Improving Tabbed Browsing article on Mozillazine blog.
My comment here is only one word image:
Here also some cite from response called "Usability of tabbed browsing in Firefox" on 456 Berea St:
The usability studies were done at Google, using a special build of Firefox 1.5b1 that was configured to open targeted links in new tabs instead of in new Windows.
The testing revealed some things that caused problems for many users:
- Back button: When a new tab is created, it gets a blank session history, so you can’t use the back button to get back to the page that launched the tab.
- Closing tabs: Many did not see the close button, and instead used the contextual menu to close tabs. Some tried closing the entire browser window instead of just the tab.
- Stacking order of tabs: When closing a tab that was opened by a targeted link from another tab, the adjacent tab is made active instead of the tab containing the opening link.
The team experimented with some adjustments to the tabbed browsing in Firefox to find out if they would improve usability:
- Put close buttons on the tabs
- Change the closing order of tabs
- Implement an “Open links that would open new windows in tabs” preference
Yeah. I do think it’s funny that one of the most seen comments from people who are new to Opera is “how to I remove the ‘X'”It is the most intuitive way to close tabs though. I found that I remove them right away because mouse gestures replace all that UI functionality. But when I’m on a laptop without a seperate mouse- I love the ‘X’ there because it makes the most sense.
i find mid-mouse-button much more stright forward than clicking on a small “X”