User Experiences: Evolving IE9 Tabs in Windows 7

Artykuł
10/14/2010

With IE9, we wanted to make tabs more useful than ever before. We know that tabs are a great way to experience multiple sites within a window, and we showed how you can increase the number of tabs possible in IE9’s site-centric frame design. In IE8, we introduced Tab Groups as a way to help you remember which tabs are related to each other. In IE9, you can drag a tab out of and between windows, use Windows 7 Aero Snap to compare tabs, continue watching a video while moving a tab, and pin a site by dragging a tab to the taskbar.

Moving tabs between windows

As we listened to the feedback we received from usability studies, site visits, and IE feedback channels like Microsoft Connect, having more control over tabs is something we consistently heard as a request. This is for a variety of different scenarios, from comparing products on multiple sites to managing groups of tabs while organizing search results. In IE9, you can drag a tab out of a window to create a new window and move tabs between windows if you want to group tabs of a specific task together. When you drop a tab into an existing Tab Group, the new tab joins the group and matches its color appropriately. For keyboard lovers, you can also “cut & paste” tabs to different windows through Ctrl+M and Ctrl+Shift+M!

Aero Snap

Comparing tabs is now easier using Windows Aero Snap. We know from our usage data that 40% of people using Windows 7 have used Aero Snap, and 17% of people look at windows side by side. Instead of having to learn another way to compare windows, in IE9 you can use Aero Snap just by dragging a tab. If you are comparing a product on two websites in two tabs and decide you want to look at them side by side, all you have to do is drag that tab to the side of the screen and it will snap to fill that half of the screen. Just as with Aero Snap, once you pull the tab off of the side of the screen, it returns back to its original window size.

Real time content

IE9 lets you fully focus on your websites as you drag a tab. Through hardware accelerated graphics and separate sessions for each tab, your tabs are fully and continually rendered, even while you drag a tab. If you are watching a video and want to move the tab or snap it to the side of the screen, in IE9, the video keeps playing as you move the window, making sure you don’t miss a beat!

Pin to the taskbar

Finally, you can pin sites by dragging a tab to the Taskbar. Pinned Sites let you put your favorite sites at your fingertips on the Taskbar. As we were developing this feature, we saw during usability studies that dragging a tab was one of the main ways people expected to be able to pin a site. This made sense as the tab is a representation for the site in the browser, so it is natural to have this be a way to pin sites.

By integrating the tab experience with Windows 7, IE 9 becomes a natural extension of what you want to do with your PC. We hope that these additions make your use of tabs even better than before. Please send your feedback in the comments and on Connect.

Eugene Chang
User Experience Researcher

Comments

Anonymous
October 14, 2010
On www.winsupersite.com/.../ie9_ff_onebox.asp (assuming a later build) we can see a few screenshots that show the refresh and stop button on the left of the OneBox. I ask for the Home button to be moved there, too.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
How can I tell IE9 to use the Adobe SVG Viewer for svg-content?
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
Pin to the taskbar i think you should also have a context menu, so right clicking a tab has an option to pin the site to the taskbar. shouldn't have to drag the tab from the top of the screen to the bottom to pin it. after all, this option exists within windows 7.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
The Ctrl+M, Ctrl+Shift+M trick is a nice touch - though it, and probably dragging, would be more effective if there was a way to multi-select tabs. IE9 is a great improvement, but it has made dealing with a large number of tabs harder.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
I would love to have the ability to close tabs without having to first click on the tab, and then clicking on the "x" sign. Chrome has this feature, and I find that very useful.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
Is there a way to drag around an entire tab group at once?
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
Madhu, you can close tabs by middle-clicking on them (personally I would think that one would expect this to duplicate the tab rather than closing it in order to match how you middle-click to open them in the first place, but there you go).
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
@Madhu Middle or wheel click on the tab you want to close. That will close it.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
This is all great but why in the lords name does IE9 not support TEXT-SHADOW?! A feature every other browser supports!? Come on IE Team, you can do it too!
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
Personally I would hardly call supporting text-shadow a 'feature'.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
Text shadow will become the blink tag of today's browser
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
I am really, really happy we still have the option to turn off tabs. I think tabs are really stupid, as I already have a "tab" for each window in the taskbar.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
On www.winsupersite.com/.../ie9_ff_onebox.asp (assuming this is a later build) we can see a few screenshots that show the refresh and stop button on the left of the OneBox. I ask for the Home button to be moved there, too.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
This is one of the more useful new feature of IE9 I have got so used to the easy drag and drop tab sorting and Aero snap that is possible with Google Chrome, that I sorely missed it in IE8 and Firefox. I hope they tweak it still from the beta as there were a few small issues I found in the beta that stopped tab dragging from being 'seamless'.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
"In IE9, you can drag a tab out of a window to create a new window and move tabs between windows" I just tested this in Firefox, and it worked. I had no idea you could do this in Firefox. Thanks for the tip! (The snapping and side-by-side comparison also works - in my KDE environment.)
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
Great, features other browsers have had for a while. How exciting. Please focus on HTML5 and CSS3 support so we can all move forward!
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
I've been missing a rather trivial feature: an option to ungroup all tabs in a tab group. Right now I can only do that one-by-one.
Anonymous
October 14, 2010
Dragging from the address bar to the desktop/folder/whatever should not create a pinned link. It should just create a good ol' classic link, like it always has.
Why is there no option to allow me to have IE9 always open the tabs that were open the last time I closed it. Silly as it may be, this is the reason Chrome is my default browser. I want to set my default back to IE, so please add this "feature".
Anonymous
October 15, 2010
@Kevin B, Lots of people (including me) have been requesting the always reopen last tabs feature since the IE8 betas but so far no improvement in this area, in fact IE9 so far makes reopen last session slightly harder to find.
Anonymous
October 15, 2010
@alvatrus - blink is cool! It's been a really good friend to me, I use it on a lot of my sites. <marquee> too. Please keep supporting these tags under IE9! MS ROCKS!!!1!!
Anonymous
October 15, 2010
The ctrl+m and ctrl+shft+m shortcuts are non-intuitive. Who is going to learn about them and from where? Unless they are reading this blog or the IE help system, which nobody does. Please use ctrl+x and ctrl+v instead, which are the default cut/paste shortcut keys.
Anonymous
October 15, 2010
@anon We considered those as possible shortcuts. There were a few problems with Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V, including:

