JOEHEWITT.COM

Thoughts on software and life.

Monday January 12

columns

If I have a screen large enough to display more than one web page at a time, shouldn't my browser allow me to do something useful with all those extra pixels?

Instead of "Open in New Tab", I want "Open in New Column", so that I can read the new page without having to switch away from the page I'm currently reading. This would also be useful when you want to drag and drop something between two pages.

Taking that a step further, I'd love it if I could select from a menu of layout options with different vertical and horizontal columns, and display a different browsing context in each. You could choose to make each pane either clipped or scaled down. Might sound crazy, but if you've got the pixels, why put all those pages in hidden tabs and windows? Most web pages look just fine in 640x480 anyway. If people are buying high-res displays, software should help them more bang for their buck.

On a related note, I look forward to all the browser vendors copying the new thumbnail-based tab browsing from OmniWeb 5. Firebird could do it easily if Gecko only knew how to render to an offscreen device context.

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