> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.