We're outgrowing our tabs.

I've been getting this sneaking suspicion lately that we're outgrowing our tabs.

And then today, a reference on Slashdot brings the question into the spotlight again.

Tabs. They've been around for a while, though arguably they became even more prevalent with their rising popularity as the standard multitasking approach in web browsers a little over half a decade ago. For most people, their heaviest multitasking activity generally involves interacting with the web in pages. In the early days of the Internet, with our dial-up connections and relatively modest computing resources, multitasking for most people meant maybe several pages. The average seemingly climbed since then, to the point where tabs came in to answer that problem.

Tabs work great when you have a mild number of documents or pages to switch between. The tabs themselves don't offer much visually, just a title or file name, which you'll have to hope doesn't look like a series of "Untitled1", "Untitled2", "Untitled3"... This issue is exacerbated once you run into far more tabs, and the truncation that comes along with it.



One of the problems with tabs is that operating systems seem to be designed to handle window-based multitasking. Take Mac OS X for example. Expose works wonders with multiple windows, but does nothing to help our 10, 20, 100 tabs in Safari, Firefox, Camino, Opera, or even any non browser app that uses tabs.

Part of this problem is mitigated with the use of effective visuals provided by favicons, which works great in cases where you have the same tab text (example: truncated Google *) with different icons for each unique section - Google Reader, Google Notebook, Google Docs, etc.



But if you're looking at multiple tabs within the same section, and therefore exhibiting both identical truncated tab labels and icons, you're going to have to examine each tab to find the one you want. An example of this would be if you had multiple Google searches going on, or multiple articles from the New York Times open, or multiple stock pages of Yahoo! Finance open.



This is why there was a trend years back of people shifting text in title bars like this: "Site Name - Page Title" to "Page Title - Site Name", once tabs and truncation became common.

There's another implemented approach where previews are shown when hovering over each tab, such as in Opera, but that still requires hovering over each tab. Building upon this, there have also been implementations displaying grids or single columns of previews of open tabs, such as with various Firefox extensions or Internet Explorer 7, though there is the issue of how best to handle multiple windows, each with multiple tabs.

Nonetheless, most, if not all, operating systems today have not provided us a way to handle the increasingly growing amount of tabs we use, especially with the continuing move of web applications playing many of the same functions as desktop applications. If there's any elegant solution, it has to come from the OS.