Vince Kocks
Aaron Kirkes
Reference Information
Shenwei Liu, Keishi Tajima, IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.
Summary
The topic of this paper is to address the management problem that people now have with tab-based browsers. People today are much more prone to multitask and have many tabs open at the same time. However, the current solution to look at all these tabs at a glance is very poor. Usually all you can see is a logo for the website and a couple of words for the title of the page. The solution presented takes into account that wide screen monitors have become much more prevalent in the world and the extra space is not being utilized well. Therefore, they want to have a browser that has the main window, but also large thumbnails instead of tabs for the other pages that are open. This allows the user to very easily glance and see what other screens are open and what they are without having to go back and forth. Also analyzed in the paper were special techniques to actually scan the page for important data to add to the thumbnail in order to give better information about the tab. So the thumbnail will not simply be a scrunched picture of the page, but have a large version of the logo and maybe a picture from the page.
Discussion
This is definitely a field that needs a lot of work for the browser world. Users of computers are spending more and more of their day on the browser and it is becoming a large focus of what the computer does. Even Google has made an entire operating system based solely on their Chrome browser. Tab management could allow for a much better experience and much more efficiency. I am really interested to see how their algorithm to make a better thumbnail would work out. I see that as the real key to this solution because often times thumbnails do not really tell you anything about what the real picture is.
I really like this idea. I've definitely had times when a system like this could come in handy. It does look a little too busy though with thumbnails on both sides. I think I'd prefer the thumbnails to be a little smaller and on just one side. Still, it's a cool idea and I, too, am curious as to how their algorithm to make the thumbnails would work.
ReplyDeleteI like this concept too, but am not convinced that this is the best solution until I actually see it implemented. I currently use an expose like interface in Chrome to view all open tabs, and I like that a lot better than the standard tab interface. Maybe this product would prove to be even more useful.
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