IE7 Tab overflow | The Coffeehouse

Wells

Why don't the tabs in IE7 overflow like this:

ie7 tabs overflowing

The current behaviour is just nasty.

Also,

It's been stuck like this for about 3 hours, I've hit cancel and the cross... I can't access the other tabs that I have open. I think it might be doing this when the page contains references to non-existant files, maybe css/images or something.

edit: oh, and another one: I had an embedded .wmv video open in one of my IE windows. I tried to hibernate but nothing happened, no prompts or anything. Later on I went back to the tab with the video and saw the "Hibernating may stop playback..." confirmation message, which was hidden from me before.

edit2: and wtf is up with scrolling? it takes about a second for my scoll wheel to scroll on even simple pages, very annoying.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Wells wrote:

Why don't the tabs in IE7 overflow like this:

The current behaviour is just nasty.

Please no. Multiple rows of tabs are bad. Scroll arrows like VS or something would be better.

Wells wrote:
edit2: and wtf is up with scrolling? it takes about a second for my scoll wheel to scroll on even simple pages, very annoying.

No such issue here. Are you using IE7 on XP or Vista, and what mouse?

littleguru
<3 Seattle

Sven Groot wrote:

Wells wrote:
Why don't the tabs in IE7 overflow like this:

The current behaviour is just nasty.

Please no. Multiple rows of tabs are bad. Scroll arrows like VS or something would be better.

No overflow please! Smiley

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

Sven Groot wrote:
Multiple rows of tabs are bad.

Why?

SimonJ

Multiple rows of tabs are very difficult to navigate. Click on a tab on one of the upper rows and that row has to move to the bottom of the stack so as not to obscure lower rows.

Try using a dialog like this. Word's Tools | Options... springs to mind. Try visiting all the tabs in a predefined order. If you try just to visit all the tabs you can never be certain you'd done it.

SimonJ

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

SimonJ wrote:
Click on a tab on one of the upper rows and that row has to move to the bottom of the stack so as not to obscure lower rows.

Ah, I see... Good point.

What if the tabs went all around the viewport, on all four sides? (Or just the top and bottom if we don't want to consider rotated text.) Would that be preferable to an overflow area?

BruceMorgan

Wells wrote:

Why don't the tabs in IE7 overflow like this:

Multiple tab rows are acceptable in something like an Options dialog, where visibility of all tabs is more important than navigation. You don't want to have to scroll just to find the right tab. This is "picker" style selection - you're trying to pick one indiviudal tab out of many tabs.

Multiline tabs are a disaster for tab to tab navigation in any sort of rational sequence, as SimonJ says. It's just not what they were designed to do.

In IE7, I think we have a great solution for overflow on the tab row as well is picker style selection via either by name using droplist on the left of the tab row, or visually using Quick Tabs.

SimonJ

Maurits wrote:
What if the tabs went all around the viewport, on all four sides? (Or just the top and bottom if we don't want to consider rotated text.) Would that be preferable to an overflow area?

Oh, please no!

If you need lots of tabs, you are better off putting them down the left or right hand side. You need more width for the display but you ge a much more navigable result. Compare Microsoft's OneNote application for the way it handles pages of notes.

sbc
GW R/Me

BruceMorgan wrote:
Wells wrote:
Why don't the tabs in IE7 overflow like this:

Multiple tab rows are acceptable in something like an Options dialog, where visibility of all tabs is more important than navigation. You don't want to have to scroll just to find the right tab. This is "picker" style selection - you're trying to pick one indiviudal tab out of many tabs.

Multiline tabs are a disaster for tab to tab navigation in any sort of rational sequence, as SimonJ says. It's just not what they were designed to do.

In IE7, I think we have a great solution for overflow on the tab row as well is picker style selection via either by name using droplist on the left of the tab row, or visually using Quick Tabs.

Quick Tabs - now that can be a good solution. You can see what the content of each tab is. What happens when lots of tabs are open - do you scroll down on the Quick Tab page (like you would on a page with lots of thumbnails)?

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

BruceMorgan wrote:
Multiple tab rows are acceptable in something like an Options dialog, where visibility of all tabs is more important than navigation.

Even for options dialogs there are much better solutions. Consider for instance the the way the VS200x options dialog is done. That's much nicer imho (I'm not saying the VS200x options are particularly intuitive with respect to where what option is, but it sure as hell beats doing all that with tabs).

jamie

...sigh

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

Active Directory/Exchange 2000...

