Tabbed browsing is pretty much the norm by now, with even someone like me (who disliked it vehemently for a long time) finally giving in and start using tabbed browsing (thanks to Chrome, by the way). Well, apparently, Mozilla thinks its time to move on. They believe tabbed browsing has become obsolete, and are asking users to come up with a better alternative.
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Member since:2006-02-28
I guess the counter-argument to that is that anything that takes up some width (the tabs themselves) also take up some height -- let's call it 10 pixels for argument's sake.
On a widescreen monitor, when you take away from height, it's more noticeable than when you take away from width:
If your resolution is 1680x1050 (a horrid yet common resolution), your tab bar means you are browsing at MOST at 1680x1040 -- more scrolling to read long articles, etc. (Of course, this is ignoring a Menubar, not to mention Windows' Window bar (minimize/maximize/close)...
However, in that same scenario, if you take 50 pixels from width to show tabs, then you are at 1630x1050 (ignoring all other bars, of course). There's more content on the display (and thus less scrolling), it's just shifted over a bit.
Here at OSNews, there's ample white space to the left and right of my screen, so I'd rather lose width than height.
...except that if my webpage doesn't scroll edge-to-edge, it annoys me, so I'd rather have tab-stuff at top, as is.
...also except that I hate Tabs and prefer to use the Taskbar for that sort of thing. 
Member since:
2008-03-08
In the age of wide-screen monitors, going tall is probably the wrong way.
I remember that Mozilla had some sites which would open in a sidebar - but back then monitors were competitively tiny and the use of real estate in such a manner was not the best.
Now that monitors are wide-screen, maybe that needs to be reconsidered? I doubt there are many sites that want pages much wider than 1000px...