In the area of graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

s (GUI), a tabbed document interface (TDI) is one that allows multiple documents to be contained within a single window

Window (computing)

In computing, a window is a visual area containing some kind of user interface. It usually has a rectangular shape that can overlap with the area of other windows...

, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents. It is an interface style most commonly associated with web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

s, web application

Web application

A web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.Web applications are...

s, text editor

Text editor

A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code....

s, and preference panes.

GUI tabs are modeled after traditional card tabs inserted in paper files or card indexes (in keeping with the desktop metaphor

Desktop metaphor

The desktop metaphor is an interface metaphor which is a set of unifying concepts used by graphical user interfaces to help users more easily interact with the computer. The desktop metaphor treats the monitor of a computer as if it is the user's desktop, upon which objects such as documents and...

).

The name TDI implies similarity to the Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 standards for multiple document interface

Multiple document interface

Graphical computer applications with a multiple document interface are those whose windows reside under a single parent window , as opposed to all windows being separate from each other . Such systems often allow child windows to embed other windows inside them as well, creating complex nested...

s (MDI) and single document interface

Single document interface

In graphical user interfaces, a single document interface or SDI is a method of organizing graphical user interface applications into individual windows that the operating system's window manager handles separately. Each window contains its own menu or tool bar, and does not have a "background"...

s (SDI), but TDI does not form part of the Microsoft Windows User Interface Guidelines.

History

The NeWS

NeWS

NeWS was a windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1980s. Originally known as "SunDew", its primary authors were James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal...

 version of UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor was the first commercially available product to pioneer the use of multiple tabbed windows in 1988. It was used to develop an authoring tool for the Ben Shneiderman

Ben Shneiderman

Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, and professor for Computer Science at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park...

's HyperTIES browser (the NeWS workstation version of The Interactive Encyclopedia System), in 1988. HyperTIES also supported pie menus for managing windows and browsing hypermedia documents with PostScript

PostScript

PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

 applet

Applet

In computing, an applet is any small application that performs one specific task that runs within the scope of a larger program, often as a plug-in. An applet typically also refers to Java applets, i.e., programs written in the Java programming language that are included in a web page...

s. Don Hopkins

Don Hopkins

Don Hopkins is an artist and programmer specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics.He inspired Richard Stallman, who described him as a "very imaginative fellow", to use the term copyleft. He coined Deep Crack as the name of the EFF DES cracker, and built "AJAXian"...

 developed and released several versions of tabbed window frames for the NeWS

NeWS

NeWS was a windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1980s. Originally known as "SunDew", its primary authors were James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal...

 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.

HyperTIES was a "hypermedia

Hypermedia

Hypermedia is a computer-based information retrieval system that enables a user to gain or provide access to texts, audio and video recordings, photographs and computer graphics related to a particular subject.Hypermedia is a term created by Ted Nelson....

" browser, a term first used by Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson

Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...

 in 1965. The first "web" browser came out later in 1990, and the term "World Wide Web" was not invented until 1990.

Four years later, in 1994, BookLink Technologies

BookLink

BookLink is a United States based web browser company founded by David Wetherell in February 1994 as a subsidiary of CMG Information Services. In September 1994, Microsoft, wanting BookLink's browser technology for Windows 95 and the Microsoft Network, offered Wetherell a one-time, flat fee of...

 featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser. That same year, a text editor called UltraEdit

UltraEdit

UltraEdit is a commercial text editor for Microsoft Windows, Linux and created in 1994 by Ian D. Mead. The editor contains tools for programmers, including macros, configurable syntax highlighting, code folding, file type conversions, project management, regular expressions for search-and-replace,...

 also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell

Internet Explorer shell

An Internet Explorer shell is any computer software that uses the Trident rendering engine of the Internet Explorer web browser. Although the term "Trident shell" is probably more accurate for describing these applications , the term "Internet Explorer shell", or "IE shell", is in common parlance...

 NetCaptor

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 tab-based interface and an expanded feature set...

 in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse

IBrowse

IBrowse is an MUI-based web browser for the Amiga range of computers, and was a rewritten follow-on to Amiga Mosaic, one of the first web browsers for the Amiga Computer. IBrowse was originally developed for a company called Omnipresence, now defunct...

 in 1999, and Opera

Opera (web browser)

Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...

 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 for the Mozilla Application Suite

Mozilla Application Suite

The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...

), Galeon

Galeon

Galeon is a web browser for GNOME based on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine. Galeon’s self-declared mission was to deliver the web and only the web. Galeon was discontinued in September 2008....

 in early 2001, Mozilla

Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...

 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.3 (now Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...

) in October 2002, Konqueror

Konqueror

Not to be confused with the Conqueror web browser.Konqueror is a web browser and file manager that provides file-viewer functionality for file systems such as local files, files on a remote ftp server and files in a disk image. It is a core part of the KDE desktop environment...

 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari

Safari (web browser)

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...

 in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7

Internet Explorer 7

Windows Internet Explorer 7 is a web browser released by Microsoft in October 2006. Internet Explorer 7 is part of a long line of versions of Internet Explorer and was the first major update to the browser in more than 5 years...

 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface. Avant Browser

Avant Browser

Avant Browser is a freeware web browser from a Chinese programmer named Anderson Che, which unites the Trident layout engine built into Windows with an interface intended to be more feature-rich, flexible and ergonomic than Microsoft's Internet Explorer . It runs on Windows 2000 and above,...

