digg

Join DiggAbout

Discover the best of the web!
Learn more about Digg by taking the tour.

Web Analytics: The Results of Tabbed Browsing

clickz.com — Depending on your audience, the following issues could arise and should be considered when analyzing site performance and visitor behaviors: Cookies, Pathing, Web browsing behaviors, Time on site, and Paid search.

Bury
show profanity settings
expand all
  • cody50, on 10/12/2007, -2/+65You don't really realize how much you love tabbed browsing till you go use a public terminal at a library and are stuck with their crappy browser.
  • hansamurai, on 10/12/2007, -13/+3That was basically a list of things that people could have potentially done for years with IE or Netscape, but now that he's discovered Firefox, he's "realized" tab's potential and pitfalls. No digg.
  • Rice, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1Urr... AOL.
  • RemKou, on 10/12/2007, -11/+1Shows us once again that the number of 'hits' in a counter doenst mean a thing!
    • captainpete, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I'm pretty sure there's no mention of counter hits in the article.
  • MattS, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Dugg, but a basic article nonetheless. Besides, the points raised in the article are issues that people don't want to readily address - they love the perceived increase in traffic!
    • kitejumping, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1sort of a useless article, but ill add to the discussion and point to http://www.phpmyvisites.us/ , it is the best free, and easy to use stats keeper i have ever seen and tracks whats mentioned in the article.
  • inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+37This is something that Digg's developers need to think about. Digg is surprisingly not a very tab-friendly site. I'm not sure of the specifics, but it seems that they track whatever story you last clicked on in a cookie (either server-side or client-side.) The problem is apparent when you come to Digg not logged in and click several stories into their own tabs and then start browsing the comments or stories. If you decide to comment and log in from one story's comments, you end up redirected to the story from the most recently opened tab instead of the story you logged in for. I looks like whatever cookie is holding that info sends you there without realizing that you're logging in from a story clicked on earlier. Very annoying. Digg's developers should assume the presence of tabs and should not assume that the most recently opened story is the one you're logging in from.
    • mojo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17I've experienced the same thing and totally agree. I use FF's live bookmarks and the other day I opened about 15 stories at once from the Digg feed. After looking at them I wanted to comment on a bunch, but wasn't logged in. I just ended up having to log in on every story I wanted to comment on.
    • pcheaven2k, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9I have had that problem numerous times, but I believe it to be fixed now. I opened about 6 tabs here yesterday then logged into one of them (second from last) and it brought be back to the correct article, additionally a quick F5 on the other tabs logged me in and brought me to the correct story on every tab.
    • FreeiPodGuy.com, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Ha! I tried to digg your comment, and ironically suffered the very same phenomenon you described. I had two other digg tabs which I opened after this story, and it was a pain in the butt to get back here.
    • inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1> I tried to digg your comment, and ironically suffered
      > the very same phenomenon you described

      Right. You encounter this glitch from any situation where you try to log in from a page that differs from the last story you clicked on. Digg's devs really ought to reconfigure how the login screen passes info around while you're logging in instead of relying on a value in a cookie somewhere. It's puzzling because there are lots of reasons why that's a bad design decision beyond not assuming the presence of tabs. I'm not trying to criticize too harshly because I'm sure Digg is a complicated site, but it does cause a lot of problems and I hope it gets addressed sometime in the future.
  • Xalorous, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Work computer in a locked down environment leaves me using IE6. I miss ctrl+click to open in a new tab most.
    • beset, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0A click of the middle mouse button (wheel) is far easier to open a tab than ctrl+click, I get all confused when I use mice without wheels.
  • chevybythesea, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I work from a locked down computer as well, but use portable FF on a thumbdrive as an alternate. Otherwise, I would be ready to scream about now!
  • tunac, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2using IE is sadistic compared to using Firefox
    • jinexile, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I think you mean masochistic... other people using IE causes me absolutly no pain.
    • achmein, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0But, it hurts those that have to develop websites!
  • akinas, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2From the article:
    Tabbed browsing allows people to open more than one window within a browser and easily bounce back and forth.

    People used to have bunch of windows open, now they have bunch of tabs open. No big difference in terms of user behavior.
    • eternalistic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Users can navigate a lot more sites easier in tabs than using separate windows. A lot of open windows can get confusing when referencing each site back adn forth. Especially when you have Photoshop, Flash, and Outlook open when browsing the web.

      I absolutely love tabbed browsing and know for a fact it has improved my user experience with the web. Its much more controlled and I like to keep as many things off of my taskbar as possible, so its nice to have all these open websites contained in one task on the taskbar.
    • kevinmotel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9that's not true at all. what's easier to manage, 25 tabs or 25 windows?
    • eternalistic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I guess I was speaking from personal experience. I can see how windows would be easier to manage for some people, but for me I prefer tabs. It all comes down to preference.
    • akinas, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It makes it easier for you to navigate many windows, but does not change the way sites are perceiving your behavior.
      I love tabbed browsing as much as the next guy. From the technical point of view this article makes no sense.
    • frukt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3There's a *huge* difference between tabs and windows regarding ease of use! First of all, it creates a hierarchical desktop - e.g. you have one window for a browser, one for a terminal emulator (easy to switch between with alt+tab, no clutter); within those a number of tabs for different sites / connections. Tabbed browsing in FF specifically can be greatly improved over standard settings (using extensions like TBE in FF1.x, many of those features should be 'native' in FF2.0) - you can rearrange (move) tabs, assign mouse events to tabs (e.g. doubleclick to close a tab, middle-click on tabbar to undo closing last tab), use tab groups, etc. For me, tabs have definitely taken the whole browsing experience to the next generation.
    • LKBM, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Though tabs are certainly more convenient than multiple windows, akinas has a point. The author seems to think you couldn't do multiple things at once without tabs except by 'using different browsers'.

