Browser productivity

[Jeff Griffiths]

Sorry for cross-posting, I'm casting a wide net to looking for
interesting ideas...

At the Summit Angelina and I led a session on 'understanding web
developers', and there was some really interesting feedback focused on
developer tools.

One of the things that really caught my ear though was some feedback
around browser features *besides* tools. Essentially, the developers in
my group were really concerned with tab management - they typically had
lots of open tabs with documentation, tools, news sites, and either
wished Firefox was better at managing tabs or had various techniques for
managing large amounts of tabs.

My request for feedback from you is a general one: what browser features
do you need, love, think could be better. What ( besides tools ) is
vital to you being a productive developer using your browser?

cheers, Jeff

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Jeff Griffiths <jgrif...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> One of the things that really caught my ear though was some feedback around
> browser features *besides* tools. Essentially, the developers in my group
> were really concerned with tab management - they typically had lots of open
> tabs with documentation, tools, news sites, and either wished Firefox was
> better at managing tabs or had various techniques for managing large amounts
> of tabs.

Tree Style Tabs.
Tree Style Tabs.
Tree Style Tabs.

Seriously. Anyone who is complaining about tab management hasn't used
Tree Style Tabs.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

I really wish this was a core Firefox feature rather than an add-on,
so that more people could find out about it.

Nick

[J. Ryan Stinnett]

Couldn't agree more! Tree Style Tabs is absolutely essential to my browser
workflow.

Maybe we could at least promote or recommend it to developer community.

- Ryan

[stripTM]

2013/11/15 Jeff Griffiths <jgrif...@mozilla.com>

> Sorry for cross-posting, I'm casting a wide net to looking for interesting
> ideas...
>
> At the Summit Angelina and I led a session on 'understanding web
> developers', and there was some really interesting feedback focused on
> developer tools.
>

> One of the things that really caught my ear though was some feedback
> around browser features *besides* tools. Essentially, the developers in my
> group were really concerned with tab management - they typically had lots
> of open tabs with documentation, tools, news sites, and either wished
> Firefox was better at managing tabs or had various techniques for managing
> large amounts of tabs.
>

> My request for feedback from you is a general one: what browser features
> do you need, love, think could be better. What ( besides tools ) is vital
> to you being a productive developer using your browser?
>

My proposal would improve the tab groups.
One scenario would be to have different groups of tabs
- Project 1
- Project 2
- Personal Management Pages

Move between the different groups is very eyecandy, but for intensive use the
address bar & bookmarks with tags.
Currently as you type in the address bar label, can view if the tab is open
elsewhere, but not within that group.

If click and change to another group, go back to the previous is complicated,
there is no 'ctrl-z' history between tabs.

Another thing that would be nice that there was no need for extensions is
exchange tool environments (see the same page in development, preproduction,
production).

A tool diff between environments? to compare the different resources of a
page (css, js, html...).


--
-=stripTM=-
http://mozilla-hispano.org
http://twitter.com/striptm

[Thaddee Tyl]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 7:26 AM, J. Ryan Stinnett <jry...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 12:10 AM, Nicholas Nethercote <
> n.neth...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Jeff Griffiths <jgrif...@mozilla.com>
>> wrote:

>> > One of the things that really caught my ear though was some feedback around
>> > browser features *besides* tools. Essentially, the developers in my group
>> > were really concerned with tab management - they typically had lots of open
>> > tabs with documentation, tools, news sites, and either wished Firefox was
>> > better at managing tabs or had various techniques for managing large amounts
>> > of tabs.
>>

>> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
>>
>> I really wish this was a core Firefox feature rather than an add-on,
>> so that more people could find out about it.
>>
>
> Couldn't agree more! Tree Style Tabs is absolutely essential to my browser
> workflow.

Without going so far as adding an add-on by default, I'd like to point
out that Tab Groups (ex-Panorama) would actually fit most people's
need, but:

1. Nobody knows about it. I'll freely admit it is very hard to
discover. I can't find it in the current menu, even though I know
about it. It will probably get worse in Australis.
2. The rare people who know about it dislike it because they have to
click on the icon at the top right (which apparently they ended up
finding, I don't really know how). The shortcut, Ctrl-Shift-E, is
nowhere to be found.

Note that having the button in the Australis menu with the shortcut in
the information bubble that pops up would solve both of those
problems.

It solves so many problems so fast because:

- Firefox doesn't load tabs from other tab groups upon start-up.
- Panorama has an immediately accessible search functionality.
Ctrl-Shift-E and start typing.
- Tab groups are remembered from device to device through Sync, making
it easy to browse through open tabs on another device.
- The position a tab group has is fixed, making it easy for you to
remember where everything is.
- Most people don't need three levels of inclusion (ie, a tree),
they're happy with simple groups.

[Girish Sharma]

I would also agree with Thaddee that Panorama is very powerful tool that
Firefox has. I would even go ahead and say that if anytime I would want to
switch to Chrome, only this feature will be blocking me :)

Its sad that this feature, even though being there for so long, is not at
all discoverable. The story worsens in Australis (as also pointed by
Thaddee).