You'd expect Ctrl+C to also work the same way without removing the original tab. But there's no real equivalent to that. We could open a new tab and navigate it to the same URL, but that's not an equivalent operation to Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V because you would lose state such as your video playback position.
Those shortcuts already means something in many of the places where your keyboard focus could land. That makes performing the action more difficult and unpredictable. For instance, if you were at www.bing.com, keyboard focus would probably be in the text field, and Ctrl+X would try to cut text rather than hold the tab. Realistically, you'd probably have to put keyboard focus on the tab itself first, which is a bit clunky.

Anonymous
October 15, 2010
Please, I need tabs on top! :(
Anonymous
October 15, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 15, 2010
Another idea would be what I use most on Maxthon the IE shell for tabs... Add, "Close All on the Right of this tab" or "Close All on the Left of this tab" on right click over tab ;) Amazingly useful...
Anonymous
October 16, 2010
Change the blog title to "ruining the user experience". The only changes in the GUI was merging the tab bar with the address bar and then forcing users to not be able to undo that massive mistake...or was it not a mistake... With Hollywood enforcing it's greed with the H.264 codec it wouldn't surprise me to find out that they also helped destroy Windows by destroying Windows Explorer and that Windows 8 will end up uploading all files to the "cloud". It's a total nightmare to work with Vista and 7 is even worse and the only people who criticize my comments suspiciously can't be looked up online. Nothing GUI related has in any way improved and I think it's still vibrantly political. It totally ruins all the awesome standards work that IE9 has. On the upside for any other XP users who feel the same way I recommend trying Kubuntu, you can actually CUSTOMIZE right down to every single menu item. If Microsoft doesn't want to keep their customers then keep doing what you're doing!
Anonymous
October 16, 2010
The new tab management mechanisms in IE9 are wonderful, and I find myself using them all the time. When I am forced to use a previous version of IE, I find myself getting frustrated! (The same hold true for using versions of Windows before Win7, without Aero Snap!) I do have one minor complaint/suggestions: when I have a lot of tabs open, it's a lot harder to tell which tab is active. In previous versions of IE, I believe the active tab was a couple pixels taller than the other tabs. In IE9, the only visual cues are the "x" to close, and the lack of a border on the bottom. I find myself having to look a second or third time to determine which tab corresponds to the page I am currently viewing. I realize one design goal was to minimize vertical space the browser took up, but I'm wondering if the height of non-active tabs could not be reduced by a couple pixels, allowing for greater differentiation without taking any more room.
Anonymous
October 16, 2010
Please move the file menu back above the address bar where it belongs, the tabs below the address bar and the home/favorites/settings icons to the left underneath the back button. Or better yet just let me drag them there. Why do you people insist on abitrarily moving/renaming functions when a new version comes out? What is the point?
Anonymous
October 16, 2010
I notice that you made the videos with only a few tabs open. I wonder if you didn't show those features with ten or more tabs open because that would reveal that the new address+tabs bar has become unusable if you use more than a few tabs? Can you please stop degrading the UI? Do you really think people do not want to be able to see the title of the page they look at? Do you really think it doesn't matter that you cannot read the titles of tabs if you have more than a few tabs open? Did you leave that out from your "usability studies"?
Anonymous
October 17, 2010
And while I'm on this, hasn't it ever occurred to the IE team people might not always use IE with a maximized window? As a test just load your four or five tabs that you think people will never exceed (no doubts about that?) and then reduce the size of the window to about half of the screen (horizontally). Many websites will still be easily usable and readable, but your famous address+tabs bar grows unusable. The address+tabs bar on one row forces people to always use IE in maximized mode.
Anonymous
October 17, 2010
For everyone who has problems with the layout, get Maxthon; It solves all the problems and uses IE9. It also has a button to split the tabs into two halves of the screen without having to enable that irritating 'snap to' feature. I had to go back to 8 because for some reason on my system everything required two clicks. Auto-scroll took two middle clicks, moving over a link would not initially change the cursor to a hand, instead a click was required, then a hand, then click the link. Getting a menu to drop was the same; it seemed that the first click was moving the focus to the menu, then the second would drop it. Whether that is a "feature" or an issue with my hardware I don't know, but I'm going to wait for the next version and try again.
