<Glazblog/>

Comments

1. On Tuesday 21 March 2006, 01:34 by marcoos

Looks nice.

Is this an extension or a patch?

2. On Tuesday 21 March 2006, 02:58 by glandium

MDI is one of the worst thing that exists

3. On Tuesday 21 March 2006, 03:07 by Daniel Glazman

glandium : give me a break...

4. On Tuesday 21 March 2006, 04:24 by jhermans

Nice trick, it really shows the power of Gecko (is it XULrunner ?).

But I also consider MDI one of the worst GUI abominations of all time. Mostly because common users could never figure out how to deal with multiple windows. Rearranging them for the best viewing solution, or iconifying unused windows is already too much for them.

However, zillions of Windooze users have been using for a decade, so there's a market for an extension.

5. On Tuesday 21 March 2006, 22:40 by TychoQuad

I'll have to agree with Glandium, even if he was rather... to the point.

The thing that annoys me most about MDI, is that application windows become contained in other windows, and even though they look like normal windows, they don't act like them. Minimizing an MDI window doesn't send it to the taskbar like one expects from normal windows, it shrinks it down to a titlebar with window controls. Makes sense if your used to using Windows 3.11, but not otherwise. Some applications are nice enough to give you a taskbar within the container window, so modern people can at least partially understand what has happened. Also, maximizing a window inside a container. Where the hell did the titlebar go? How do I restore it back to how it was? Resizing the container also causes your window management to go to hell. All of a sudden, many windows are either missing, (outside the container display) or totally rearranged because they had to be kept within the boundry.

Another very important fact that MDI developers always forget (I've never seen a counter-example) is that they always leave the occasional dialog out of their MDI system furthur confusing their users. Why should Options dialogs and such be excluded? Why can I drag this window out, while these ones stay in?

I can only see one purpose for MDI in a browser, and that is to handle size restricted windows in a tab enviroment. This would allow javascript windows to be in a tab, but not stretched to fit the browser window. It wouldn't technically be MDI anyway, as there would only be 1 of them, switching tab would hide it and bring up the next just like one would expect from tab switching behaviour.

6. On Wednesday 22 March 2006, 07:34 by Jared McAteer

I don't like MDI, it's not an elegant solution, but I do see it as a necessary evil in some circumstances. There are times I want to be able to view three or more tabs at one time, sometimes to be able to copy sections of text over to the other window easily, comparing two sites (or the same one with IE tab handling one view) or simply for multi-tasking.

I can see this as a very useful extension for me.

7. On Wednesday 22 March 2006, 08:32 by glandium

Jared: what you are looking for is not MDI, but frames.
TychoQuad: for the javascript window, you actually don't need it to be a MDI-like window. It just should be possible to limit the viewport size in the tab without modifying the window size.

8. On Wednesday 22 March 2006, 08:35 by glandium

TychoQuad: BTW, what you describe is what I hate the most with the "popup catcher"... having my firefox window becoming over-tiny (the most annoying case I got is with a wysiwyg text editor that pops-up a color selector that is very very small, resizing the whole browser... to this tiny size)

9. On Thursday 23 March 2006, 07:24 by Laurens Holst

My work has a demo showing an entire windows interface (of some kind) inside the browser :): www.backbase.com/demos/wi...

One problem however is that there are some sites which want to ensure that they are in the top frame, and do window.top.location.href = location.href (or something), which kind of breaks the MDI. Can’t really think of a way to avoid that.


~Grauw

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