A while ago I read an interesting article about MDIs in Mac OS. OS X is design to have multiple documents in it’s own window, and exposé and spaces behave according to that pattern. An exception (by Apple itself) is the tabbed Safari.
Users that have a lot of windows opened at the same time really enjoy having tabs, and it was a huge success in Mozilla Suite and it also worked out pretty good in Safari. So why did they broke their own rule?
I decide to give single-page windows a try. I usually have only a couple of tabs open, but when reading feeds I end up with more than 20, being my “todo list”. I am also a mouse-user. I do use shortcuts, but when reading, my right hand is scrolling the page in my mouse.
I was expecting a few advantages from this new way of using Safari. Having pages in one window each would allow me to switch pages by their content, and not only their title as I would in tabs. I would also be able to minimize it to the dock for later reading. In the end, I never minimized any page (as I don’t use that feature at all) and I spend more time looking for the right page than with tabs, since exposé makes different arrangements with the same windows, depending on the active one.
At first, using windows as the same as tabs, but when I started working with the keyboard, everything changed. To open a new tab I was used to type cmd+T with just the left hand, now I have to use both hands to type cmd+N, which sucks since I want to be able to use the mouse with the other hand. Another issue with shortcuts was the navigation between open websites. I switch tabs by using cmd+shift+arrow keys. With windows, I have to cycle them with cmd+shift+` [1] so there’s no back and forth.
Since I have a black macbook, I am only equipped with an integrated graphics card, which is perfectly fine for its purpose, but with more than 15 windows, exposé was breaking a little. And I looove exposé so much, I can’t bare it to slow down, so with all of this in mind, I switched back to tabs after a couple of days.
If this is something that interests you, make sure to check the How do People Use Tabs presentation.
1 Yep, seems like apple doesn’t care a little about people who don’t use US/UK keyboards.