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[Wish] Resizable tab widths   [OT]

By: Slobodan Vujnovic   Homepage   France  
Date: Feb 27,2019 at 23:16
In Response to: [Wish] Resizable tab widths (Martijn Coppoolse)

> I'm uncertain what you mean by "instance". If you mean a separate
> process: moving a tab to a new window doesn't create a new process.
> Firefox nowadays creates a new process for every tab, regardless of which
> window it's displayed in, plus one process to manage communications
> between the different processes, and an extra one for extensions. (Chrome
> even launches an extra process for each extension).
> So no, opening a new window doesn't noticeably affect the performance
> (be it memory or speed) of Firefox — or Chrome, for that matter.

Yes, technically you must be right. But visually, a newly created window that
now accommodates a single tab looks like a full-blown instance of the
app, given that all the menus and my elaborate Bookmarks toolbar (6 lines)
get created, but I just wanted a single tab to float around temporarily.

But I guess tabs cannot exist without the context of the parent container,
with all its decorations and functionality.

> That is... not true. The tab can be dragged back to the original
> window, and reinserted at any location in the tab bar.

I stand corrected!!! All these years of using this feature in Firefox
and Chrome I've been trying to do this by dragging the window TITLE, it NEVER
occurred to me to grab and drag the TAB back to the parent window... There is
no hint that implies that such an action exists.

In my defense, right-clicking the dragged-out has the option "Move Tab"
grayed out - a hint that it has already left home once, so you can no
longer move it. OK. But, instead of this grayed-out option, why did
they not put "Restore Tab", so that idiots like me would at least
know that it is possible and dig around?

Of course, default restoring could place the tab anywhere (not its original
position), although a good programmer could make a best effort to bring
it close to its origin.

In addition, given the huge UI real estate available, there could
be some visual/textual hint telling the user that a particular tab
can be dragged back using the mouse, in addition to the hypothetical
"Restore Tab" context menu option. I can't be the only one to have
missed that?

> All I've heard is that MDI is "outdated", and not sexy, so designers
> don't want to go "back" to that design paradigm.

I hated MDI when it appeared (Macs and Windows 1.0?), with all the
tiling, stacking and overlapping; it looked great as a demo, but soon
became useless, given the tiny screens at the time.

What I had in mind is what we now have in tabbed source code editors:
you can show two source files side by side, that is, TWO TABS SIDE
BY SIDE, each being resizable, and font sizes independent!

That's how I imagine browser tabs, it's been done! It's like a F8
Split in ZTree. If editors do it, so can browsers! I remember early
browsers: there was no such thing as tabs! When they appeared, it
was so strange, but now it's the rule. Same with many other tools -
even terminal emulators are multi-tabbed. What is missing is
individual control of each tab's geometry.

> Another problem I see is that for many sites, 50% isn't going to be
> wide enough. How do you manage which site will go side-by-side with which
> other site? I think it would introduce quite a bit of additional
> complexity for little (perceived) gain. But I've never asked.

Not at all - you drag and resize the width, and tweak the fonts, I'm
doing this in Notepad++ as I type this! One rule could be: hit some
F8-like key (or pick a menu option) and the CURRENT tab and the one
on the RIGHT (or LEFT) to it will open and the two will share the
screen equally -- but you can resize as needed. The same F8 in either
tab would restore the standard view.

For example, I could have the ztw3.com tab next to the twitter.com tab,
since both these sites have content that does not require full
width. Both would be happy with a 50/50 or 40/60, whatever share.

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