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In interface design, a tab is a
graphical user interface object that allows multiple
documents
A document is a writing, written, drawing, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of nonfiction, non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', w ...
or
panel
Panel may refer to:
Arts and media Visual arts
* Panel (comics), a single image in a comic book, comic strip or cartoon; also, a comic strip containing one such image
*Panel painting, in art, either one element of a multi-element piece of art ...
s to be contained within a single
window
A window is an opening in a wall, door, roof, or vehicle that allows the exchange of light and may also allow the passage of sound and sometimes air. Modern windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent materia ...
, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents. It is an interface style most commonly associated with
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
s,
web application
A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection.
History
In earlier computing models like client-serve ...
s,
text editor
A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be us ...
s, and preference panes, with
window managers
A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction ...
, especially
tiling window managers
In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach (used by stacking window managers) of coordinate-based stacking of overla ...
, being lesser known examples.
Tabs are modeled after traditional card tabs inserted in paper files or card indexes (in keeping with the
desktop metaphor
In computing, the desktop metaphor is an interface metaphor which is a set of unifying concepts used by graphical user interfaces to help users interact more easily with the computer. The desktop metaphor treats the computer monitor as if it is t ...
).
Tabs may appear in a horizontal bar or as a vertical list, of which the former takes typically less screen space whereas the latter can show more items at once while still having space for individual titles. Horizontal tabs may have multiple rows. Tabs may be organizable by changing their order through
drag and drop
In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to i ...
or creating a separate window from an existing tab. Implementations may support
range-selecting multiple tabs for moving, closing, and separating them.
History
The WordVision
DOS
DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems.
DOS may also refer to:
Computing
* Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel
* Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
word processor
for the
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...
in 1982
was perhaps the first commercially available product with a tabbed interface.
''
PC Magazine
''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the present d ...
'' later wrote that it "has served as a free R&D department for the software business—its bones picked over for a decade by programmers looking for so-called new ideas".
Don Hopkins
Don Hopkins is an artist and programmer specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics. He is an alumnus of the University of Maryland, College Park, University of Maryland and a former member of the University of Maryland Huma ...
developed and released several versions of tabbed window frames for the
NeWS
News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...
window system as free software, which the window manager applied to all NeWS applications, and enabled users to drag the tabs around to any edge of the window.
The
NeWS
News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...
version of UniPress's
Gosling Emacs
Gosling Emacs (often shortened to "Gosmacs" or "gmacs") is a discontinued Emacs implementation written in 1981 by James Gosling in C (programming language), C.
Gosling initially allowed Gosling Emacs to be redistributed with no formal restriction ...
text editor was another early product with multiple tabbed windows in 1988. It was used to develop an authoring tool for
Ben Shneiderman
Ben Shneiderman (born August 21, 1947) is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathe ...
's
hypermedia
Hypermedia, an extension of the term hypertext, is a nonlinear medium of information that includes graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks. This designation contrasts with the broader term ''multimedia'', which may include non-interac ...
browser
HyperTIES
The Interactive Encyclopedia System, or TIES, was a hypertext system developed in the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab by Ben Shneiderman in 1983. The earliest versions of TIES ran in DOS text mode, using the cursor arrow key ...
(the NeWS workstation version of The Interactive Encyclopedia System), in 1988 at the
University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...
. HyperTIES also supported
pie menus
In user interface design, a pie menu or radial menu is a circular context menu where selection depends on direction. It is a graphical control element. A pie menu is made of several "pie slices" around an inactive center and works best with stylus ...
for managing windows and browsing hypermedia documents with
PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...
applet
In computing, an applet is any small application that performs one specific task that runs within the scope of a dedicated widget engine or a larger program, often as a plug-in. The term is frequently used to refer to a Java applet, a program w ...
s.
While
Boeing Calc
Boeing Calc was a spreadsheet package written by Boeing Computer Services, an independent subsidiary of aviation manufacturer Boeing. It had originally been developed as an in-house accounting tool, but was launched as a commercial product in Apri ...
already utilized tabbed sheets (as so called ''wordpads'') since at least 1987,
Borland
Borland Software Corporation was a computer technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was the development and sale of software development and software deployment product ...
's
Quattro Pro
Quattro Pro is a spreadsheet program developed by Borland and now sold by Corel, most often as part of Corel's WordPerfect Office suite.
Characteristics
Historically, Quattro Pro used keyboard commands close to those of Lotus 1-2-3. While it ...
popularized tabs for spreadsheets in 1992.
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms includin ...
in 1993 used them to simplify submenus. In 1994,
BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its
InternetWorks browser. That same year, the text editor
UltraEdit
UltraEdit is a commercial text editor for Microsoft Windows, Linux and OS X created in 1994 by the founder of IDM Computer Solutions Inc., Ian D. Mead, and owned by Idera, Inc. since August 2021. The editor contains tools for programmers, includi ...
also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the
Internet Explorer shell
An Internet Explorer shell is any computer program (web browser or otherwise) that uses the Internet Explorer browser engine, known as MSHTML and previously Trident. This engine is closed-source, but Microsoft has exposed an application programmin ...
