One of these things is not like the other…
Well, okay, two of these things.
Once I upgraded to Windows 7 I noticed that the taskbar grouping varies wildly depending on the browser you’re using. Firefox 3.5.x, Chrome 3.0.x, Safari 4.0.x and IE 8.0.x all have differing levels of support for the Win7 taskbar.
In the screenshot above, all 4 of those browsers have 1 window with 2 tabs open, yet IE and Safari show grouping whereas Firefox and Chrome do not. What’s going on?
For a limited number of available preview items (dependent on screen resolution), IE & Safari will show you an Aero-Peek view of all available windows and tabs. If you have 2 windows open and 3 tabs on each, it will show you 6 items. Chrome & Firefox on the other hand will show you 2, the number of windows you have open.
It looks as though FF & Chrome aren’t far behind though, as this will be in Firefox 3.6 (already in the nightlies and RCs) and a future version of Chrome (the bug for this is already fixed).
Frankly, I’m not sure how I feel about it. As someone who currently has open 15 tabs in Firefox, I don’t know if I really want all of my tabs listed in Aero-Peek. There is discussion of this on the chromium bug tracker too.
Ninkendo:
Am I the only one who *hates* having multiple tabs show up in the mouseover preview? I separate my windows into tabs for a reason: my tabs within a window are from one session (or category), and I like to be able to drill down by picking the right window first, and then the right tab within a window. With the mouseover preview all I see are a giant sea of tabs, and I have to spend a lot of thought thinking “ok, which tab is the one I wanted?” As a result, there’s actually *no* way in the windows 7 taskbar to find the IE8 window you want. You have to know even more specific information to get the right window: you have to know the tab too.
RCDailey:
What happens if you have 2 chrome windows open, each with a set of tabs? I guess it
doesn’t care? I suppose from the preview you can’t tell what window the tabs belong to.
Machee:
Honestly, I usually only have one Chrome window open, so I hadn’t considered the sea
of tabs that could come from having multiple open. That just means this feature
needs a few options:1. Always show all tabs from all windows. (Like IE)
2. Always show only the current tab from each window. (Current functionality.)
3. Only show tabs when there is only one window open.
Once the new release of FF goes official, I’ll see how I like this. I have a feeling though that it’s going to annoy the crap out of me.