My wife strongly dislikes the new Firefox 3.6 tab behavior (where tabs opened from links appear immediately to the right of their parent tab, instead of at the extreme right of the tab bar).
I do like the new behavior, because by keeping related tabs closer together, it reduces the amount of time I have to spend interacting with the tab-bar scroll buttons (my least favorite UI element in all of Firefox).
She dislikes it for consistency reasons: when you open a new blank tab, it still appears at the far right. So now tabs can appear in two different places, depending on where you opened them. It violates the principle of consistency, which is generally considered one of the most important UI principles. This inconsistency hasn’t really bothered me personally. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s because opening a tab through a link, and opening a new blank tab, feel like different actions to me. There’s a difference in what I’m thinking about. But I can certainly understand how it feels like a consistency violation to other people.
My wife also doesn’t like that there’s no way to change Firefox back to the old behavior without going through about:config. (If you’re interested: type “about:config” in the location bar and hit enter, then do a search for a preference named browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set it to True or False, as you like.)
February 8, 2010 at 11:38 pm
It took me a while to get used to the new behaviour, but I think now I am over it.
There is one thing though: I read something, click a link and a new tab opens (in the background), then I hit Ctrl-T to switch to the new tab to read some more on a specific thing. Next is Ctrl-W to close that tab.
After that I am in the tab right of the original. Ideal would be to be back to the one I started with.
February 8, 2010 at 11:49 pm
The functionality is not complete – that is why people (like me) find it annoying.
Since there is very little visual distinction to the new tab, it becomes easy to “lose” it with all the other tabs.
IE8 gets around this be colouring groups of tags to show where they came from.
I have been trying to get used to this functionality, but it is still awkward at best.
February 9, 2010 at 12:02 am
I actually wrote an add-on for this so people do not have to much around in about:config:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/61766
February 9, 2010 at 12:13 am
I really don’t like the related behavior, it’s among the first things I change with a new installation/profile. Partly it’s because I don’t always open a bunch of links and then read them one by one. I’ll open one or two, read them, open another from there, close one I’m done with, switch back to the first page, open a few more. Always appending means I have a mental model of where the tabs are going to end up, while the append-related behavior means that where it goes depends on whether I was reading a tab and switched back.
February 9, 2010 at 12:26 am
I think Benjamin’s case is actually an argument for maintaining tab groups even after switching tabs. That way, the mental model isn’t broken and the order of child tabs disrupted by switching away from the parent tab temporarily. Extending the new behaviour this way would necessitate some sort of visual indication, however, as You points out (a request already made in bug 540125).
February 9, 2010 at 12:32 am
Here’s my problem with it: I often middle-click a lot of links to open each of them in new tabs. Usually, I’m doing this.
The first link I click opens up to the right of the current tab; let’s call that new tab “Tab B”. But if I open another new tab before switching over to the one I’d just opened, then it opens to the right of Tab B. Then Tab D opens next to Tab C, and so on. This is, I assume, because Tabs B, C, and D, aren’t yet “viewed.”
Usually, after I’m done reading Tab A, I close it to move onto Tab B. But there are occasions on which I’ll jump to Tab D, then close it, before jumping back to Tab A. The problem is that after looking at Tab D and going back to Tab A, is that Tab E will open to the right of Tab A, even though I haven’t yet viewed Tabs B or C. And Tab F will open to the right of Tab E, and so on, pushing Tabs B and C even further to the right.
Perhaps the default behavior should be to open to the right of the rightmost “not viewed” tab under all circumstances?
February 9, 2010 at 12:46 am
I do like the new behavior.
With previous version of Firefox, one of the first add-ons I used to install was Tabs Open Relative. Now it is not necessary anymore.
Just like the author of this blog, i think that opening a link from a tab or opening a new tab are two different actions. Opening a new tab is kind of “Let’s go to another stuff”, so I find it good that it is at the rightmost end.
February 9, 2010 at 12:53 am
I like this new behavior but, as with your wife, I hate it that new tabs are opened on the far right.
Most of the time, when I open a new tab it’s because some of the non-liked content on the current page picked my interest. As so, it would make sense to open it near the currently focused tab (Just as if it had been open with a middle click.).
(Likely) Problem is it would be cumbersome to open an unrelated tab in the end of the tab list, but it is still easier to move a tab to the end of the list than to a precise spot between two other tabs.
