Bremsstrahlung

Tabs. How I hate them. The trouble is that most of the world's computer users adore them and don't realize that I'm the one who's right.

What are tabs? It's becoming a standard term for a relatively new user interface element, even though there is an older on of the same name. In the old use of 'Tab' a tab was one sub-element of a tab view, a view which showed only one of several subviews at a time, but displayed small labels or 'tabs' representing all of its subviews. Tabviews were almost never used to fill an entire Window except for dense sets of preferences or settings grouped by category, especially on Mac OS. The new extension of the idea, and the one that people usually mean when they use the word 'tab' is a single window which contains what would have been the contents of many windows, displaying one at a time but showing a bar of labels to allow access to the non-active items. It's the same concept, but extended to entire widows instead of just small groups of control or widgets within windows.

Why do I hate tabs? Window tabs first began appearing in my experience as an addition to web-browsers to handle having many windows open at once. i prefer, however, to open every webpage, every document, and so on in its own window. This is because Mac OS X offers such simple and powerful means to cycle through applications and windows. Command-Tab and Command-Shift-Tab cycle among applications that are running, much as Alt-Tab does in Windows, but in addition Command-Acute (That's the little fellow who's actually the main character on what most people think of as their tilde key.) and Command-Shift-Acute cycle among windows within the current application. This means that I can very quickly jump to the application I want and then with repeated keystrokes, (since keyboard shortcuts excel at doing repeated tasks quickly, as mentioned by Mr. Gruber) I can reach the document I want. This works especially well in applications which don't screw up window order (Firefox, I'm looking at you. Leave the order the windows were in when the user created them, don't sort them by creation time, window title, or any other wacky criterion). Even in applications which provide keyboard shortcuts to cycle through tabs there are still problems: It's a third layer which makes searching for what I want slower both because I have switch keyboard shortcuts more and because it's easier to head down the wrong track (I might be cycling through tabs in one window when the tab I want is actually in another. It's less likely that this will happen under the only apps/windows system because I won't look for the webpage I was reading in XCode. ). Also, since tabs are an application specific construct, keyboard shortcuts aren't standardized. Even if I know the short cut to cycle through tabs in safari, it probably won't help me in Firefox.

Why are tabs so prevalent? I think that this is the fault of Windows, and unimaginative Linux user interfaces that just follow where Windows leads. In Windows, and every Linux UI I've chanced to encounter, there's a taskbar. (Alarm bells should go off at the very mention of this abomination.) Worse yet, unlike in Mac OS, where only entire applications may appear in the Dock (on the left side of the divider, that being the main portion) these taskbars will try to show every window separately, as though each Firefox window is totally independent of the others.¹ This means that taskbars get crowded and impossible to find things in, and fast. (Note that this leads to them having to, surprise surprise, collapse all of the windows for a single application into a single label, like they should have in the first place.) So the basic paradigm used by these user interfaces is to just have a blizzard of windows everywhere. Add the this the fact that I've never seen another OS that uses a scheme like Apple's brilliant feature to 'Hide' applications, that is, all of the application's windows are left in the same locations, but are rendered invisible. Minimized windows belonging to the application also disappear temporarily from the Dock. That way, if I want to preserve my workspace in Photoshop, but I know that I won't be using it for a few minutes, I can just hide the application, and every part of it disappears until I switch to it again by using the Dock or application switcher. Thus, on Windows and many Linux systems, the only way to get control of the dozens of windows is to have the applications do it themselves, since the OS won't. One old fashioned way, used notably by programs like MS Works was to have a single application window which would contain multiple static panes and then its own smell desktop like area which would house multiple document windows. This approach has fallen from favor, which I can only call a good thing, because it was terrible, in particular in the way that it tended to waste screen real-estate. The new way is tabbed windows.

The trouble with tabbed windows is that in my view, I don't need or want them because they are superfluous on Mac OS. They only add complexity to a system that works better without them, and they offer nothing new. One thing that I have to wonder about is whether another reason that people are seeking to use tabs it to take load off of inefficient windowing systems. I often open 30 to 40 windows in Safari and it performs fine on my system, even though I'm not using very fancy hardware to run it. But I'm suspicious that the windowing systems on Linux and especially Windows systems may be less well tuned to handle large numbers of windows than Mac OS is, and thus they suffer more from having many windows open. This is just guess work though, as I lack comparable computer systems running other OS's to do any sort of testing, and it would be hard to devise a well controlled test.

Lastly I'd like to comment that lack of tabs is the most major reason that I use Safari virtually exclusively. While Safari has had tabs since version 2, it allows me to tell it that I'd rather have more windows instead of tabs, so that even now in version 3 I can keep browsing the way I prefer. Every other browser I've tried does everything it can to make open links in new widows unpleasant and slow; this includes Firefox, Camino, Navigator, Opera, and Shiira. While in Safari I can set a preference to make Command clicking a link open it in a new window, I have been unable to find any way to do something similar in any of the aforementioned other browsers. Even if it's there it means that their design must be rather bad and counter-intuitive to have hidden it from me. Thus, I simply will not for the foreseeable future seriously entertain the notion of using any other web-browser.