Browsers, tabs, wide screens and usability

Computer users with widescreen monitors are sometimes the victims of software designed for a non-widescreen world - as most dialogs in the existing applications were not built with "plenty of horizontal space" in mind.

As time passes by, widescreen monitors gain popularity, and software developers have to take that into account. Today's example is Opera.

My habit is to open a lot of tabs and keep them there until all their reading material is analyzed and understood. Since there is a lot of good content on the Internet, it is difficult to keep up. As a result, after a series of my computer's hibernate cycles, I experience "tab avalanche" (note to self: find a better name for this effect).

(click for a larger image)

You can see that the tabs are so small that their titles are not readable.

This may not be a problem if you use the favicons to tell one tab from another, but if you have several tabs displaying pages from the same site (as it is usually the case with Wikipedia) - you have a usability problem. The screenshot above is not the "worst case scenario", at times it also happens that the tab markers become smaller - so it becomes difficult to click on them. This turns the browsing experience into empirical evidence that Fitt's law is true.

I have a widescreen monitor on another computer, Opera runs there too. As an experiment, I decided to place the tab-bar to the left side, vertically. This is what it looks like:

Vertical placement had several reasons behind it:

• I really get to see the title of each tab, so it makes navigation easier
• Many sites aren't designed to look good on a wide screen, so a lot of space is wasted. I shrink the browser's window so that I can open other programs and keep them on the remaining space (ex: see Pidgin on the right)