February 9, 2010 at 12:59 am
I personally subscribe to the way of doing things by first going to one page in my routine, then going to another then another, until my list is done, opening tabs as i see fit as i go through, most of the time without looking at the tabs i open (unless its not part of the routine and I’m looking for something specific). Then once I’m done, i peruse the tabs i still have open, and close as i see fit. So sometimes i will open a whole bunch of pages from one site, then go to another and open some tabs, and i want to go find a tab that i specifically remember from the first site in a specific spot, and i cant find it…thats why i dont like it.
Actually now that i think about it, that way doesnt really apply, but there are instances…at least i think there are. I guess it could just be me disliking change and whatnot, but alas, i dislike change too much to give this possibly better way a try (actually i lied, if it acts in the same way Chrome does, then i lied again and do dislike it because i HAVE tried it in Chrome)
February 9, 2010 at 2:21 am
I despise the new behavior, I changed it (through about:config) 5 seconds after I realized it was different.
It beats me why Mozilla changed it and didn’t add an option in [Tools/Options]
February 9, 2010 at 3:07 am
I use Firefox primarily, but Chrome and Safari as a secondary. I love this behavior, it should always keep the tabs close together. I’m really glad this is the new default option, because it makes sense.
February 9, 2010 at 7:17 am
I think whether people like/dislike it has a lot to do with browsing habits and how we create a mental map of the tabs in the tab bar.
For me, having tabs clustered in parent-child relationship clumps is less intuitive than having tabs stacked by sequence of opening. I guess it’s also somewhat analogous to how I organize things in real life — vaguely time-based stacks. I locate things by approximating the sequence of opening/reading. For me, the primary difficulty with the Open-Relative is that it breaks the linear stack into clumps, but is still visually represented as a single linear sequence of tabs. I’d be much more okay with the Tabs Open Relative if there were ways of demarcating the “clumps,” with colors or spaces or visual “stacks” or otherwise.
But I think this also gets into the bigger question of tab sorting.
When I am doing web browsing, I’d often middle-click a bunch of links from a variety of sources — emails, feed aggregators, blogs, etc, and then read through all of them at once. Since I’m just browsing casually, the new tabs’ “parent” doesn’t really matter so much. In those cases, I’d prefer my tabs to be sorted into “standard stuff” like email (far left), “read stuff” and “new stuff”. When I’m doing research, on the other hand, I can see the benefit of Tabs Open Relative, since that would help me group the many different topics of research. After I have 20+ tabs open on some research topic, I often belatedly wish I had grouped the tabs somehow — in a new window or if there was some way to bookmark/tag a bunch of tabs… Finally, there are times when I wished I could easily sort tabs by media and maybe have several of them bisecting the window. For example, have a youtube clip running in one corner while I browse through a blog.
February 9, 2010 at 10:32 am
I multi-task on the macro-scale (since multi-tasking on the micro-scale is impossible), and never did like tabs opening on the far left. As such, I, like Pierre (comment 7) always installed Tabs Open Relative. I just wished that new tabs would also open relatively…
Further, I realize now that my wish has come true (Tabs Open Relative being built-in), that people have different models of using tabs. Because of this, I believe that a public pref should be available to dis/enable it. Furthermore, I believe that new tabs should also open relatively when the relative feature is enabled through the choice. Furthermore, I believe that an about:config pref should be added if the above is added known as “browser.tabs.insertNewAfterCurrent” with the following possible values: -1, 0, and 1. -1 is default, and it grabs whatever value browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent has. 0 is disabled (current behavior), and 1 is enabled (with behavior of Tabs Open Relative). Tabs are a crucial experience of web browsing these days, and as such, the defaults have to be set with a standard of expertise, with the ability to change where change is needed.
February 9, 2010 at 11:13 am
I didn’t see this change documented in the release notes or even advertised as a feature.
I’ve tried to get used to it but I find that far from helping me find information it just makes it into a mess because I’ll switch around tabs opening links and they will be in no linear order, which with the old behaviour at least they were essentially in a list at the end, so I could process them at my leisure instead of hunting them down.
I never really use the tab list button anyway.
February 9, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Surely there should be an option to turn this off in the options/preferences window. I mean there’s already a tab panel there for gods sake, with plenty of room for several more options.
February 10, 2010 at 9:24 am
Sure, but you can always use add-ons like Tabberwocky, Tab Kit, etc. for some of the things mentioned.
