Born out of Google’s Summer of Code, Desmond Elliot has shown his work in a neat little movie. It’s a neat new approach to the problem of tab overflow. Safari, Camino, and NetNewsWire all currently allow a certain number of tabs given a window width, and the rest are overflowed into a menu that one can select from. The problem with this is that the overflow tabs can’t be seen without closing existing tabs.
One has to close those tabs by using a keyboard shortcut or menu item. That’s not a great solution. Further, it makes it harder to move between these tabs quickly because the menu has to be open to know what’s there. Desmond’s solution is allow one to scroll though the tabs using buttons on either side. That’s an elegant solution and far more intuitive than the current implementation. It’s only a matter of time before it’s in Camino, but I want it in Safari (and no, I’m not a fan of the rumored thumbnail tabs a la OmniWeb).