Anonymous
October 17, 2010
IE9's UI is by far the best among all browsers. I love the combined Address-bar and tab bar. For those who are complaining about the issue when 6+ tabs are open, should realize that it's never a good idea to have 20 tabs open in the same browser window. Instead I use the "Pin to taskbar" feature to pin individual websites like Facebook, Neowin, Twitter and Hotmail and keep 4-5 related tabs open in each window. That's so much more productive. And I love the empty space over the navigation bar. It allows me to drag a maximized window to take advantage of the incredibly useful Aero Snap feature of Windows 7, something which simply can't be done with Google Chrome as there's no empty space to drag a maximized window. I also love the way the tab-tearing feature integrates with Aero Snap. All in all, keep up the good work. IE9 has been and will continue to be my default browser because of its speed and superior UI.
Anonymous
October 17, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 17, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 17, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 17, 2010
widescreen ^
Anonymous
October 18, 2010
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 19, 2010
Actually, with Opera 11 coming with add-ons (including many ported from Firefox and Chrome) I'll be able to say goodbye to IE once and for all. For me, if this IE9 product team attitude continues, it's a shame, but I have to say it, all the good work done under the hood will be ruined by the stubborness concerning the UI aspects. Currently this UI looks like an amateurishly thrown tab bar over some platform preview build, with a small address bar which is insecure by not letting the user see the entire URL. You guys on the IE product team decided to stop listening to the users again. You won't give the UI flexiblity (options to have a separate tab row, not necessarily by default, but still), disabling by design add-ons in pinned sites, and so much more, making sites dragged on desktop or any folder pinned sites instead of simple url files. Oh, about those URL files. Not even now you didn't solve the .url file properties meta tab, which won't allow us to tag and rate our favorites, which would make them indexable and searchable in Vista and Windows 7. I think IE team is terribly wrong and won't listen to the users, which is a terrible damage to the good image Microsoft achieved while building Windows 7. Leave the UI defaulted to your own way but give us the opportunity to tweak it to our own taste. It isn't so hard, really, guys, come on ! Just add some options and you'll make users happy. And one more thing, a question actually : when will you release the next beta version ? The way IE looks and the way IE team and Microsoft treats geek requests is an involution and not an evolution in user experience, IMHO.
Anonymous
October 19, 2010
Actually, with Opera 11 coming with add-ons (including many ported from Firefox and Chrome) I'll be able to say goodbye to IE once and for all. For me, if this IE9 product team attitude continues, it's a shame, but I have to say it, all the good work done under the hood will be ruined by the stubborness concerning the UI aspects. Currently this UI looks like an amateurishly thrown tab bar over some platform preview build, with a small address bar which is insecure by not letting the user see the entire URL. You guys on the IE product team decided to stop listening to the users again. You won't give the UI flexiblity (options to have a separate tab row, not necessarily by default, but still), disabling by design add-ons in pinned sites, and so much more, making sites dragged on desktop or any folder pinned sites instead of simple url files. Oh, about those URL files. Not even now you didn't solve the .url file properties meta tab, which won't allow us to tag and rate our favorites, which would make them indexable and searchable in Vista and Windows 7. I think IE team is terribly wrong and won't listen to the users, which is a terrible damage to the good image Microsoft achieved while building Windows 7. Leave the UI defaulted to your own way but give us the opportunity to tweak it to our own taste. It isn't so hard, really, guys, come on ! Just add some options and you'll make users happy. And one more thing, a question actually : when will you release the next beta version ? The way IE looks and the way IE team and Microsoft treats geek requests is an involution and not an evolution in user experience, IMHO.
Anonymous
October 19, 2010
www.askvg.com/download-mozilla-firefox-latest-beta-version - this is a very good example of how Mozilla is listening to user feedback, leaving telemetry science away. Maybe this will ring a bell in IE9 headquarters. Really, folks, it's embarrasing.

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