Saturday, July 18, 2009

An Open Firefox Feature Request

I love tree-style tabs.  It suits my [scatterbrained] working style to have 50+ tabs open at a time.  I almost always middle-click links to put them in a new tab. This way, I can leave parent pages completely untouched while I go off on tangents, compare notes, etc.  I eventually return to the page I started on and continue on my merry way.

Increasingly, links no longer point to discrete pages but DHTML elements that are meant to change the appearance of the parent page.  They can't be opened in a new tab, and there's no reassurance that they won't mangle the page beyond recognition.  Not only that, but they're hard to identify-- Generally their destination ends in an anchor tag (i.e. "#content"), but other than that they are indistinguishable from normal off-page links.

I propose that middle clicking these links opens an overlay that can be easily closed.  This way, the damage can be undone, and the browsing experience can continue uninterrupted.

3 comments:

Bill said...

I think you're conflating anchor tags and javascript functions here. A link to an anchor tag does not change the appearance of a page, it simply points your browser to a section on that page. To actually *change* the state of the page, you need a Javascript function. What I think you want is a way to revert the layout changes that a Javascript function makes.

However, this is one of the major stumbling blocks of web usability. To progromatically revert this change in a language like Javascript is nearly impossible. This is because functions in Javascript are allowed to have *side effects* which are rarely reversible. For instance, a web poll. When you click on a link to the "vote" function, not only does it update the HTML, but it also sends a request the server tallying your vote. You can't really revert that change unless the author of the page has written a similar function like "remove_vote". Welcome to the crazy world of the dynamic web.

INTERNET.com said...

You guys are nerds.

I think I currently have 75+ tabs open in 4 windows.

HightonRidley said...

...and for the record, the one feature I would find invaluable would be a way of going back with the back button but opening the page you're going back to in a new window/tab.

The number of times I click a link and then think, darn, I should have opened that in a new tab. So I click the back button, wait for the page to reload to the point I can see the link, then right-click it and open in a new tab.

Instead, it would be nice to, say, right-click the back button and be given the option for a new tab / window.

Surely I'm not the only person who does this?

Glad to get that off my chest :)