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A friend who recently upgraded to the Windows 7 operating system commented to me that upon initial use of the taskbar, he was fairly displeased.  He did not understand why they would choose to group multiple instances of the same program under a ‘tab’ or ‘folder’ that requires clicking further, choosing to open up a window.  Personally, I happen to very much enjoy the new taskbar, as I prefer to have a more minimalist approach to what is on my desktop and home screen (I have almost no icons on my desktop except for items I am currently working on, to serve as constant reminders for my forgetful mind).  That being said, it got me thinking about the usefulness of ‘tabs’ and how their appearance is becoming more and more standard in various User Interfaces.

My first real interaction with multiple tabs came with Mozilla’s Firefox browser, and while initially it took some getting used to the differences between that and merely alt-tabbing between multiple browsers, I quickly became adapted and indeed preferred the lower CPU and RAM resource hogging of one browser versus multiple.  While I had lost the ability to quickly and easily alt-tab between different browsers, after some short usage I discovered I could simply press ctrl-tab to switch quickly between tabs.  Suddenly any negatives to the situation were erased.  It was then that I began to wonder why more User Interfaces hadn’t moved to a similar situation  a long time ago.  While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer eventually adapted the tabs ‘feature’ (I put ‘feature’ in quotations because with the time it took to add it to their Internet Explorer browser, it was hardly new / novel anymore), there were still many opportunities to utilize such a feature that were being neglected for reasons that still continue to boggle me.

When I began looking around the Operating System and the applications that come with it, it began to feel as though they were lacking something because they did not nclude any tabbing.  Why did I have to have several notepad files open instead of one shell with multiple files inside of it?  Why does Microsoft Office still demand that separate instances be opened instead of one as well?  A barebones text editor such as Notepad I am willing to forgive for it’s lack of feature (although really, I shouldn’t), but a fully fledged Office Suite, that costs as much as it does should not be held to the same lax standards.

I’m curious as to why such a simple feature hasn’t been upgraded.  I’m sure that whatever version of Microsoft Office is next will employ such a feature (though what they should do is release an update patch for everyone to download freely), but that sort of thing should already be in the program.

Adobe incorporated the same tabbing into their line of products for CS4, but for what reason, I’m unsure.  Specifically in Photoshop, the tabbing of new images and opened images creates far more headache than before.  Often times I want to copy parts of one image to another, and the tabbing has made that significantly more cumbersome as it is no longer a drag and drop operation.  It is frustrating that such a ‘feature’ was added into program as the default, without thought as to how it might interfere with the workflow, or as to what ‘problem’ it is solving for the user.