I think you should make a distinction between tab switching and tab organization. Tab switching will be done a lot, whereas most users will probably never mess with reorganizing their tabs, and those that do will probably spend some time getting an organization they like, then stop messing with it. I think it makes sense to separate the two UIs.
I think a drop down menu (or more realistically a pop-up menu) is the simplest way to handle too many tabs. This menu can also have some auxiliary functions, such as "organize tabs" which will bring up the separate tab organization UI (analogous to Firefox's bookmark menu and the "Organize bookmarks" menu item). It could also contain some predefined tab-sets such as "HTML+CSS tabs", "JavaScript tabs", "Net tabs", etc. If the user creates custom tab sets, they'd show up in the menu as well. So you might get a menu like: Console HTML CSS Script DOM Net Firecookie FirePHP YSlow Firediff ---------- Organize tabs... --------- Basic tabs HTML & CSS tabs JavaScript tabs Net tabs My custom tabs 1 My custom tabs 2 I would put all the installed extensions in the menu, not just the tabs that have overflowed the tab bar. This way the menu contents don't change every time you resize the browser window. The switcher menu should be easy to implement since it's pretty much a conventional menu. The "Organize tabs" UI is another thing altogether. However, having a dedicated UI for it should simplify implementation. There should probably be some sort of visual affordance for the menu, but I'm not sure what it should be. I can't visualize an icon that means "switch tabs", certainly not one that will fit in 16x16 icon. You could put a count of installed tabs on the tab bar before the first tab, and connect the menu to that. But that's the kind of UI that UI designers make fun of programmers for. On Jan 8, 6:08 am, "Honza (Jan Odvarko)" <[email protected]> wrote: > Yesterday, I have posted a short proposal how to solve a problem with > too many panels in Firebug (coming from extensions). > > Here is the original issue:http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=1842 > > And the blog > post:http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/too-many-panels-problem-in... > > If you have any ideas/wishes/proposals how to solve this problem (so > the UX is best possible) please respond on my blog or follow here. > > Thanks! > Honza
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