stargeek
The pleasures of browsingThe pleasures of browsingThe pleasures of browsing 07/19/2004 09:53 AM I don't know Debbie Davidson, but I went to her LiveJournal blog because she dropped me a line about something I'd written. Thumbing through the entries, you not only get dropped into the stream of her life, but you find stories like this one about how 9/11 intersected the lives of several of her friends. We just haven't had anything quite like this before.... This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)The pleasures of browsingGrok Headline matches for The pleasures of browsingGaming pleasures to comeGaming pleasures to come 07/13/2004 12:24 AM News.bbc.co.uk - Mon Jul 12, 12:23 pm GMT Guilty PleasuresGuilty Pleasures 04/14/2005 12:30 PM What's your guilty pleasure? It doesn't always have to be about finance. Guilty pleasures on your PCGuilty pleasures on your PC 05/31/2004 06:46 AM News24.com May 31 2004 10:50AM GMT iPod Guilty PleasuresiPod Guilty Pleasures 09/11/2004 10:38 AM What's cringe-worthy to one might be sweet audio succor to another. What's hidden on an iPod can often strip down any bravado or boasts of highfalutin taste. By Don Fernandez, Cox News Service (via MyAppleMenu) Web Browsing on Your PSPWeb Browsing on Your PSP 03/27/2005 10:46 AM Opera browsing, as seen on TVOpera browsing, as seen on TV 09/09/2004 08:43 PM Opera Software releases a new version of its browser, aimed at viewing Web pages on TV. Browsing at GoogleBrowsing at Google 09/22/2004 09:59 AM The rumors about Google becoming a Web browser begin to swirl in earnest. Browsing for AlternativesBrowsing for Alternatives 08/19/2004 09:51 AM Direct and Related Links for ' Browsing for Alternatives' “Following the discovery that several major financial institutions’ Web sites were being used to spread an Internet Explorer exploit, The Register ran the story, “CERT recommends anything but IE.” CERT’s point is that enterprises and individual users can reduce their risk exposure by using browsers that aren’t as susceptible to Web-based exploits. So, why are we giving malware writers easy targets? Why aren’t we switching to more secure browsers? When Robert Morris released his famous…Browsing the Web? Not AnymoreBrowsing the Web? Not Anymore 07/09/2004 04:50 PM I can't remember the last time I actually browsed the Web. You know, just sort of aimlessly following links in the hopes of encountering something unique or interesting. (I'm also glad that idea of calling it "surfing" seems to have become less popular.) Between the few sites I visit daily to get things done, links that come in via e-mail, and the various weblogs and news feeds I guess I'm spending enough time in my browser already. It's a far... Tabbed BrowsingTabbed Browsing 03/11/2003 09:44 AM I've seen a lot of comments in various Mac forums where people have claimed that "Dave Hyatt said he doesn't like tabbed browsing!" or "Dave Hyatt hates tabbed browsing!" I find these posts perplexing, because I never said any such thing, and of course the opposite is true. I love tabbed browsing. I implemented tabbrowser in the Mozilla trunk. I implemented tabbed browsing in Chimera. I implemented the version used in Phoenix. Given how many times I've implemented it, I'm amazed that people would think that I am not a tabbed browsing devotee. That said, I wanted to express some of my thoughts about the various UI decisions one has to make when designing a tabbed browsing system. Target Audience I think the most important question you have to answer before designing a multi-page system is "Who is my target audience?" In the case of Phoenix the target audience is experts and power users. I do not believe that tabs serve any useful purpose for novice users, because novice users don't ever use multiple views of Web data. They just browse from page to page. The classic novice user Web setup is to have Windows IE maximized with the sidebar open. That kind of user simply doesn't need tabs. Tabs are total overkill for what that person wants to do with his/her Web browser. That is why I think ideas like this, although extremely pretty, seem to be targeting an audience that IMO doesn't exist. A power user doesn't want thumbnails, since they wouldn't be easily distinguishable anyway once you opened several tabs, the overflow mechanism for such a system would be clumsy (or would use too much space, scrollbar anyone?), and you lose too much horizontal real estate. Sure, it's got a neat initial "whizzy" factor to it, but it's simply not as usable or as scalable as the classic tab strip model. Bookmark Groups vs. Folder Options This is something I've implemented three different ways in Phoenix, Mozilla, and Chimera. In both Chimera and Mozilla the bookmark group is a special entity