Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
Understanding context in your New Tab
Aza Raskin and the Mozilla Labs team looks like they are having a lot of fun. They have been putting up proposals for new UIs and the latest involves a smarter new tab screen.
Aza discusses how opening a blank screen doesn’t really help you. Opera already allows you to have a quick dial screen show up there, but what else can be done?
Often a new tab is opened to do a search, so they can put a search bar right there, and it can be smart enough to search across your own tools and providers (e.g. delicious). I personally don’t do this, as I use Apple-K to jump to the search bar in the browser and have the search results open in a new tab.
What I found even more interesting was the context specific smartness. How often do you do this:
- Find an address
- Select and copy the address
- Open a new tab
- Go to maps.google.com
- Paste in the new address
Instead, the new tab selector can be smart and automatically show you the map option. NOTE: there are of course other options such as plugins that find the addresses and give you links to the map.
I don’t understand why adding a new search location to the page. When you open a new tab, the focus is given to the awesome bar ! We can improve the awesome bar to recognize addresses, events and such, but adding another awesome bar inside the new tab is just terribly useless, isn’t it ?
All this is explaining is that when you open a blank window, you want a personalized home/portal page. This is particularly not useful for me, since 99% of the time when I open a new tab, I’m typing in a new address in the address bar. Searching can be done by hitting the TAB key once and popping me over to the search input in the top of the browser.
I agree with frenchStudent. While this looks nice, surely everything you do in a new tab, you can also do in the current tab. I use CyberSearch, which makes the awesome bar do searches. Pressing Alt+Enter from either the awesome bar or the search bar opens the result in a new tab anyway.
As for the context sensitive text selection stuff, shouldn’t I be able to select an address, right click and select “view map”. Same with calendar entries.
Isn’t it looking a bit like IE8 Activities? (well, what dave1010 describes would be, and I agree 100% with him about this being a better way for such contextual uses; for other uses, either an IE7-like or Opera-like behavior would be fine)
I usually just do a Google search directly and click through the map link. I’d forgotten about holding down the alt key while using the search box. Thanks @dave1010.
I thought there used to be an option to have all searches automatically open in a new window. I fished around prefs for a minute and couldn’t find it. …or maybe that was a behavior added by an extension I used to run.
I love the Opera thing where they have the “fast dial” or what it’s called in fact which are “special bookmarks” which will be displayed in a table style when you open up a new tab…
Well, I always use my machine’s performance - mostly RAM - at the edge: like, having around 40 pages open, I usually close my IM windows once a day, that means over 20 or 30 on a normal weekday…
For me, such a solution would be an unnecessary memory hog, since I mostly can type what I want.
This stuff is in IE8 Beta 2… what a coincidence :)