(resending since I did it wrong before and only Itai saw this) On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Itai <[email protected]> wrote:
> In Chrome, the thumbnail added could easily be the same > thumbnail we use for the most visited pages in the New Tab Page. Note that most people expect the tab preview to be a *current* snapshot of the page, which this image would not be. The most important question is: Can someone find a reason why this > would hinder usability? That is, if we added this feature, would there > be a compelling reason to turn it off? Yes. We tested this pretty heavily a year or so ago; various people installed different Tab Preview extensions for Firefox. Unilaterally we found that the feature was very cool for a brief period of time, then quickly became somewhere between useless and annoying. There were numerous reasons for this: * If the tab preview was set to appear on the standard tooltip timer, it was both faster and more informative to simply click on the tab you were hovering to get a full-size image. * But if the preview was set to appear instantly, the UI felt extraordinarily distracting, since tab previews are moderately heavyweight yet were extremely transient. Random mouse movements caused distracting UI to appear, and even attempting to move to a desired tab became frustrating. * Even when the preview UI itself was not annoying, previews were rarely large enough to provide better information than the tab favicon in a compelling enough way to prefer them over simply clicking the tab. Frequently we squinted at the preview, then clicked the tab to check what it really was, with the net result being a pure time loss. In short, I can think of no use cases that tab previews make better, and a lot that were concretely worse when we used it. I cannot think of an alternative design which would overcome both these difficulties, although perhaps one exists. Being partial to Tab Previews, my personal take is that the preview > itself is extremely useful because titles quickly become too small to > display with 10 to 20 tabs and that this feature helps identify tabs > quickly. Note that this use case could perhaps be solved much better with a "tab switcher"/tab exposé (sorry Apple) sort of system, which could provide the sort of information a preview could, but for a large set of tabs at once. I think this particular area holds much more promise, though it is also one we've struggled to create successful prototypes for in the past. For previously visited links for example. It happens that I go back to > a page and forgot which link had what I was looking for. If hovering > over a visited link, it would be a lesser problem. It would not be > done for non-visited links for latency issues and not to trigger > unwanted requests. This is somewhat more compelling than the tabstrip case, though JS-based implementations on websites feel pretty frustrating to me, primarily because mouse hover on content is rarely a good indicator of my attention (and thus when something happens on hover I am surprised). Again, the contrast should be, is the alternative we're proposing monotonically better than simply clicking (or middle-clicking) the link in question to see what it is? Bookmarks are another place where previews would be very useful, if I > don't bother editing bookmark titles, a lot of bookmarks end up with > similar titles like 'homepage' or 'welcome'. Yahoo's bookmarking > service offers such previews based on when they last crawled the site. > Yes, this seems like a natural place to expose a thumbnail. PK --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Discussion mailing list: [email protected] View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-discuss -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