I am pretty sure that all the "tab management" issues / requests that users
were giving, would be fulfilled by Panorama and that they already did not
know that such feature exists in Firefox by default. I think it would be
much easier and worth it to investigate a little time in Panorama to make
it discoverable and even more better than to look/experiment various other
ways of tab management.

PS: One clear way that (I think) Panorama wins over Tree style tabs is
space consumption. While Panorama saves your vertical/horizontal space by
hiding other groups, Tree style tabs takes more space than a normal tab bar.

> _______________________________________________
> dev-developer-tools mailing list
> dev-devel...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-developer-tools
>



--
Girish Sharma
B.Tech(H), Civil Engineering,
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

[Karl Dubost]

just for giving balance in the discussion. :)

Le 15 nov. 2013 à 06:32, Girish Sharma <scrapm...@gmail.com> a écrit :
> PS: One clear way that (I think) Panorama wins over Tree style tabs is
> space consumption. While Panorama saves your vertical/horizontal space by
> hiding other groups, Tree style tabs takes more space than a normal tab bar.

Panorama is not working for me. It changes the UI from glanceable to place to manage. On the other TreeStyle Tabs is a kind of progress. It doesn't have all the feature I want.

This is the way it is currently organized
http://www.la-grange.net/2013/07/22/firefox-nav-tab

What I'm missing.

* Groups for Tree Style Tabs. Things where I can move a tab in a group
The group label is NOT a first stab. It's a folder.
* Search feature on the tab list (see Opera Presto display window). When typing a keyword, it shows only the tab on the right side which contains this keyword.
* A possibility to hide a group (or at least collapse it) so you can focus on some contexts.
* Open a new tab in this group… (contextual menu)
* Finally but not least, the number of tabs in each group and the last time this group has been activated.


--
Karl Dubost, Mozilla
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/moz

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 10:32 PM, Girish Sharma <scrapm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Tree style tabs takes more space than a normal tab bar.

But it takes up horizontal screen space, which is much less precious
than vertical screen space. And you can have dozens of tabs open and
still be able to read all the tab titles just as easily as if you have
a few tabs open.

Nick

[Victor Porof]

I’d love to see this shipping: http://readyformozilla.com/panorama/

[Thaddee Tyl]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 1:19 PM, Victor Porof <vpo...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> I’d love to see this shipping: http://readyformozilla.com/panorama/

I am genuinely curious: isn't that just Panorama with fixed group
positions, no group names, and smaller tab snapshots for all groups
but the current one?

Clicking on a tab "space" sounds a lot like clicking on a tab group's grid view.

[Girish Sharma]

Yes, its just a (mockup of possible) UI update on panorama.

[Luke Crouch]

+1 to a bunch of this; tab management is a huge productivity win.

Perhaps an even bigger win is to enable and emphasize keyboard shortcuts
for everything. In fact, just read the "Mechanics" part of Neal Ford's
Productive Programmer book [1] about 10 times and implement everything
in there.

I've given talks on the book and done experiments like so:

Dev tasks: 1. go to gmail; 2. go to mdn pull requests 3. go to mdn
sprint backlog; 4. google for 'mdn geolocation'

Method 1 - use the mouse; time = 57s
Method 2 - use keyboard shortcuts; time = 26s

Doing those tasks 10x with a keyboard saves me 5.1 minutes; 100x saves
me 51 minutes. I probably do those tasks hundreds or maybe even
thousands of times each month.

-L

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596519544.do

--
Q: Why is this email five sentences or less?
A: http://five.sentenc.es

[blis...@gmail.com]

I've gotten a ton of mileage out of Tab Groups. I find them super useful. Would love to see them upgraded (without removing features).

[Jeff Griffiths]

Thaddee Tyl wrote:
...

> Without going so far as adding an add-on by default, I'd like to point
> out that Tab Groups (ex-Panorama) would actually fit most people's
> need, but:
>
> 1. Nobody knows about it. I'll freely admit it is very hard to
> discover. I can't find it in the current menu, even though I know
> about it. It will probably get worse in Australis.
> 2. The rare people who know about it dislike it because they have to
> click on the icon at the top right (which apparently they ended up
> finding, I don't really know how). The shortcut, Ctrl-Shift-E, is
> nowhere to be found.
>
> Note that having the button in the Australis menu with the shortcut in
> the information bubble that pops up would solve both of those
> problems.
>
> It solves so many problems so fast because:
>
> - Firefox doesn't load tabs from other tab groups upon start-up.
> - Panorama has an immediately accessible search functionality.
> Ctrl-Shift-E and start typing.
> - Tab groups are remembered from device to device through Sync, making
> it easy to browse through open tabs on another device.
> - The position a tab group has is fixed, making it easy for you to
> remember where everything is.
> - Most people don't need three levels of inclusion (ie, a tree),
> they're happy with simple groups.

Here's the truly bad thing about tab groups in it's current
implementation: if I close that window I lose work. Tab Groups are
definitely an interesting idea, but until we're able to save those
groups out to profile, open a tab group in a new window, sync them
around to my devices, I feel like it's a loaded gun. Tab groups has
failed me, and to be blunt I think that is because Mozilla failed to
finish tab groups.

