By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Download Google Chrome for Windows Beta 3.0.191.3 from Fileforum now.
With Web pages having evolved into Web sites and moving on to become Web applications, we find ourselves frequently revisiting the question of what a Web browser tab should represent. In researching a topic for multiple stories during the course of a day, I often find myself with as many as a hundred tabs open at one time. And yes, I try to keep them in some kind of order, which is never easy; and when the browser crashes (as it still often does), recovering all those open tabs is becoming more difficult, it seems, as time goes on.
Improving the way one organizes tabs is part of the entire value proposition for Google Chrome; besides its impressive architecture under the hood, tab management is one of the few front-end features Google sought to perfect from the very beginning. The idea behind Google's approach to tabs is this: Perhaps in this evolving Web landscape, a tab should be whatever the user designates or needs it to be at the time. So if the user should decide it should go in a window or outside of a window or floating around on its own, for whatever reason, Chrome should enable those options. And it should enable as many options as possible.
Does that mean those options are self-evident or self-explanatory? Not at all. In typical Google fashion, unless you're reading some sort of comic-book-styled sales brochure -- or this particular article -- you have to either stumble upon these options for yourself, or read an article like this one. It's strange to note that of the major Windows Web browsers produced today, only Mozilla Firefox and Opera render their pages in typical window devices -- even Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 uses a non-standard window. For Google Chrome, this means that each tab must serve double-duty as a Web page's title bar. That actually may be a problem in cases where titles run long -- e.g., news sites whose names fall first, followed by the headline. You can still point to each tab, and in a moment see a tooltip with the full title -- a slight inconvenience, if any at all, but also an indication of one of the problems all browser architects must face. Whereas an application is easily identifiable by its icon, a Web page's icon may denote its publisher but not its purpose.
So if you don't mind your desktop looking like…well, like mine at times, then Chrome 3 presents you with a way to work out where Web pages or applications should be arranged and how they should work. While you can still drag and drop a Chrome window anywhere on the desktop and create any number of windows for collecting more tabs, you can drag a tab away from one window and into another or onto the desktop by itself (thus creating a new window). And the beta of Chrome is experimenting with a system perhaps inspired by, or inspiring (depending upon whom you ask), the Aero Snap feature of Windows 7. Though Beta 3.0.190.1 had some trouble with this feature, Beta 3.0.191.3 released this morning appeared, in Betanews tests, to have fixed its troubles:
• When you drag a Chrome tab (as opposed to a window) toward the center of the edge of the desktop, an animated symbol pops up representing the projected placement of the tab's new window on the desktop if you were to release the mouse button. If you leave this symbol alone and release the button, then the new window will be created at the mouse pointer location. But if you continue dragging on top of this symbol and release there, then the new window will be opened as indicated by the symbol. For example, if you drag to the bottom (just above the taskbar), you'll see a symbol showing a window that hugs the bottom and that's half-height, leaving the top open. If you drag to the left, you'll see a symbol for a window that hugs the left edge, that's full-height and half-width. It's a little different than Microsoft's method, introduced in Windows 7, of "bumping" the edge of the desktop, and it takes an extra step, but it's certainly sensible. I've said before that I really like this feature in Windows 7, and I must admit to really liking Google Chrome's interpretation of it.
• When you drag a Chrome tab toward the center of the outside edge of another Chrome window that has room alongside for a new neighbor, another animated symbol pops up depicting the relative location of the new window if you were to release the mouse button. This way, you can create a new window beside an existing one, hugging its edge. For example, if you drag an open tab toward the center of the left edge of an open Chrome window, the symbol will show two windows beside one another. You have to touch this symbol (bringing it from transparency to the forefront) and release the mouse button to snap the new window to the edge of the existing one.
• Inserting an open tab into any open Chrome window, even if it only has one tab open, and releasing the mouse button, results in that tab being reinserted in the open window at that location. This is how you expect things to work, but up until today's release of build 3.0.190.1, that's been a problem for Chrome.
While Google has been working since last year to show up Mozilla in the functionality department, you can't help but think this time around, it can't resist the opportunity to one-up Microsoft.
Next: What helps Firefox in one way, holds it back in another…
Since Firefox relies on a conventional window device as its homebase, there's certain limits as to how sensitive it can be to unconventional mouse events, such as those that Chrome is experimenting with now. Many of the browser's more versatile tab functions are actually provided by way of third-party add-ons such as Tab Mix Plus, ColorfulTabs (which tints tabs by group and order of spawning, like IE8), and Tab Kit (which, we note, beat Tab Mix Plus to being updated for Firefox 3.5). But that's the way Mozilla development typically works: If a feature provided by an independent developer in the community is good enough, Mozilla would rather sanction and promote that feature rather than absorb it into Firefox without accreditation.
Until Mozilla's developers get bold and try a non-standard window, however, it will not be able to compete with Chrome or any other browser in the area of desktop arrangement. So the add-ons are limited to providing functionality within Firefox windows. And since Firefox 3.5 has only now enabled the user to drag an open tab between two windows without the receiving window reloading the tab's contents, add-ons such as Tab Mix Plus have to rethink the way they work. Tab Mix Plus' biggest benefit (and Tab Kit's as well) is enabling multiple tab rows within a single window, eliminating the need for scrolling through infinite open tabs along a partial row (until you try to open more than three row's worth of tabs, that is…something I can end up doing quite easily).
For now, when you drag an open Firefox 3.5 tab outside its window, you can deposit it on the desktop. Firefox will open a new window for it, but its location appears to be designated in the old-fashioned manner determined by Windows itself. Using the window device model Microsoft conceived in the 1980s, when a window produces another window, the child's default location is just below and to the right of the parent's, leaving just enough room for both title bars. So the position of the mouse pointer when you release the button is inconsequential, since Firefox's window device doesn't have the sensitivity to record the location of the pointer at the time of release.
Arguably, if Firefox had a Chrome-like ability to let the user group open tabs in multiple locations on the desktop, Tab Kit's or Tab Mix Plus' stacks of rows might become outmoded. For example, if I could just open a small window and keep it on the lower left of the desktop, and just dump multiple pages on the same topic into that window as I find them, then break them out into categories such as "trusted" and "suspect" at will, then I might never end up with a single window full of more than three stacks of tabs.
Maybe this heat was a gimme for Google from the beginning, but given the fact that Chrome hadn't scored any points in our showdown up to now, it really needed the break. In lieu of absolute answers for the moment about how the Web should differentiate published pages from functional applications, Chrome offers a much richer tool set for the user to figure it out for himself. That leaves our running score for now at Firefox 3.5 (2), Chrome 3 (1).
Download Firefox 3.5 Final for Windows from Fileforum now.
KEEP SCORE ALONG WITH BETANEWS:
- Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?: Firefox 3.5 (1), Chrome 3 (0) after 1 heat
- Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 2: Are bookmarks outmoded?: Firefox 3.5 (2), Chrome 3 (0) after 2 heats
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009