When Firefox, previously called Phoenix and Firebird, launched tabbed browsing (well, after Bloatzilla), I was super-excited and pimping it to all my friends. It’s been a while since I felt this way and, with tab-saving in browsers (which I of course turn on), I tend to choose the browser with the least tabs saved in it. Apps like Choosy for the Mac, which gives me a pop-up with a choice of browsers whenever clicking a link, or which chooses the best-performing browser running at the time, are a life-saver, but they are just a piecemeal solution to a greater problem.

Firefox, in its latest version (3.6), introduced a nifty feature for a better tab user-experience, which I hope they expand a little more. Basically, when you click on the little icon on the top right (see screenshot), you get a nice overview, called “Showcase,” of all the tabs loaded in your browser at the time.

A similar implementation is of course Safari’s and Chrome’s start-window, which shows you an overview of your most viewed sites, making it a visual replacement for your bookmarks and/or history managers.

For some time now, you’ve also had the feature of restoring tabs after closing your browser, either voluntary, which makes sense as tabs consume an insane amount of ram and CPU (especially for Flash sites, but for plenty of other things also), and as a safety feature, when your browser crashes. Saft for Safari (Mac only) introduced a tab-recovery user-interface (see picture), where you see a list of tabs previously loaded and where you can tick or untick sites that you want to start up with. I believe Firefox has a similar interface for tab-recovery after a crash.

But it’s all still a hassle and I really haven’t come across a perfect implementation of dealing with several dozens of tabs. I wouldn’t mind having the option of starting Firefox tab-free, with option of restoring whatever tab I used previously, in its original state, via something like the Firefox Showcase interface. There are some Firefox extensions that do just that, but I’ve so far not come across something that is intuitively usable.

There is the other problem, which is that sometimes you want to open a browser for a single purpose, such as Google Maps, Gmail, or the weather, and it’s annoying to have to open a browser with 50+ tabs in it. Some sites have become applications rather than sources of information and just like it doesn’t make sense to open the full Office suite when opening Microsoft Word, it doesn’t make sense to open several tabs to go to one site.

Since last night, I’m experimenting with Fluid on the Mac, one of a few, I’m sure, applications that turn websites into applications that launch from your application folder. So I now have a Google Calendar app, a Google Docs app, etc. For Gmail, I really like Mailplane, which also uses Webkit, Safari’s open source sibling, as a basis for creating a service dedicated to one site, or in Mailplane’s case, multiple Gmail accounts.

So far that is the best user-experience for me if I want to go to a site that is also an application. Tabs, I’m sure, have a purpose, but they just invite information overload and the guilt for not being able to deal with it all. If you, the readers, have similar experience, feel free to share them, and if you found solutions, please let us know as well!

Addendum: talk about measuring the real cost of tabs… In the last weeks, I received 12 identical letters from the Dutch government regarding an access code I requested once. Turns out that it was one of my 50 saved tabs in Firefox that, every time I restarted the browser, requested a new code when the page loaded.

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…Is if this were possible on it (apologies for the deformation, apparently Windows isn’t good for everything):

Concept iPhone keyboard – a composite made out of  an iPhone + a Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

I’m actually quite surprised that something like this isn’t possible. The iPhone screen would make a fine portable screen and the touch keyboard is pretty terrible for typers (at least my polls have revealed). With the current bluetooth keyboad even, I would think a simple synergy was possible and I don’t at all get why Apple does not allow for this to work.

Let’s make some noise!!!

Vincent

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Dear App-maker and Apple,

I appreciate Spaces a lot as a feature on Leopard. I think it makes me more productive, in the sense that I am now completely focussed on my blog editor in space 2, and all the other distracting apps are stowed away in the other spaces. But Spaces isn’t perfect, which is part Apple’s fault and part Apps’ fault.

Exhibit 1: the preference pane

The Spaces preferences are a mess, one long list of messes. When adding an app to a certain space, it doesn’t go to that app in the list, instead it adds it, I have to search for it, and find it has been set to the latest space I used or assigned an app to (which is a actually good, I’m not a whiner).

Why is all of this centralised? If I want to see what space an app is assigned to, why not have me do that in the app-preferences? To me it makes so much more sense to install an app, go to its preferences or a menu-item, and just set the space from there. Instead of having to dig through the bloated preference pane.

Exhibit 2: the auto-switching

OK, I actually don’t have a problem with selecting an app and having it open in its appropriate space. But what I do have a problem is apps ripping me away from the space I’m in, sometimes multiple times, because… I don’t know, they call for it? This happens with Pages, with Marsedit, with Safari, and I don’t know what. Somehow, when it loads up stuff, like webpages or those pesky floating info-windows, it calls Spaces to attention and poof, I am ripped away from what I was currently doing.