[Eric Shepherd]

Not only that, but it's official policy that we won't be investing further in them. They're just too glitchy to rely on as they are, as you alluded to, as they are. We ought to either finish them or remove them.

Eric Shepherd
Sent from my iPad

[tril...@gmail.com]

My wish would be a tab stack feature like Opera implemented. Let me ctrl + click multiple tabs, and then select "stack tabs". They would then collapse into a single tab (kind of like how the Windows 7 shows multiple windows for one program). When I hover over or select the stack, it would expand to show all tabs in the stack.

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 4:55 PM, <tril...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My wish would be a tab stack feature like Opera implemented. Let me ctrl + click multiple tabs, and then select "stack tabs". They would then collapse into a single tab (kind of like how the Windows 7 shows multiple windows for one program). When I hover over or select the stack, it would expand to show all tabs in the stack.

The Tree Style Tabs extension supports this kind of grouping and
collapsing of groups of tabs, though the mechanics are slightly
different (you drag a tab into a tab tree, rather than ctrl-clicking
them).

Nick

[Jeff Griffiths]

Nicholas Nethercote wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 4:55 PM,<tril...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> My wish would be a tab stack feature like Opera implemented. Let me
>> ctrl + click multiple tabs, and then select "stack tabs". They
>> would then collapse into a single tab (kind of like how the Windows
>> 7 shows multiple windows for one program). When I hover over or
>> select the stack, it would expand to show all tabs in the stack.
>

> The Tree Style Tabs extension supports this kind of grouping and
> collapsing of groups of tabs, though the mechanics are slightly
> different (you drag a tab into a tab tree, rather than ctrl-clicking
> them).

Also, I have heard a lot of people saying that they are suffering
through various bugs trying to use tree-style or Vertical tabs with
Australis. Not sure what the current status is.

Jeff

[J. Ryan Stinnett]

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Jeff Griffiths <jgrif...@mozilla.com>wrote:

> Nicholas Nethercote wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 4:55 PM,<tril...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>

>>> My wish would be a tab stack feature like Opera implemented. Let me
>>> ctrl + click multiple tabs, and then select "stack tabs". They
>>> would then collapse into a single tab (kind of like how the Windows
>>> 7 shows multiple windows for one program). When I hover over or
>>> select the stack, it would expand to show all tabs in the stack.
>>>
>>

>> The Tree Style Tabs extension supports this kind of grouping and
>> collapsing of groups of tabs, though the mechanics are slightly
>> different (you drag a tab into a tab tree, rather than ctrl-clicking
>> them).
>>
>
> Also, I have heard a lot of people saying that they are suffering through
> various bugs trying to use tree-style or Vertical tabs with Australis. Not
> sure what the current status is.

I am one such person. ;) The main issue I experience (on OS X) with Tree
Style Tabs and Australis is it causes the browser window title bar to
disappear if you move a window between screens... I believe there is a bug
filed on this already.

Other than that, it works well, assuming you have the latest build of the
addon, as many changes were made to make it work with Australis.

- Ryan

[tril...@gmail.com]

That's cool. But I think tree style tabs is too much. I definitely still want horizontal tabs, and I only need one layer of nesting.

Another, possibly cleaner option would be to make tab groups appear as tabs in the tab bar. When clicked, the tab would contain thumbnails of the included pages, much like the new tab page. Click the thumbnail to open the desired page. Plus, you could pin a tab group so that it persists across sessions.

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 8:38 AM, Jeff Griffiths <jgrif...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
>> The Tree Style Tabs extension supports this kind of grouping and
>> collapsing of groups of tabs, though the mechanics are slightly
>> different (you drag a tab into a tab tree, rather than ctrl-clicking
>> them).

http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/nightly/treestyletab.xpi is an update
that works with Australia.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=940106 was the bug for
it.

Nick

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 10:27 AM, <tril...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That's cool. But I think tree style tabs is too much. I definitely still want horizontal tabs, and I only need one layer of nesting.

Have you tried vertical tabs? If not, you should really try it. You
can have 20 or 30 tabs open and still read the tab titles! So much
better.

And although Tree Style Tabs supports arbitrary levels of nesting, you
can choose to only have one level. 99% of my tabs are either top-level
or one level down, which is the same as you'd have with groups.

Maybe it's just me, but I find that Tree Style Tabs is more powerful
*and* easier to use than every other tab grouping design I've seen.
I'll stop talking about it now.

Nick

[tril...@gmail.com]

I've used either it or something similar in the past. It's a cool tool, but doesn't suit my needs. I'm not the person who has hundreds of tabs open. Just dozens. And I spend a lot of time developing with my screen split down the middle--a browser on one side and a code editor on the other--so I need as much horizontal space as I can get.

My point isn't to devalue tree-style tabs. I wouldn't mind seeing such a feature get the full UX treatment as an option. But I feel that Mozilla should explore an enhancement to the current design first.