It’s safe to say I’m not the only Web surfer who has lots of tabs open at any given time. It’s also safe to say I’m not the only one who all of a sudden thought he was hearing voices, only to realize it was actually some Web site that automatically plays audio (or a video with audio). Funny at best, annoying on average, embarrassing / disruptive at worst. Especially if your desktop looks like this:
What if it looked something more like this:
I’m obviously not the best at Photoshop (and thanks to Jing for the easy markup tool), but there are so many ways to think about how to help users out a bit more. Tabs could also show:
- Download status
- Buffer status
- Flash/script problems
- Incomplete forms
- Loading issues/status
- and so much more…
We’ve been online and using “the Web” for about 15 years now (some of us, at least), and despite the amazing advances in the capabilities of a Web browser, I find in many ways things aren’t much “better”. Web sites still can’t seem to load much faster than they did a year, five years, or ten years ago. I understand you can “do more” in a Web page than ever before. But is “more features” better than “load faster” in our fast-paced lifestyle? I’m not quite sure…
good points. My main feature request for browsers: Keyboard short cut to scroll open through tabs.
Currently you have to click on the tab, its slow and annoying.
On a mac Commnd + Tab lets you view and quickly switch between open apps, need some function for browser tabs.
Regarding that 15 years… I’d say Firefox is a big improvement over Lynx. 😉
nearly 17 for me 🙂
Hasan,
I’m not sure whether I understood correctly what you were asking for, but I’m wondering if CTRL-tab is what you need. It allows you to tab through the open tabs in your browser just like ALT-tab allows you to tab through open windows/applications.
On a Mac I believe you can use cmd-opt-tab just like ALT-tab on a Windows computer. Firefox even has a cool plugin that appears to show a preview of the tab as you move through them.
PS – totally agree with the smart tab request… Been bothered by audio more than once. Of course… Playing audio unsolicited on a website might be the greater offense…
I realized that I was suffering from tab-overdose when I would look at my browser and be overwhelmed by dozens of open tabs. They were taunting me – like I wasn’t accomplishing to do items if I didn’t close them.
Then I discovered the Firefox extension called TooManyTabs. TMT lets me stuff open tabs into a ‘folder’ of sorts, and hides them. This is perfect for when I’m working on a particular project where I need a bunch of pages open, but don’t need them 24/7. One nice feature is that they (the open tabs) don’t use up tons of memory when they’re TMT’ed. Another benefit is that my Firefox starts up a lot quicker.