That Sir, is not my definition of a productivity enhancer.

I have now set Spaces to not auto-switch, but what I would really like is for a. this not to happen and for b. to be able to set, per app, which one auto-swicthes and which doesn’t—another case for having Spaces be included in app-preferences.

Exhibit 3: ghost dialogue boxes

Regardless of what app I use, this happens constantly. Dialogue-boxes don’t always open in the same space as the app is in. Instead, a dialogue box opens, I know it does, but I can’t find it. And when I switch between Spaces, I sometimes see it floating by, like a ghost again. Hiding the app in front of it doesn’t work, the dialogue box disappears too. I have to minimise the app(S) in front of it, to find that stupid box. Not effective!

I want dialogue boxes per app to stick to the space they are set to, and preferably stay on top (if anyone knows a hack for the latter, post a comment).

In conclusion…

I assume that most of this is a design error on the part of Apple, but I’d really like for this to be improved. Exhibit 1 is clearly a user-interface issue, which could be drastically improved by allowing preferences to be set per app. Exhibit 2 and 3 are bugs, no more no less, and I hope that Apple gets it together and fixes it.

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Choosy is Mac software, currently in beta, and works as follows: when you click a link… it let’s you choose what browser to open it with.

I’m certainly not a typical user, but browsers hijack my time in a number of ways. For one, I tend to have a lot of tabs open in them. If the browser is running, that means that I don’t want to close it; if it is closed and a tab-saving feature is enabled, I’m hesitant to open it. Not closing a browser with many tabs, means that your browser gets heavier and heavier. Having many saved tabs, means that opening a browser will be slower and slower. Another, less prevalent thing, is extensions. I no longer use Firefox on a day-to-day basis, but when I did, the more extensions I had installed (and they can be so addictive), the slower that browser would get.

The consequence of the many-tabs problem is that I tend to use different browsers at different times. On the Mac, my no. 1 browser is Safari, because it’s the fastest to start. Camino is no. 2, because it’s faster (to start) than Firefox. Firefox is no. 3, and was, until recently, browser non grata (Firefox 3 has been a massive improvement). And I now use them interchangeably, according to which has the least tabs in it.

Quicksilver is a big aid in browser-management for me; having each browser attached to a keyboard-trigger, means that I can quickly launch one of them as needed. But it didn’t solve one problem for me, which is the default-setting in OS X. You can only set one browser as your default, which means that when you click a link in any other app, it will open my default, Safari (even if that is currently browser non grata).

And that is the problem that Choosy solves for me and perhaps for you too. And even cooler perhaps, you can set it up to open the link in the browser you are currently running. It’s still in beta (there are actually some bugs), and will eventually be be pay-ware, but test it out and you can get a discount.

This isn’t the end-all-problems solution for me, but it’s definitely a good step forward.
Vincent

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Probably not a mainstream user

Now, my list is not scientific at all, and is, as usual, meant to be the start of a conversation. What I would do to make it scientific however, is as follows:

1. Talk to experts (hello there, experts )
2. Based on expert-input, design a survey that measures preferences per demographic (gender, age, spending-behaviour, etc.).
3. Advertise that survey on an industry-specific website (Alternatively: use survey to interview people face-to-face during an industry-specific event. Works well as a combo, the first being quantitative, the second qualitative.)
4. Process data into user-achetypes (and expected ratios).

In web-apps, by which I mean a web-utitlity like Facebook of Netvibes, I’m curious as to both the archetypes and, later on, how to deal with them. Generally, you of course have the early adopter and the mainstream one, which, I know, should be catered too differently.

Following is a list of the ones that I would expect to play a role.

• The money-maker: This is typically the most pragmatic of the group, cares about results, speed, and task-specific information, but not so much about elegance and useless information.
• The (early) geek: This, at the risk of generalising, is very much the Digg-, Techcrunch-, and Engadget-audience, by which I mean the typical commentator on those sites. They ask for feature, after feature, after feature, and often ask for too many of them. I call them “early” geeks, because I expect them to be rather young.
• The newbie: This is not the loudest of users, and tend to accept that which they get (as long as the quality is ok). I’m thinking people that use PCs with Vista-home pre-installed. I think that these are also pretty hard to reach with niche-apps.
• The specialist geek: I’m thinking photographers or writers, who have very specific demands of what an app should do and also a certain aesthetic demand. This would be more the Macbook Pro / Photoshop audience. Whether these are a large segment in the web-apps category, I’m not sure. I would expect that these apps don’t really meet with their approval, most of all because they are often free.

What do you think? Were there any archetypes that I missed or is the reality much simpler? (How) do you find out what the user-archetypes for your apps are?

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