Journal timothy's Journal: Every app should copy Firefox's tab mgmt features! 6

Tabs are great. I've been happy with tabs since I first noticed them in Mozilla long ago (Yes, I realize Opera may have actually *had* them first, but I am too lazy to check), and am very pleased with the way many apps (terminals, word processors, file managers, etc) now use tabs now to separate documents or windows.

However, Mozilla is (as often) still ahead of the curve on this, partly because the plug-in approach lets people experiment and iterate (on a per-desktop basis) faster than any one bunch of developers could. Besides just *having* tabs, I can use plug-ins to alter how they act. So:

- I use one plug-in to change the color of the tabs (I think the contrast is too low as is, between the active and inactive tabs)
- I use another one to cause new tabs to open just to the right of the current tab, which I find much easier to follow when I have several unrelated tabs open already, and then want to open new ones from within any particular one of these. (So if I'm reading a story on Slashdot with several links, I can open each of these in a new tab, and they appear just to the right of the Slashdot story's tab, rather than on the far side of *all* the existing ones.)

Don't even need a plug in (though I think at one time you did) to re-order tabs within Firefox, by dragging. (This is one thing I've been pleased to find is now SOP in a lot of apps.)

Also, under History, there's a list of recently opened tags, which is handy. Some other apps (many, these days) include a "recent documents" option under the File menu, but being able to deal with tabs as tabs is nice.

When closing Firefox, a get one dialog that asks if I'd like to save the opened tabs as the startup group for the next time -- this is smart. I'd like this ability in every terminal, word processor, etc, too -- easy to click No if that's what I want, but a real time saver when I'm working on several related docs. Cuts down on the process-switching cost of remembering which three lists were being combined into one, etc.

There may be a good plug-in for this, but one thing I miss from Galeon is that tabs could (I forget if this was the default) could be abbreviated by leaving out vowels, etc. This was a nice meaning-preserving space-saver, and I'd like to do this with all my tab-friendly apps.

Another Galeon feature for which a plug-in may exist but I am just unaware: loading tabs were one color (red, I think) and switched to blue when the page in that tab was finished loading. When dealing w/ slow-loading sites, this made reading a lot more efficient.