Re: That tab panel off on the side

On Jan 24, 2007, at 1:21 PM, Doug Lerner wrote:
> But my point is - if a percentage of people who are not used to and  
> don't care for OmniWeb's method of doing this then why not make a  
> preference to let people do it the way they like? What's the harm  
> in letting people have the UI they prefer?

We're certainly listening, and we appreciate you letting us know that  
that's now the UI you prefer.  (If you send email to our support team  
by selecting "Send Feedback" from the Help menu, they won't debate  
your preferences with you:  they'll just add your vote to our feature  
request database.)

One of the reasons we didn't arrange our thumbnails horizontally was  
that we were trying to avoid confusing the dimensions of navigation:   
in OmniWeb, left and right currently always refer to moving back and  
forth in history, while up and down switch to a different "tab" (i.e.  
a different stream of history).  This is true both visually and with  
the shortcuts (you can hold down command and press the appropriate  
arrow keys to navigate either your history or your thumbnails).  We  
actually did implement a horizontal thumbnail bar, but it was used to  
navigate a window's history rather than its "tabs".  (For those who  
are wondering, we didn't end up shipping this due to time constraints.)

Another reason we chose to put our "tabs" on the side is that we felt  
that vertical space was the most important space to give to a web  
page, because text (in European languages) is easier to scan  
vertically than horizontally, and because most screens are wider than  
they are tall.  Obviously that argument doesn't hold much weight if  
you're using the browser to view predominantly horizontal content  
such as movies or landscape pictures, but I think that's relatively  
rare (or we'd have more mice with horizontal scroll wheels).

Anyway, that's some of our reasoning, but we still appreciate your  
feedback that you find this layout awkward and unfamiliar.

				Thanks,
				Ken

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