NetCaptor
NetCaptor was an Internet Explorer shell that was in development from 1997 to 2005. It used the Trident layout engine of Internet Explorer in conjunction with additional programmed features to create an alternate browsing experience with a ...
in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like
IBrowse
IBrowse is a Magic User Interface, MUI-based web browser for the Amiga range of computers, and was a rewritten follow-on to AMosaic, Amiga Mosaic, one of the first web browsers for the Amiga Computer. IBrowse was originally developed for a company ...
in 1999, and
Opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...
in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although a MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on 1 April 2001 (an
extension
Extension, extend or extended may refer to:
Mathematics
Logic or set theory
* Axiom of extensionality
* Extensible cardinal
* Extension (model theory)
* Extension (predicate logic), the set of tuples of values that satisfy the predicate
* E ...
for the
Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite (originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite) is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition b ...
),
Galeon
Galeon is a discontinued Gecko-based web browser that was created by Marco Pesenti Gritti with the goal of delivering a consistent browsing experience to GNOME desktop environment. It gained some popularity in the early 2000s due to its speed, f ...
in early 2001,
Mozilla
Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...
0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and a ...
) in October 2002,
Konqueror
Konqueror is a free and open-source web browser and file manager that provides web access and file-viewer functionality for file systems (such as local files, files on a remote FTP server and files in a disk image). It forms a core part of ...
3.1 in January 2003, and
Safari
A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...
in 2003. With the release of
Internet Explorer 7
Windows Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) (codenamed Rincon) is a web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on October 18, 2006, as the seventh version of Internet Explorer and the successor to Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 7 is par ...
in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
Users have quickly adopted the use of tabs in web browsing and web search. A study of tabbed browsing behavior in June 2009 found that users switched tabs in 57% of tab sessions, and 36% of users used new tabs to open
search engine
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
results at least once during that period.
Numerous special functions in association with browser tabs have emerged since then. One example is visual tabbed browsing in
OmniWeb
OmniWeb is a discontinued web browser that was developed and marketed by The Omni Group exclusively for Apple's macOS operating system. Though a stable version is no longer maintained, it is still available as a free download and unstable versions ...
version 5, which displays preview images of pages in a drawer to the left or right of the main browser window. Another feature is the ability to re-order tabs and to
bookmark
A bookmark is a thin marking tool, commonly made of card, leather, or fabric, used to keep track of a reader's progress in a book and allow the reader to easily return to where the previous reading session ended. Alternate materials for book ...
all of the webpages opened in tab panes in a given window in a group or bookmark folder (as well as the ability to reopen all of them at the same time).
Microsoft Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems (in Wi ...
marks tab families with different colours.
Development
Tab behavior is handled by the
widget toolkit
A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a library or a collection of libraries containing a set of graphical control elements (called ''widgets'') used to construct the graphical user interface (GUI) of programs.
Most widg ...
it is built with (for example Firefox uses
GTK
GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and propriet ...
). Behavior such as whether a tab opens at the end of the list, next to its parent or at the beginning of a list is determined by the
graphical user interface (GUI) toolkit framework. Due to the large diversity of available widget tool kits, tabs may appear to behave unexpectedly to users inexperienced in front end design.
In 2021, researchers published the first in-depth study of Web browser tab
interfaces
Interface or interfacing may refer to:
Academic journals
* Interface (journal), ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society
* ''Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Lin ...
in over a decade. They found that many people struggle with tab overload and conducted surveys and interviews about people's tab use. Thereby they formalized pressures for closing tabs and for keeping tabs open. The authors then developed related
UI design considerations which could enable better tools and changes to the code of Web browsers – like
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
– that allow
knowledge worker
Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "thin ...
s and other users to better manage – and make use of – their browser tabs.
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Available unde
See_also
*_Comparison_of_document_interfaces
_
*_Microsoft_Internet_Explorer_
Internet_Explorer_(formerly_Microsoft_Internet_Explorer_and_Windows_Internet_Explorer,_commonly_abbreviated_IE_or_MSIE)_is_a_series_of_graphical_web_browsers_developed_by_Microsoft_which_was_used_in_the_Windows_line_of_operating_systems_(in_Wi_...
_marks_tab_families_with_different_colours
*_Multiple_document_interface#IDE-style_interface.html" ;"title="Comparison of document interfaces">See also
* Comparison of document interfaces
marks tab families with different colours
* Multiple document interface#IDE-style interface">IDE-style interface
* Ribbon (computing)
deDevelopmentmo of the Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0 (1991).
{{Graphical control elements