[derefr]

Regarding the use of horizontal space: This is what the Reading List feature of Safari 5 is for. (Example for comparison: http://i.imgur.com/x2tkl.png)

Tabs are really only supposed to be used for things you're actually looking at simultaneously; any time you're just middle-clicking everything on a page (e.g. the HN frontpage), in order to queue those pages up for reading after you close the index page, you should be putting them in the reading list instead. It's kind of sad that Apple hasn't made a larger push to get people to notice it; it's a much better solution for the bottom-80% of what people use tabs for today.

Things you might not know about the Reading List:

1. It has quite a bit of accelerator support (you can put any link into the reading list by Shift+Clicking it; you can put the page you're on into the reading list with Command+Shift+D; and Command+Alt+Down is "I'm done reading this; advance to the next thing in the list.")

2. The reading list (as part of your bookmarks menu) gets iCloud-synced. Your open tabs don't. That alone was worth consciously forcing myself to re-learn my "eh, later" behaviour, because now I can just forget what I had "open" and read the rest on my iPad/iPhone/etc. (I suppose this might be why it hasn't been advertised much as a feature; they might be waiting to use it as part of the iCloud release pitch.)

---

On a separate note/rant, regarding the use of "tab groups": it seems like the author simply wants to re-invent the Springboard/Launchpad-style application management paradigm within the browser. Why bother? I don't want to have two different ways of managing my applications, depending on whether they're "web" applications or not. I want my applications in Launchpad, and my running applications in the Dock, with notification badges on them. It shouldn't matter that Gmail requires Webkit-et-al, just like it shouldn't matter that an app requires Java.

Safari, just like Mobile Safari, should simply have an "Add To Home Screen" button and be done with it. Apps that have been added as such should perhaps be able to access extra resources. (Their HTML5 offline-browsing manifests should be automatically downloaded, for one; they should have accelerated WebGL enabled, with shader support, for another; and this would also be an obvious place to adopt something like Google's NaCl.) I'm guessing, though, that we sadly won't see any of this support, because anything that integrates with the OS well-enough as a web-app is something that doesn't have to make a Mac App Store app instead.

[officemonkey]

I just booted up Safari (for the first time since I installed Lion) and tried out the "Reading List".

The main reason I don't like it is that the reading list doesn't load the page until you click on it. When I create a tab, it loads and opens the page and it's ready when I navigate to it. I navigate to a reading list page and I have to wait a non-trivial amount of time for the page to load.

I understand why you would do this for a mobile browser (to reduce data charges for pages that might never be opened), but that doesn't matter to my desktop machine.

Safari could mostly fix this by preemptively loading the neighboring pages in your reading list. Until then, I'll stay with my tabs in Chrome, thanks.

[derefr]

> The main reason I don't like it is that the reading list doesn't load the page until you click on it. When I create a tab, it loads and opens the page and it's ready when I navigate to it.

If you've ever gone on a Wikipedia/TVTropes/Everything2/other-heavily-intralinked-website-here binge, you'd be thankful for the fact that the reading list doesn't load the pages you hand it until you're actually reading them. 3000 open tabs will kill any web browser I'm aware of; 3000 reading list entries is just 3000 items in a list.

[CognitiveLens]

I'm not sure I understand your reply. I think that officemonkey meant that in a serial list of "things to read", Reading List could cache the preceding and succeeding pages relative to the particular item you're on so that as you complete one page you can immediately jump to the next/previous page.

I agree, however, that Reading List does not address the "random access" approach to research, which is more along the lines of using tabs simultaneously, as intended.

[dpark]

> Tabs are really only supposed to be used for things you're actually looking at simultaneously; any time you're just middle-clicking everything on a page (e.g. the HN frontpage), in order to queue those pages up for reading after you close the index page, you should be putting them in the reading list instead. It's kind of sad that Apple hasn't made a larger push to get people to notice it; it's a much better solution for the bottom-80% of what people use tabs for today.

I appreciate the time you spent putting together a long response and a good explanation of the reading list, but honestly this seems like broken UX. Tabs and the reading list have a massive amount of overlap conceptually. The only true distinguishing feature seems to be that the reading list syncs. Other than that, it seems like the user is being asked to take on extra cognitive load to decide whether to open a link in a tab or the reading list. There are times when I know I would like to read something later or on my tablet, and that's the use-case for the reading list. Most of the time I just want to open a link now, and that's what tabs are for. If a vertical tab design is better, then tabs need to go vertical. I shouldn't be forced to open everything in the reading list to work around a UI deficiency.

[quizbiz]

Thanks for the reading list insight. But I'm surprised reading list isn't paired with any kind of note taking system.

I have been dying for a sidebar solution where I can take notes and write while I read a webpage. As it is, I always have Notational Velocity open on the right and Safari open on the left.

[albertzeyer]

This sounds interesting. I use Chrome. Does somebody know if there is a similar feature there?

[BhujangiJedi]

I made an extension for browsing sites like HN and reddit: http://msssk.bitbucket.org/

I have a 1920x1200 monitor and find that a lot of my web browsing wastes a lot of my horizontal space. Tabbed browsing certainly beats single-window browsing for content aggregation sites like HN, but it's still kind of cumbersome... and there's all that horizontal space not being used. So I wrote clikkit - it creates an iframe and starts loading the page as soon as you click the link (unfortunately, it's up to Chrome how much priority it gives to fetching the page, and it doesn't start rendering it until the iframe is added to the DOM).

[arpit]

Nothing native, but third party services like Instapaper and Read It Later are popular

[inconditus]

Interestingly enough, Chrome had this option in the developers page, but they removed it. I believe it was called horizontal side tabs.

[WesleyJohnson]

I have this option with Chrome 13.0.782.109 beta-m. If you right click a tab, the context menu option is "Use Side Tabs". I just can't remember what I did to get that option to appear in the context menu. I thought I used "about:labs", but that is no longer showing anything. Maybe the feature is baked into this build?

[elxx]

It's the first item in "about:flags".

[lloeki]

> The reading list (as part of your bookmarks menu) gets iCloud-synced

Good to know, information was scarce on the subject. Had it not be syncing it would have killed the feature for me.