that you have to make by taking a tab snapshot. I now hate this idea. The implementation is to just have a tagged special folder that when clicked loads all the bookmarks in tabs, a sort of one-click clustered loading. This complicates bookmark management and viewing, since you now have this third kind of entity along with regular folders and bookmarks. I much prefer the system we came up with for Phoenix, which is borrowed somewhat from Opera. In this system, folder submenus pick up an extra "Open in Tabs" menu item, and you can just load any folder's children in tabs. No special new kind of bookmark group, and no special means required for creating bookmark groups. You just work with folders and can now load a single page of a group by drilling into a folder, or load all the pages in a group. With the Chimera way, you'd end up having a Blogs group, and then you'd also have to bookmark individual blogs for when you didn't want to load the group. You had needless replication that is avoided by just making the operation available on folders instead. Replace vs. Append? When doing clustered loading, we took two approaches. One can be seen in Mozilla, and I personally hate it. The other can be seen in Phoenix and is my favorite choice. Mozilla actually appends the tabs loaded by a bookmark group to the end of the tabbed list. This means that if you click first on a News group and load tabs 1-5 and then click on a Blogs group, you'll end up with new tabs 6-10. In Phoenix, you replace instead, so the News tabs go away and are replaced by tabs 6-10. The argument for append is basically that you end up with potential data loss in that you may lose access to the previous tabs by closing up some of the ones you replaced, e.g., if the second group has fewer tabs than the first. This is of course a solvable problem, though, and doesn't justify changing the default behavior to append. Position of Tabs inside the Tab Strip Chimera centers tabs within the tab strip. Everyone else puts them on the left. The only reason Chimera does this is because I couldn't figure out how to use the normal tab widget to make the tabs be left-aligned. Center-alignment for a dynamic tab system is of course awful, since for every tab you open, all of the tabs move. It's much better to avoid moving all of the tabs around when a single new tab opens, and left-aligning the tabs inside the tab strip makes for a much less jarring experience. Where do new tabs open? A highly debated issue with tabs is "Where should new tabs open?" NetCaptor and the old Chimera (in early versions) use the following model. If you click to open a link in a new tab, then the new page will open just to the right of the current tab. Links will continue to open to the right if you keep opening them, so you may have a setup like this: 1 2 3 4 where 2 is the active tab, and you then open three more links from 2 and end up with: 1 2 7 6 5 3 4 The advantage of this approach is that similar pages stay together. The disadvantage is that the opening of new tabs is more jarring, since you do an insertion in many cases rather than an append. A disadvantage is that you have to read the pages from right to left in order to preserve the original order. Because of this, when you *close* tabs, this model dictates that you move to the left. You do have the advantage that when you finish with the child links, you conveniently end up back at the original document as you close up tabs. The second model, and the one I favor (used in Phoenix, Chimera, and Mozilla now) is to always open new tabs on the far right. Usability testing at AOL showed that this was far and away what users expected to happen, and it lends a smoothness to the tab opening process, since you never move any other tabs. You also get to read links from left to right instead of right to left, e.g., the previous example would result in: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 In this model, in order to be able to browse the links you open effectively, when tabs are closed you need to move to the right. Note that when you finish with child links, you don't end up back at the previous page in this case, but in the common case, you do. Note that by far the common case is to simply have: 1 and that you'll open a few links, end up with: 1 2 3 4 and still end up back at 1 once you close up. The ability to easily read left to right, and to not shuffle the tabs around on the tab strip when you open new links more than makes up for the edge case where you may not end up back at the parent tab. Close Boxes I actually prefer Galeon's behavior here. Phoenix and Mozilla offer close boxes for the tab strip, but this UI frankly stinks, because the user expectation is that clicking on the X will actually close up the