Heirarchical navigation would help here, it's true. But it's hard to see how that could be applied to IE. How would you collect tabs into groups?

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Maurits wrote:
Heirarchical navigation would help here, it's true. But it's hard to see how that could be applied to IE. How would you collect tabs into groups?

I wouldn't. That example applied only to options dialogs, not to tabs. I still don't really see why a browser needs tabs in the first place.

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

Sven Groot wrote:
Maurits wrote:Heirarchical navigation would help here, it's true. But it's hard to see how that could be applied to IE. How would you collect tabs into groups?

I wouldn't. That example applied only to options dialogs, not to tabs. I still don't really see why a browser needs tabs in the first place.

The choice to switch between open pages has to happen somewhere. The user probably doesn't care whether the navigational tool is part of the OS (apps in the task bar) or part of the app (tabs in an app). If it is natural to use, the user will be happy.

The task bar, of course, has changed several times, what with:

collapsing task groups

a single "IE" entry with a drop-up containing all your IE windows

and exploding task groups

separate entries for all your Office documents even though they're all in a single app

I personally like the Alt-Tab feature that allows you to more easily switch to apps that were more recently used. It would be nice if Ctrl-Tab did the same thing between MDI documents and IE/Firefox tabs.

But to each their own.

SimonJ

Maurits wrote:
Active Directory/Exchange 2000...

Heirarchical navigation would help here, it's true. But it's hard to see how that could be applied to IE. How would you collect tabs into groups?

Just putting those tabs down the left hand side of the dialog instead of across the top would dramatically improve its usability. You could still use a tab control or you could use a list box.

General
Address
Account
Profile
Telephones
Organization
Exchange General
E-mail Addresses
Exchange Features
Exchange Advanced

etc.

General, the most important tab, is then at the top of the list, not burried at the bottom. Published Certificates is put much lower, where it belongs, not first as it is on the horizontal tabs.

This has the great advantage that the lines don't rearrange themselves when you select one. If there are more tabs than you can comfortably fit down the left side of the dialog, switch to a list box. The user can than see the scroll bar and use it to see and select the lowest options.

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

SimonJ wrote:
Just putting those tabs down the left hand side of the dialog instead of across the top would dramatically improve its usability.

Agreed.

This works as long as the titles of the navigational subelements (pages, tabs, whatever) are reasonably short, and there's a fixed number of them.

If there are a variable number of elements, and the titles are long, and it is desireable to see as-much-as-possible-of-each-title before truncation, then it doesn't work so well.

EDIT: Your list box idea removes the "fixed number" requirement. Or at least changes it to a "fairly large number" requirement. Tabs-on-the-left looks kind of silly if there are only two or three tabs and the navigational subelements are large... there becomes a significant area of wasted space.

A hard problem.

SlackmasterK
I write my OWN blogging engines

Trouble is, as you put horizontally-oriented text (like this text) in tabs along the vertical axis, demands on screen space go way up. Standard toolbars only increase the required Y dimension by about 15-20px, whileas putting them along the side would increase the X dimension by at least 50 (to be readable) to 150 (to differentiate them). If Microsoft implemented something like this, they'd probably add some sort of obscurity that would make it even worse, such as adding "Windows Internet Explorer - " to the beginning of each tab's title, rather than the end as it does now.

Obviously there are divergent viewpoints. These viewpoints are each equally valid and present very good points to the issue. I propose we have a preferences option for tab arrangement:
- Horizontal Orientation - Scroll tabs 1 line at a time
- Horizontal Orientation - Group Tabs Exchange-Style
- Horizontal Orientation - Group Tabs Visual Studio-Style
- Horizontal Orientation - Show [X] Lines, then compress text Taskbar-Style
- Vertical Orientation - Show [Y] Lines, then compress text vertically
- Vertical Orientation - Show [Y] Lines, then overlap tabs
- Hybrid Orientation - Show [X] Lines [·], then open new window

where X is a textbox that converts to int32 which the user can edit
where Y is the # of tabs that will fit on the screen vertically without overlapping
where Hybrid provides a ComboBox [·] which contains index members "Vertically" and "Horizontally".

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

sbc wrote:
Quick Tabs - now that can be a good solution. You can see what the content of each tab is. What happens when lots of tabs are open - do you scroll down on the Quick Tab page (like you would on a page with lots of thumbnails)?

We currently do both with AOL Explorer...

Quick Tabs to preview the content of a tab (We also do back and forth Quick Views) and we do Mosaic (Show all tabs, like IE7 does)...it's nice but can be annoying.