      I, for one, don't see how multiple tabs change cookie behavior v. multiple windows. Yes, more people are doing multiple tabs and more of them than they did multiple windows, but he seems to be saying that cookies are treated differently. Two browser windows will share the same cookie file exactly the same way two tabs will.
  • valour, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2I'm really tired of seeing articles that say obvious, well-known things, hosted by "marketing" sites that specialize in search engine placement and other nefarious things. Digg seriously needs a spam filter.
    • penbeatssword, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Isn't the whole concept of Digg supposed to create a built-in spam filter? If no one cared about an article, it wouldn't get dugg. As I write this, about 350 people have decided they care enough about it to digg it. You're entitled to your opinion, but judging by the fact that this story was dugg by several people, while your comment was dugg down, you seem to be in the minority here.
  • omniwired, on 10/12/2007, -13/+6Just remember who "invented" tabbed browsing it wasnt FF it was Opera.
    Opera was the first place I saw it.
    ..
    Ok. Digg me down, FF fans.
    • stygiansonic, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12No one has claimed that FF "invented" tabs, so why the need to point this out and turn it into a "fanboy" topic?
    • frukt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7What's the difference, really? I strongly prefer FF over any other browser, but if Opera developers came up with the concept of tabbed browsing, all respect to them.
    • foopolate, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Oh yes, because if you saw it first that's obviously where it was first pioneered. You're just as misinformed as those who say Firefox invented tabs. BookLink's InternetWorks was the first in 1994-ish. Opera didn't even utilize MDI until '96.
    • inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3stygiansonic, I agree wholeheartedly to the point where I'm willing to risk being dugg down by posting a "me too" like this.

      It gets tiresome that people can't just discuss these things without having to poke and prod everyone else with the superiority of their own preferences. I have some pretty strong preferences as far as my computing goes, but I never use it to start argument or rile people up. I don't get what motivates that kind of thing.
    • Izzie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My 2 cents on this: I thought netcaptor was the browser that first implemented tabs, back in '97 or '98
    • motionblur, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The first instance of tabs I can immediately think of was in the form of sheets in Excel. Did Opera get the tabbing idea from there or elsewhere?
  • ChristianD, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2Every time someone credits Firefox with tabbed browsing, it really burn my britches, because before there even was a Firefox, Opera had tabbed browsing. I have no desire to turn this into a FF vs Opera thread, but I still haven't found one original idea in anything I've seen from Firefox. And yes, I like firefox, but realize it's just a conglomerate of other peoples ideas.
    • Luuvitonen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Dude. The reply button is there for a reason. kthxbye.
    • duality, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2ChristianD, I think that's the whole point of Firefox. It's distilled from the best ideas that the most experienced users came up with. I personally see it as "Invented in Opera, made in Firefox."

      Many ideas work like that. I'm sure you've heard of Sudoku? Everybody thinks it comes from Japan, but it was really invented in the U.S. and originally called "Number Place". It didn't become popular in the U.S. until it actually left the U.S. and came back from Japan. In the same way, as silly as it sounds, Firefox is the Japan of web browser features. (Go ahead. Laugh at that statement. You know you want to.)
    • drbhoneydew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Rather than getting into the "who invented what first" argument, I would suggest that it was Opera that introduced the concept into a wider domain that then served as an inspiration to other implementations (see Windows invented by Xerox, not Apple).

      However I'm busy laughing at duality's Firefox is Japan statement (as it happens, I did want to) - where is Firefox up to? the 1950's/60's? controlled by American aid post being nuked and just starting to copy and undercut their industry - particularly ironic considering Netscape lost the browser wars. I was initially thinking of IE as America, but realised that the analogy fails when one considers that America's isolationist period was before the war. Mind you it is still pretty strong - run by vastly powerful idiots who can't have been THAT stupid to get into the position they're in & self-serving policies that screw everyone else (Kyoto, HIV prevention in Africa - that would be America rather than IE: perhaps BillG should take on the foreign policy role while GeorgeWB produces a better browser ;-).
  • CitizenKamb, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I use the Maxthon (formerly MyIE2) browser. http://www.maxthon.com/

    IE Shell, etc, etc, I know. That sucks. But with a little vigilance on the user's end it's not going to make a difference.

    The real reason I use it opposed to FF or Opera though is the "Super Drag and Drop" feature. It works like this: Click down on a hyperlink and drag it, then release the mouse button. It opens the link in a new tab, behind your previous one. You can do the same thing to highlighted non-hyper URLs. Or to highlighted text to Google search it. All in a new background tab. This plus mouse gestures makes my browsing so smooth it's ridiculous. In fact, Maxthon has the best tab use I’ve ever seen. Go test it out, I’d be interested to hear how you think it compares to your current browser.

    I’d be interested in an extension for FF or Opera that has this same feature. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
  • tasharanee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've been using Safari for a few years now, and I absolutely love tabbed browsing. It bugs me that our PCs at work still have IE!
  • Kvetch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Am I missing something. This article was really lame and pretty basic junk.
  • kaod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0who dug this. my grandma has been using tabs for 6 months.
  •  

    Login or register to add a comment

    Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.


© Digg Inc. 2008 — Content posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain.
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.