Tab (GUI)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tabs inside Microsoft Windows XP's System Preferences pane.

In graphical user interfaces, a tab is a navigational widget for switching between documents. It is traditionally designed as a text label within a rectangular box with its top borders rounded. Activating a tab (usually by a mouse click) makes its associated document visible and the tab itself usually becomes highlighted to distinguish it from other inactive tabs. Generally, only one tab can be active at a time.

GUI tabs are modeled after traditional card tabs inserted in paper files or card indexes and thus they are often employed to give the user interface a more "natural" look.

1 Usage
- 1.1 Browsers
2 Patent Dispute
3 See Also
4 External Links

[edit] Usage

Tabs in modern GUIs at first became widely used to make option-laden dialog boxes easier to understand and navigate, by grouping similar or related options into one tab pane each. Some applications base their main interaction on tabs, using a tabbed document interface.

[edit] Browsers

In the last few years, tabs have also become quite popular in web browsers, where they are used to switch between different webpages without having to switch top-level windows. Tabs are now supported by all major browsers. With the exception of Opera 4 and up, tabs in these browsers are orthogonal to top-level windows, which means they may be seen as a supplementary rather than competing way of opening numerous browser windows at the same time.

Numerous special functions in association with browser tabs have emerged since then, for example the ability to re-order tabs (e.g. in Internet Explorer 7, Opera, Konqueror, and Firefox, as well as Mozilla with suitable extensions), and to bookmark 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 them all at the same time). Links can most often be opened in several modes, using different user interface options and commands:

in a new main window
in the same main window and tab panel
in the same main window and a new tab panel, which is instantly activated
in the same main window and a new tab panel, which remains in the background until the user switches to it

Optimal Desktop offers the only 3 dimensional tabbed browser that stores your bookmarks (web, rss or files and folders) in tabs (Section Tabs) and organizes the bookmarks in another set of tabs called Drawers. The main difference between Optimal Desktop and other tabbed browsers is that Optimal Desktop was designed to create and manage link structures, so each stored link owns the tab and the organization of tabs is maintained as they are created.

[edit] Patent Dispute

Adobe Systems holds patents in the United States and Europe on tabs in general or certain uses of GUI tabs, which are widely held to be trivial patents. Also, some argue that there are hints for prior art, e.g. in text-mode user interfaces. Adobe has used these patents to sue Macromedia Inc. for employing tabs in its Macromedia Flash product. The case was won by Adobe, earning them $2.8 million of damages; however, a countersuit initiated by Macromedia ended in a $4.9 million ruling at Adobe's expense. The suits were then settled on undisclosed terms.^{[citation needed]}