Tab previews are in the works for a future release of Mozilla Firefox. In current versions of Firefox you hover your mouse over a non-active tab (i.e. any
I think many people in the comments suffer from some version of curse of knowledge.
Sure, this feature us quite irrelevant for a power user who is quick to navigate the browser and needs a split second to remember what tab it is simply by reading the header and seeing the icon.
However, many less proficient people can benefit from this feature. Not once I saw how someone who has 10 tabs open and needs to go to a different webpage, starts meticulously clicking through every single one of them because they have no idea how the page they are looking for is called, they are too overwhelmed by using web as a whole to take notice.
Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”
Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.
There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.
Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.
Again, in my opinion you approach the problem like a power user. Using a browser is not a speedrun where every millisecond matters. Here is why I think it provides more comfort to an average user:
No need to divert attention and look around the monitor. When you’re not well versed with a mouse, it’s easier to click and look at the same place
Nothing distracts you unlike when you click through pages. Imagine going from dark theme page to a light theme page, the entire screen suddenly lights up
Depending on the way it is implemented (perhaps by keeping compressed page screenshots?), it might be faster to show a preview than to render the page again on a weak machine
I’m not sure how clicking can be considered “power user”… Had I said “just install tree style tabs, it’s much better”, you might’ve had a point, but you’re arguing that clicking is worse than hovering. Really can’t agree with you.
But hey, I don’t give money to Mozilla and the chance is very low that I ever will, so they can do what they want. If they think this is how they want to spend the 500 million they get from Google, that’s their prerogative.
I didn’t say clicking is power user, I said that you assessing features in terms of speed (“Is hovering faster than clicking?”) is a power user approach. It’s deeper than just bare speed and accessibility features are not developed to provide physically faster experience, but one that is more comfortable for some group of users.
Hovering preview does not even take ability to click through tabs away, but could provide comfort for a user who is not as browser proficient, for the reasons I outlined above.
Agreed. As a Netscape/Phoenix stan since late 90s, I sometimes do like the peeking feature on Ungoogled Chromium. Yes, I am a power user, but often I have one trillion tabs open with just the webpage tab icon barely visible, and need to check roughly what the tab is showing.
I would even propose there should be a very faint 1-2 pixel thick scrollbar so you can see how far you scroll on your hundreds of tabs left/right, similar to vertical tabs having a scrollbar for Tree Style Tabs.
I don’t understand how someone can have 10 or more tabs open. The times when I have “many” tabs open is when I’m looking for references while doing art, and that still hardly ever surpasses 5 tabs! XD
I think it’s much easier to have more than to have less. Most people I encounter have such a mess of pages in their browser, makes my hair stand on end. If we continue to approach this as an accessibility feature, it starts to make even more sense since tons of users have so many tabs they only see icons, not page names
I often get myself into a position where I have 50+ tabs open, but then I get annoyed with all the damn tabs and go on a purge… furiously clicking X on tabs down the line until I have it down to something manageable. This happens every couple of days. I wish there was a setting where one had the option of limiting themselves to x amount of tabs and if you hit the limit you know it’s time for a purge. I’ve seen where chromium browsers also have tab groups… I’m not sure if that helps for tab hoarding, I guess it could be more organized that way, but also sounds like it just enables more tab hoarding.
I think many people in the comments suffer from some version of curse of knowledge.
Sure, this feature us quite irrelevant for a power user who is quick to navigate the browser and needs a split second to remember what tab it is simply by reading the header and seeing the icon.
However, many less proficient people can benefit from this feature. Not once I saw how someone who has 10 tabs open and needs to go to a different webpage, starts meticulously clicking through every single one of them because they have no idea how the page they are looking for is called, they are too overwhelmed by using web as a whole to take notice.
Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”
Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.
There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.
Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.
How is hovering over a tab and waiting for a preview faster than clicking it?
Again, in my opinion you approach the problem like a power user. Using a browser is not a speedrun where every millisecond matters. Here is why I think it provides more comfort to an average user:
I’m not sure how clicking can be considered “power user”… Had I said “just install tree style tabs, it’s much better”, you might’ve had a point, but you’re arguing that clicking is worse than hovering. Really can’t agree with you.
But hey, I don’t give money to Mozilla and the chance is very low that I ever will, so they can do what they want. If they think this is how they want to spend the 500 million they get from Google, that’s their prerogative.
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I’m sorry, but did you… read my comment?
I didn’t say clicking is power user, I said that you assessing features in terms of speed (“Is hovering faster than clicking?”) is a power user approach. It’s deeper than just bare speed and accessibility features are not developed to provide physically faster experience, but one that is more comfortable for some group of users.
Hovering preview does not even take ability to click through tabs away, but could provide comfort for a user who is not as browser proficient, for the reasons I outlined above.
Oh great. As if my life doesn’t have enough curses on it.
Agreed. As a Netscape/Phoenix stan since late 90s, I sometimes do like the peeking feature on Ungoogled Chromium. Yes, I am a power user, but often I have one trillion tabs open with just the webpage tab icon barely visible, and need to check roughly what the tab is showing.
I would even propose there should be a very faint 1-2 pixel thick scrollbar so you can see how far you scroll on your hundreds of tabs left/right, similar to vertical tabs having a scrollbar for Tree Style Tabs.
I don’t understand how someone can have 10 or more tabs open. The times when I have “many” tabs open is when I’m looking for references while doing art, and that still hardly ever surpasses 5 tabs! XD
I think it’s much easier to have more than to have less. Most people I encounter have such a mess of pages in their browser, makes my hair stand on end. If we continue to approach this as an accessibility feature, it starts to make even more sense since tons of users have so many tabs they only see icons, not page names
Currently have 23 tabs open, 7 are youtube, 3 lemmies, and i guess the rest are docs I cant tell I’d greatly benefit from the tab previewer
I often get myself into a position where I have 50+ tabs open, but then I get annoyed with all the damn tabs and go on a purge… furiously clicking X on tabs down the line until I have it down to something manageable. This happens every couple of days. I wish there was a setting where one had the option of limiting themselves to x amount of tabs and if you hit the limit you know it’s time for a purge. I’ve seen where chromium browsers also have tab groups… I’m not sure if that helps for tab hoarding, I guess it could be more organized that way, but also sounds like it just enables more tab hoarding.