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Reference
WildThumb: A Web Browser Supporting Efficient Task Management on Wide Displays
Shenwei Liu, Keishi Tajima
IUI'10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China
Summary
This paper talks about the advantages and disadvantages of current web browsers. Liu and Tajima claim that none of the current web browsers provide enough support for managing multiple windows or tabs. Since users are spending more browsing the web, tab-browsers are the predominant web browsers. According to a cited previous work, users who use larger displays tend to open more tabs or windows. The research done by Liu and Tajima is focused specifically in wide displays. The main disadvantages of current web browsers are difficulty in page recognition, inefficient scan of tabs, difficulty selecting tabs using pointing devices, and inefficient page organization. The main difficulty when working with many tabs is that as you increase the number of opened tabs, the size of the tab becomes smaller and the site titles become indistinguishable. When many tabs are opened, it takes a longer time to scan the list to find the desired tab. One of the main disadvantages when using wide displays is that most sites have unused empty side margins. The authors propose a system where this unused space will be replaced by augmented thumbnails to solve the disadvantages mentioned previously. These thumbnails will be shown in the current focused page and will show the most relevant sites visited calculated by an algorithm which infers information from the history.
Discussion
I personally do not own a wide display computer, but my co-worker does and I can say he does open many tabs at once. I always ask him how he can keep up with so many, but he seems to perform well the way he browses the web. I think the augmented thumbnails are a great idea, but I do not know how accurate they could be. If there are two pages from the same site with no image, it would be extremely hard to differentiate.
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