entire tab strip. In effect, the X should map to the "Close Other Tabs" command, but instead it maps to "Close Selected Tab." This is utterly confusing, and at least Chimera avoids the problem by not having a close box at all. The right way IMO to do this is to have a close box for closing up the tab strip itself in the same place Phoenix and Mozilla have it, but to also have close boxes on the tabs themselves (the way Galeon does it). With this model, it's clear what the different close metaphors are, and you don't end up with user (even power user) confusion. Background vs. Foreground Despite the inconsistency with opening links in new windows, I strongly support the default in Phoenix, which is to open links in new tabs in the background by default. This option should be overridable with a modifier key (SHIFT in Phoenix) and also the default should be controllable via a pref. Phoenix, Moz and Chimera all have the same pref and modifier key, but only Phoenix defaults to background loading by default. It's really interesting just how many different choices have been made by tabbed browsing implementers. Pick the browser that implements the system you like best I guess. :) An Archaeology of Browsing...An Archaeology of Browsing... 02/17/2004 10:30 PM So here's a weird sensation. I'm trying to install a Photoshop upgrade at two in the morning, because i'm jetlagged and can't concentrate on work but can't sleep either so I'm procrastinating. And in order to install said upgrade I'm going to have to restart my browser. So I start the process of closing down windows and tabs and adding them to a little bookmarks stash and I'm about forty-five tabs down (and about half-way through the process) when I start finding clumps of windows that I opened during presentations at ETCon. One browser window is full tabs stuffed with ubicomp and networked objects sites, another is full of robot-related material. As I grab the URLs and stuff them in a folder for later, I start to realise how clearly I remember navigating to each of the sites and how I'd determined to keep them for later. Suddenly I'm back in the auditoria, next to Phil and Paul keeping notes and listening for the hum of the infinity of extension cords that litter the carpet around us. If they'd all been hand-outs, I'd have them in my hands - little grubby bits of paper stacked in piles here and there, clogging up bags and boxes and bookcases. Every so often I'd glance inside them to find one thing in particular and a wave of nostalgia and association would fill my head. That is - at least - until I finally snapped and threw them all away. Now until this point I'd always assumed that the web was getting rid of interactions like that - that our relationships to sites were transitory and fleeting - but now I'm not so sure. The act of "saving" and the act of "having open" are gradually merging and I can foresee a time when I haven't closed my browser in months rather than weeks and in which I've managed to accumulate thousands of open windows across a whole range of applications. The stuff near the surface will be the stuff I've been working on recently, but I'll be able to do an archaeology of my own browsing when I'm bored and filter through the collected papers, throwing away the things that no longer have any relevance to my life. Will we start wanting to transfer documents in their open states between computers when we upgrade? Will we expect a computer desktop to be as persistent and never-changing as a wooden one? When someone famous dies, will the biographer go through their enormous accumulated browser cache to find out what they were interested in five or ten years ago? Python Browsing Probe 0.2.0Python Browsing Probe 0.2.0 05/12/2004 06:45 PM A shell-like interpreter/Web browser for creating test scripts. Python Browsing Probe 0.2.1Python Browsing Probe 0.2.1 05/17/2004 04:36 PM A shell-like interpreter/Web browser for creating test scripts. Python Browsing Probe 0.2.2Python Browsing Probe 0.2.2 05/21/2004 04:06 PM A shell-like interpreter/Web browser for creating test scripts. Google Goes Browsing By Name (PC World)Google Goes Browsing By Name (PC World) 07/15/2004 08:54 AM PC World - Toolbar now lets users navigate the Web without using URLs. Python Browsing Probe 0.1.0Python Browsing Probe 0.1.0 05/08/2004 07:35 AM A shell-like interpreter/Web browser for creating test scripts. Faster Browsing TipsFaster Browsing Tips 08/12/2004 05:04 PM WebDevInfo Aug 12 2004 8:01PM GMT Python Browsing Probe 0.3.0Python Browsing Probe 0.3.0 07/07/2004 12:59 AM A shell-like interpreter/Web browser for creating test scripts. Browsing will be nicer under Longhorn --
|
Also check out: |
BarCodeArt: a gallery of meat and digital artwork inspired by and made
from UPCs.