On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 07:50:57AM +1200, Stephen Lewis wrote:
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 06:14:01 -0500 Paul Pelzl <pelzlpj@eecs.umich.edu> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 11:57:54AM +0100, Mechiel Lukkien wrote: ...
Personally, i like to have this functionality in one place instead of in each and every program: my window manager (currently pwm, but at least fluxbox has this tabbing too). I have tabbing for my xterms, browsers (dillo, opera and more), everything, it works great.
Or does tabbing inside the browser provide additional features?
Tabbed browsing usually adds the ability to load links in the background, without leaving the current page. I find this to be very useful; for example, I can go to http://news.google.com, load all the interesting news in the background, and later go through all those pages one by one. There are very few window managers that can provide this ability (at least without having *every* window pop up in the background, which would be highly annoying).
This is handled fairly well in Ion (hence probably PWM as well), you can set windows to open in the background based on their WM_CLASS, so, for example, you set all browser windows to open in the background, and allow find dialog boxes to open in the foreground.
That is true. However, you can hardly expect that most people will (1) switch to a highly unconventional WM like Ion and (2) figure out how to edit their "kludges.conf" textfile to enable this behavior. There are additional benefits to managing the tabs via the browser. The tabs can be updated to show whether or not the page is done loading, whether or not you have switched to a particular tab, etc.
I find tabbing in the browser gets in the way, and makes the program unusuable since it's already done well in my window manager and needs a different set of keybindings to do the same thing. If it's ever implemented, please, please make it an option :)
Of course I agree that this should *only* be an option. Actually, having functionality for both "open in new window" and "open in new tab" gives the user a lot more freedom for grouping information than would be available with only one of those two options. Paul