February 10, 2010 at 12:03 pm
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February 10, 2010 at 1:25 pm
I hate the new behavior, since I use lots of app-type like tabs to the very left (gmail, facebook, google reader, etc.). I always want them to be there, and just open lots of links from them. Once I have openeed all interested links (often 20+) I just know i have to “work off” from the right to the left, and once i hit the first “sticky” tab, I know that i am done. Also it keeps the position of the sticky-tabs always the same.
February 11, 2010 at 5:42 am
It’s incomplete.
As @You and @David Regev have said, Firefox needs tab groups (and hierarchical at that).
Visualisation of hierarchical tab groups would certainly be an interesting design challenge.
But there are *so* many things broken with Firefox’s tabbing interface for Abundant Tabs Management (such as tabs that change size and move when closing, no multi-row, minimum tab width is way too big, etc.), that I don’t have much hope that something as complex (and potentially controversial) as hierarchical tab groups will ever be implemented.
February 11, 2010 at 10:23 am
Another way to look at it is depth-first vs breadth-first. Look at the XKCD comic that Zacqary mentioned. The new behaviour encourages a depth-first experience, where the ‘William Howard Taft’ page is read before the ‘Structural Collapse’ page. This usually allows you to organize your reading by topic and to cover each topic fully before moving on to the next one. The old behaviour, on the other hand, is breadth-first, where the ‘Structural Collapse’ page is read before the ‘William Howard Taft’ page. That led to a purely chronological organization. The problem with that is that, if I open a tab in the background, by the time I reach that tab, my mind has already moved on to other topics, and I now must remember what was on my mind when I had opened that tab. I, personally, found it inefficient and mentally taxing, which is why I installed Tabs Open Relative ages ago.
So, this leads me to wonder a few things: are the people who prefer the old behaviour more likely to be (so-called) multitaskers? Do they usually open fewer tabs than those who prefer the new behaviour? Are they more likely to follow links in-tab and then hit Back rather than to open background tabs for later reading? Finally, will the breadth-first people, over time, get used to doing things depth-first.
(Incidentally, I recently mocked-up a thought experiment of what a browser would look like as a ZUI, inspired by that very XKCD comic. I suppose breadth-first users might have a different mental model.)
February 11, 2010 at 1:24 pm
I don’t like many of the UI changes that happen in Firefox, and frankly find some of the proposed changes for the future horrifying.
The new tabs appearing next to the tab that spawned them in 3.6 is excellent though. I love it.
Not liking that you can’t change it back to the old behaviour without going to about:config is understandable, but at least you *can* change it back. An Add-on to make it easier would be trivial I presume.
February 11, 2010 at 8:34 pm
@David Regev,
Your (Z)UI is very interesting. It would exactly fit my way of browsing.
Did you aldready present this to the Mozilla Design Challenge about reinventing tabs last summer ?
Is your ZUI still just at the mockup level or is there a way to ‘test’ it (beta or even alpha release?) ?
February 12, 2010 at 5:29 am
@Pierre:
Thanks! I put up the mock-up only very recently. I should probably post it somewhere to see what people think. At this point, it’s just a thought-experiment with a (crude) mock-up.
February 19, 2010 at 10:27 am
I hate the new behaviour because i’ve been conditioned to the old one, however, I know in the long term it will mean my tabs are grouped together, so i’m glad of the change, however much it frustrates me now.
February 23, 2010 at 2:24 pm
@Pierre and anyone else interested:
I ended up posting the mock-up to the Concept Series group. Feel free to comment on it there.
April 6, 2010 at 10:05 pm
I agree with your wife, I think the new functionality is awful. I program e-commerce sites for a living and my productivity is affected by this. Like you wife said, if I openned something new I like to know exactly where it will be. I can change its location later. Now, if I have 10 tabs open, I dont remember which tab I am on, and where the new one will open. I get lost trying to find where I am.
May 8, 2010 at 4:42 pm
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October 9, 2010 at 8:11 pm
I prefer my tabs to be laid out in a time-specific, sequential order of when I opened the tab, as this serves as a mental chronology of what I was thinking about, where I was going, and how I arrived from point A to point B. Thus, I definitely cannot agree with the way Firefox is grouping the tabs in relative form.
For those who prefer to have the original tab behavior, there is an addon available to revert back to the original tabbing: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/61766
November 13, 2010 at 5:01 pm
I’ve liked relative tab opening for a long time. And I wish new blank tabs opened relative too. There’s a good discussion of why new blank tabs opening relative is useful, here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1589445
I don’t like heavy tab extensions, so I was glad to find a small extension that opens new blank tabs relatively: Tab Kit. Available here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1480/