Comments on: Thunder-tab

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:16:35 +0000

Is thundertab still being used prevelantly? Its been quite a bit of time since I’ve even heard of it.

My own personal preference is for Chrome, it’s super fast.

By: Mephisto

Mephisto — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:24:56 +0000

Rawsausage is an idiot.The tabs in nautilus don’t get your way if you don’t want to use them. There is no tab bar if only 1 tab is open (like firefox), and other than a “tabs” in the menubar and 1 option in the context menus, you won’t notice the difference.
He also completely ignores the fact that other users (like uhm, me?) like this feature. I often had several filebrowser windows open cause it’s faster when moving or copying files around, or comparing stuff in directories, and it’s nice to be able to group them in a tabbed filebrowser now.
If you don’t like change, stick to the old version. Go back in time and install Redhat 9 or even the crappy windows XP and cry about the outdated UI’s. Mac OS X is good, but lacking tabs is not a plus, but a missing feature.
Tabs in TB are a great idea, if they can be done in a useful way. Anything’s better than opening emails in a seperate window imho, and its nice to see TB changing the old outlook express-like behavior into something more userfriendly. I don’t want a seperate windows when composing new messages, i’d much rather have this in a tab, so it doesn’t clog up my desktop with useless windows.

By: Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » Thunderbird Tab Session Restore

Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » Thunderbird Tab Session Restore — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:56:47 +0000

[...] new Thundertab has (partially) landed in the nightly builds of Thunderbird. You’ll need to get Lightning [...]

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:37:24 +0000

I like the idea of a “summary tab” when opening a new tab. with an overview of your new mails, tasks, etc. like in Spicebird. A blank page makes no sense when calendar, tasks, address book, etc. opens in a new tab automatically.
Will the open tabs be re-opend after restart?

By: Bryan Clark

Bryan Clark — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:20:22 +0000

rawsausage: yeah dude, safari, firefox, and even IE have tabs. I suppose there’s no where left to run for a person like you.

By: rawsausage

rawsausage — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:44:51 +0000

When someone decided to ruin Nautilus and add tabs to it, I left for Mac OS X. I had been using Linux daily since ’95, and those tabs where the last straw. Seeing that some morons have the will to destroy even the rest of the applications entirely (in usability terms), I am really terrible glad that I jumped the ship. For good, perhaps.

By: Ninja

Ninja — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:37:32 +0000

ThunderBrowse has it’s own tabbing system right now.

The problem with currently implemented tabs is that:
Tabs in TB3 use the same browser element (messagepane) to work (this is because of gDBView). So when tabs switch, it reloads the messagepane browser element, and in effect reloads the current page or message displayed.

So ThunderBrowse will probably not use TB3 tabs in this case.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:08:00 +0000

I like how much thought is being put in how Thunderbird tabs should work. Although we have seen some interesting previews for PostBox, it seems like there is a lot of potential still for e-mail reader UI.

Keep up the awesome work, and the carefully crafted blog posts!

By: Django Bliss

Django Bliss — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:41:44 +0000

I use tabs for web browsing in many of the different ways you listed on the linked blog post. But I think of the usefulness of tabs in an email client in a different way. Being able to create, essentially, a filter that the tab can display would be a great way to help a users workflow. For instance you could create a tab that would display customer emails, or internal company emails, or, working with tagging, items that need immediate attention. The workflow to do this with tabs would seem much more natural and easier to go through than the simple sorting on the columns in inbox and searchbox. Exciting stuff.

By: patpi

patpi — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:13:17 +0000

Hi,

Thank you for all those post about usability. I really appreciate this. I’m interested in improving OS usability, I also want to improve my skills in this area (couse I’m just hobbyist) and your blog is really nice resource for learning from real use cases. So thank you ;]

Regards

By: Bryan Clark

Bryan Clark — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:43:11 +0000

The new tab work is slated to be in the Thunderbird beta 2 release. I’ll post up another entry when we get it in the nightly build so you know when it’s available.

JoeS: I’d never thought of using tabs for that, once we get them hooked up we should try it out.

By: JoeS

JoeS — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:13:01 +0000

Here’s my take on tabs, and how they could be more useful to me.
I use tabs now for the same reasons I use messages opened in a new window.
That is, I want to preserve a view of a composition for comparison, or reference purposes.
That view IMO should be pretty much chromeless, and similar to the f11 fullscreen option in FF.
I don’t want to see buttons, visual options, or anything else other than content.
For multipart messages some things I would like to see:
Open attachment in new tab
Open all attachments in tabs (with automatic pref)
Open all mime parts in tabs (fix for mime part over-run)
Open selection in tab (ability to select a piece of the message)

I know I’m asking for the world here, but you never get what you don’t ask for.

By: Blair McBride

Blair McBride — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:06:29 +0000

Awesome stuff. Look forward to playing with the evolving behaviour in the nightlies.

And this is going to lead to some cool interactions between Ubiquity and Thunderbird, once some concrete work gets started on that.

By: Ibrahim Awwal

Ibrahim Awwal — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:32:09 +0000

Hi, I happened across this post through Planet Mozilla and I’d like to say that this seems like an excellent idea. Is it available in nightlies yet? That might tempt me to jump on the nightly train, although last time I tried the nightlies they weren’t very interesting/different from TB2 so I just went back to release versions.

By: nmpty

nmpty — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:49:18 +0000

Thunderbird works fine for mail already, just LEAVE MAIL ALONE AND MAKE IT A BETTER NEWSREADER PLEASE!!!