FishEyeTabs
FishEyeTabs is an interesting way to make the situation of having many tabs open more usable. It’s not without it’s flaws (gets rid of the red “X” for example). I wonder if this would be beneficial or just annoying to users. I think personally the effect would be better on a longer delay so that it wasn’t so instant. You could just mouseover and see the title via a tooltip, but that’s not always intuitive especially for a casual user.
It’s always great to see innovative extensions like this.
[Via Lifehacker]
Tags: firefox, fisheyetabs, Mozilla, usability, user-interface
April 24th, 2007 at 3:54 am
“It’s not without its flaws.”
T,FTFY.
Also, your security cert is broken. I’m not visiting red.mynethost.com!
April 24th, 2007 at 6:25 am
Where are you seeing that?
April 24th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Hmm, the red “X� annoyed me. So i removed it completly. Cant see the point when you have close tab on Ctrl w and middleclick tab or tab bar
So FishEyeTabs looks interesting……
April 25th, 2007 at 5:54 am
Funnily enough, my first thought was that it should be instant. The current semi-animated growing/shrinking is jerky and nasty - at least for me, on Ubuntu Linux. If it was more of a crisp “snap” as one shrunk and another expanded, it might be better. And it definitely shouldn’t move or change size as you move your mouse across it.
They’ve attempted to emulate the Apple Dock algorithm, but forgotten the important point that Dock icons don’t have text, and reading moving text is hard.
April 25th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Hello,
I’m the author of FishEyeTabs, thanks for writing about it, and also for the feedback. I’m considering a change in the algorithm, where the tabs will get back to their normal size as the user moves away the mouse. As for the red X (close buttons), I had to remove them, because as the tabs resize/move, it was quite hard to hit them with the mouse, so they were quite annoying. Currently it is just a beta, having it’s flows, as you said, I’ll improve it soon.
April 26th, 2007 at 12:13 am
Version 0.14 available, with improved zooming.
April 30th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Laszlo: Thanks for the update.