Murphy's dashboard

The main feature of Songbird that sets it apart from other music programs is its web browser. Whether using it to find and install addons inside of the program, or playing songs off of music blogs and sites, the web browser offers many new possibilities and is something that most users will make use of. However, I think that using tabs the way they currently are in Songbird can feel pretty confusing and cluttered.

The problem, I think, is that Songbird modeled its tabs off of the way they are currently displayed in web browsers. Firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera, and almost every other browser I have seen all have a thin, horizontal tab bar at the top of the program window. This is primarily done because it takes up less screen space than vertical tabs, and possibly because it is comfortable in most cultures to read across text from left to right, rather than downward in a list. It works pretty well in web browsers considering that bookmarks and websites are the only places you can navigate to in a browser.

Songbird, on the other hand, has many more places one can navigate to. The library, playlists, radio stations, stores, and plugged-in devices are all places that the user needs to be able to navigate to within the program, and that is before even including web features. Because of all of the locations, a vertical service pane is used to list them all clearly. Bookmarks are even listed in this pane as well, rather than in a horizontal bar as they are in web browsers. However, tabs are the only places in Songbird not listed in the service pane.

A horizontal tab bar is created when you open a tab, and this creates two navigational areas: the main service pane, and the tab bar. It can be confusing to have these two navigational areas to switch between, especially when bookmarks are in the vertical plane and tabs in the horizontal. It causes both horizontal and vertical space to be taken up, and it causes the Library tab to be doubled, which looks really confusing.

Aza Raskin, who works on Firefox's interface design, made a blog post talking about how tabs could be listed in a vertical pane in Firefox, and I think this would especially be a perfect solution for Songbird. Tabs would be listed in the service pane just like any other place you can navigate to in the program, there wouldn't be the confusion or clutter of having an additional navigation area, and the Library tab wouldn't get doubled. I also think that it would feel more intuitive to have bookmarks (unopened websites) and tabs (open websites) listed in the same pane. It might even be neat if clicking a bookmark made it slide into the tab area, and upon closing or leaving that page, it would slide back into the bookmark area, preventing unnecessary doubling of content in the service pane. However, there are some negative aspects of both design choices, so I figured I would make a pros and cons list so that people could weigh the choices.

Current method - horizontal tab bar



Pros:
- Tabs are displayed the same way in current web browsers, so users have more experience with the model
- The user can hide the main service pane while browsing for more horizontal space in web pages

Cons:
- Creates two separate navigational areas in the program; the service pane, and the tab bar
- The user ends up having two Library tabs, so they can still access the library from the tab bar if the service pane is hidden while browsing
- Takes up vertical space and adds clutter to the top of the window

New method - tabs in the service pane



Pros:
- Tabs are listed in the service pane just like all of the other areas of the program that you can access
- Tabs no longer create a second navigational pane
- There are no longer two tabs for accessing the Library
- Bookmarked websites are already listed in the service pane, so it would keep consistency to have open websites listed there as well
- Saves/declutters vertical screen space

Cons:
- Users could not hide the service pane while browsing, because if they did they would not be able to access tabs
- Tabs would no longer be displayed as they currently are in web browsers, and might be harder for people to use
- Takes up more space in the service pane

What does everyone think? Do you think it would be more convenient to use this new system for displaying tabs, or is the traditional way better? It might be hard to tell which way you would like better without actually testing it out, but try to imagine what it would be like to click on tabs in the service pane. I think it would be an improvement.