News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Container Tabs. Parent comment

Re:Container Tabs by WorldMaker on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @02:31PM (#13474653)
Old Netscape/Firefox builds used to start with the Profile creation/selection screen by default (which is the -ProfileManager CLI option that remains today) and someone can correct me if I am wrong, but the consensus seemed to be that it confused people more than it helped them.

The majority of people already separate family members with different user accounts on the machine or mostly just don't seem to care.

This seems to be the interesting UX compromise that the new "Container Tabs" is trying to meet "where they live": the users that could use some of the advantages of profiles without the full overhead of using multiple profiles. It will be interesting to see if the compromise is picked up by average users.

(Fwiw, I've used multiple profiles in Firefox off and on for decades but have yet to find a relative I'd recommend that to.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Container Tabs by mverwijs on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @01:14AM (#13479109)
That was then, and this is now.

In the old days, seperate profiles were used to seperate Moms browsing from Dad's browsing. Now, we need different profiles to browse: one for shopping, one for banking, one for work...

Seems to me that coders forget that people evolve. Same with Moxie saying that it is fine for WhatsApp not ticking the 'tell me when the key changed'-box by default because that confuses people. Perhaps it /did/ confuse people, when security was not a known issue. People tend to learn, in my experience. You can't say: "Well, we did an A/B test in 2002 and now we're done for the next millenium."

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Container Tabs by WorldMaker on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @10:38AM (#13482216)
Uh, right, people could use one for shopping, one for banking, one for work, etc... but they'd like them all to be in the same window so they can switch between them as tabs... (It's funny when you realize that the old ProfileManager predates tabs.)

Which is where we arrive today with Mozilla's work on "container tabs". The code and UX evolve, too.

I'm not sure what your complaint here is, mverwijs? That Mozilla should test Firefox starting up with the ProfileManager again? Like I said, I think "container tabs" might be a good way to do this in a way that mainstream users might pick up and this will be interesting to watch.

(I guess one trick that might be interesting if there was a way to easily "graduate" from I know/love "container tabs" to "oh, the next thing I can try is profiles to do more complicated things", but I think the answer is that profiles will adapt more to work with "container tabs" UX than "container tabs" UX will adapt to the old profiles UX. Given "incognito" tabs in other browsers can be seen as a specialization of a "container tab"/"profile tab", I suspect mixing profile tabs in a single browser window is a UX that is here to stay.)

[ Parent | on HN ]