Wandering Thoughts archives

One reason why I prefer browser windows to browser tabs

I recently read about a study of tabbed browsing, and it inspired some reflective thoughts. I am well out on the 'many things open at once' curve of browser users, but unlike almost everyone in the study, I do almost all of it in separate windows instead of in tabs. I've touched on this before, but I feel like taking another shot at one specific aspect of it, which is how one deals with inactive browser sessions.

(By 'browser session' here I mean one window-or-tab object. This is more than just a single web page; I often care about things like the history of how I got to the page.)

At any given time, most of my browser sessions are inactive (I'm not paying any attention to them). In my current window manager environment, I deal with inactive sessions by iconifying the browser window and spatially organizing the icons to keep track of them. I have a good enough spatial memory that I'm pretty good at remembering both where a particular iconified browser window is and what the iconified browser window in a particular place is.

(And unsurprisingly, I've developed habits around all of this; there are certain browser windows that I always iconify to the same places and so on.)

As far as I know, there is no similar method of shelving inactive tabs; they will clutter up the tab bar even if I'm not interested in them right now. Space on the tab bar is a much more limited resource than usable free space on my desktop for icons, so putting any decent amount of inactive sessions into tabs creates mess quite fast. Also, you rapidly get into a situation where it is hard to actually find things in your tabs short of manually searching through them all.

(There seem to be some Firefox extensions that try to deal with this.)

This advantage of browser windows is clearly an artifact of my rather odd window manager environment. Iconification is vastly out of style; common window managers these days put all windows (iconified or not) into a taskbar area, which gets cluttered even faster than the tab bar and is probably harder to manage. At least with Firefox's tab bar, things stay in order and you can shuffle that order around.

(Thinking about all of this makes me want a hopelessly geeky extension to session saving such that you could save and restore groups of windows separately from each other. Or just a good 'park this somewhere so I can come back and read it later' feature of some sort; I have a lot of browser windows that are for things I am going to read someday, honest.)

A thought on feed readers versus the social web

It's become common for bloggers to announce their new entries by posting little announcements to places like Twitter and Facebook; the ultimate version of this is the Planet Sysadmin twitter feed. Even beyond how common this is, my vague Referer-watching here on WanderingThoughts suggests that readers actually use this.

(Although a certain amount of the hits are from robots; for some reason, harvesting URLs from Twitter streams seems popular.)

In fact, anecdotally a fair number of people have switched from feed readers to finding out about new posts through Twitter and Facebook updates. On the face of it this sounds vaguely crazy, which makes me think two uncomfortable thoughts about why people could be doing it (especially for something that's already an aggregated feed, like Planet Sysadmin).

First, it could be that most people don't actually want to read all of your entries most of the time. Instead, they prefer to skim over a short headline and click through only sometimes, if they're sufficiently interested. In theory this could be done in feed readers, but in practice most feed readers seem to put obstacles in your way for doing this sort of fast skimming, some of them subtle (for example, even having an 'unread' state for entries).

Second, it could be that people actively prefer the web browser experience (and haven't found web based feed readers to be compelling). I can sort of see this, especially in the modern world of heavily tab based browsing. I suspect that when you get down to it, few feed readers provide as good a user experience as opening a bunch of links in a bunch of tabs and then going through them; you get random browsing through them, you can pause your reading of one entry and go to another without losing your place, you probably have less space eaten up with administrative clutter, and the result may well be prettier.

(This leads to some thoughts on feed readers themselves, but that's another entry.)

My sad little irritation with Twitter

I have a confession: every so often, Twitter irritates me. To be honest, there's a bunch of sources of this specific irritation besides Twitter, but Twitter is the most frequent one.

The irritation is that Twitter effectively hides information on who is linking to WanderingThoughts entries. In most linking and re-blogging environments, some amount of this information shows up in the Referer headers of incoming HTTP requests. Even if the Referer URL doesn't give you the exact entry where someone linked to you, it will usually tell you who the person was so you can go read their blog or whatever and pick it out yourself.

Not with Twitter. With Twitter, the Referer is generally just a generic 'http://twitter.com/'. I assume that this is because Twitter does the Web 2.0 thing of making their front page into your main page if you're logged in, so you stay on it when you read the stream of your friend's tweets and then follow interesting looking links.

(Facebook does this too, but they have the good excuse that the update that's linking to you isn't publicly visible. In most cases, the Twitter tweet will be publicly visible; you could see it if you just knew where it was or who had made it. And while Google Reader also does this, they're more towards the private than the public side of things.)

On the global scale of things, this is a sad little irritation, especially since keeping track of links to ones blog entries is close to egosurfing. But there it is.

(I suspect that this link-source-hiding is only going to get more common in the future, especially as people are starting to wake up to how much information can leak out in the Referer header.)