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by kragen 5425 days ago
I've thought for a while that we need to switch to multicolumn views for web browsing:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe..., "multicolumn web browsers":

> So the solution generally adopted --- in newspapers, dictionaries, and research papers --- is to lay out the text in multiple columns.

> With Apple's 30-inch-diagonal 100dpi display widely available and > multiple-screen solutions becoming common, it's well past time to > adopt this solution for web browsers as well.

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2000-August/..., "Phone browsers suck":

> On the other front, ever-growing screens on PCs present the opposite problem --- how to usefully use a screen the size of two sheets of A4 paper side by side? Interface idioms that worked well on smaller screens --- a menubar along the top, single-column text filling the screen, icons sized by pixels --- become clumsy.

I agree that moving tabs to the left side of the screen is a good idea, too. --enable-vertical-tabs doesn't seem to work for me in Chromium. Tree Style Tabs in Firefox gives you both tabs on the left and tab groups.

2 comments

I'm going to use this opportunity to shamelessly plug a hack of Readability that I call Horizontability[0]. It just displays the usual Readability output in multicolumns with some javascript hooks to help navigation. For whatever reason, I can't seem to drag the bookmarklet in Chrome anymore[1].

Chrome's side tab implementation really needs some help. I appreciate being able to read more of the tab title, but they really don't save much space (the window bar is still present but it shrinks by like 2 pixels). I'm surprised it still doesn't work on Linux[2]. I checked out the source earlier and it's easy enough to understand but there's no way I can get chromium to build on my box.

[0] http://etcet.net/projects/horizontal/index.html

[1] maybe related to http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=12290

[2] http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=31763

Agreed. He isn't saying something that isn't already present in firefox with a simple extension.