, Enigma Browser

Enigma Browser

The Enigma Browser was previously a shareware Internet Explorer shell but is now freeware. It uses Internet Explorer's Trident layout engine. It was made for Windows XP,2000,ME,98.It presently incorporates many features including:*Popup Killer...

, and Maxthon

Maxthon

Maxthon is a free web browser for Microsoft Windows. The latest release, Maxthon 3, supports both the Trident and the WebKit rendering engines....

 are some of the most popular tabbed browsers using Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

's layout engine

Layout engine

A web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...

 Trident

Trident (layout engine)

Trident is the name of the layout engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer.It was first introduced with the release of Internet Explorer version 4.0 in October 1997; it has been steadily upgraded and remains in use today...

.

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 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

OmniWeb is a proprietary Internet web browser developed and marketed by The Omni Group. It is available exclusively for Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system...

 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 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). 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.

There are minor usability issues such as whether a new tab opens in the end of the tab list or next to its "parent". For example Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

 marks tab families with different colours.

Compliance to Microsoft User Interface Guidelines

There is some debate about how the TDI fits in with the Microsoft Windows User Interface Guidelines. In many ways the Workbook window management model most closely resembles TDI. However this is a relatively recent addition to the Windows User Interface Guidelines, and most developers still prefer to view SDI

Single document interface

In graphical user interfaces, a single document interface or SDI is a method of organizing graphical user interface applications into individual windows that the operating system's window manager handles separately. Each window contains its own menu or tool bar, and does not have a "background"...

 or MDI

Multiple document interface

Graphical computer applications with a multiple document interface are those whose windows reside under a single parent window , as opposed to all windows being separate from each other . Such systems often allow child windows to embed other windows inside them as well, creating complex nested...

 as the primary document models for Windows.

Advantages

Because the tabbed document interface holds many different documents logically under one window, it keeps the primary operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 interface free of the clutter that would be created by a large number of small child windows. Another advantage is that sets of related documents can be grouped within each of several windows. Tabbed web browsers often allow users to save their browsing session and return to it later.

Disadvantages

Although the tabbed document interface does allow for multiple views under one window, there are problems with this interface. One such problem is dealing with many tabs at once. When a window is tabbed to a certain number that exceeds the available area of the monitor, the tabs clutter up (this is the same problem as with SDI but moved to another place in the user interface).

Multi-row tabs are a second issue that will appear in menu dialogs in some programs. Dealing with multiple rows of tabs in one window has two disadvantages:

• It creates excess window clutter
• It complicates what should be an easy-to-read dialog

Finding a specific tab in a 3 or 4 level tabular interface can be difficult for some people. Part of the issue with this difficulty lies in the lack of any sorting scheme. Tabs can be strewn about without any sense of order, thus looking for a tab provides no meaningful understanding of a position to a tab relative to other tabs. Additionally, the clutter created by multiple tabs can create a dialog that is unusually small, with the tabs above it dominating the window.

Thus, although tabbed windows are adequate in environments where there is a minimal necessity for tabs (around ten tabs or less), this scheme does not scale, and alternate methods may be required to address this issue.

Among the methods for addressing scalability of many tabs:

• reduce the width of individual tabs, so that more can fit within the available area
• introduce scrolling
  Scrolling
  In computer graphics, filmmaking, television production, and other kinetic displays, scrolling is sliding text, images or video across a monitor or display. "Scrolling", as such, does not change the layout of the text or pictures, or but incrementally moves the user's view across what is...
  
   to enable tabs to occupy a non-visible region of the screen
• introduce sections through any of various means, to spread tabs out to multiple areas
• introduce real-time zooming
  Page zooming
  In computing, page zooming is the ability to zoom in and out a document or image at page level. It is usually found in applications related to document layout and publishing, e.g...
  
   of a tab, based on the position of the mouse cursor
• discard tabs in favor of another interface element such as a listbox or drop-down list
  Drop-down list
  In computing with graphical user interfaces, a drop-down list is a user interface control GUI element , similar to a list box, which allows the user to choose one value from a list. When a drop-down list is inactive, it displays a single value. When activated, it displays a list of values, from...
  
  

Large numbers of tabbed windows scale better with the tabs along the left or right edges of the window, instead of the top or bottom edges. That is because tab labels are usually much wider than they are tall, and because it is now common to use displays which are considerably wider than needed for displaying documents and web pages. The NeWS

NeWS

NeWS was a windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1980s. Originally known as "SunDew", its primary authors were James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal...

 version of the UniPress Emacs text editor placed tabs along the right window edge, and laid windows out in a vertical column, so each tab was initially visible, and the user could use them to raise and lower the windows, drag them around in the column, or pull them out to anywhere on the screen.
Better yet, tabbed window interfaces can give the user the freedom to position the tabs along any edge, so all four edges are available to organize different groups of tabs as the user or application sees fit.
The PSIBER visual PostScript programming environment for NeWS had tabbed views that you could stick onto the stack (represented as a "spike"), and you could move the tabs to any edge. The NeWS pie menu and tab window manager enabled users to position the tabs anywhere along any edge, and the tabs popped up pie menus with window management functions, to uncover and bury windows, etc.

Advantages

For people used to SDI, MDI can be confusing as windows can be hidden behind other windows. Some MDI applications lack a taskbar or menu to allow quick access to all windows, so for these applications in some cases a window can only be found by closing or moving all others. Practically, however, most MDI environments provide for much richer window-switching functionality than SDI-oriented environments. On the other hand, since in TDI applications most tabs are visible and directly accessible, it is much harder for windows to get "lost". Some MDI applications such as Opera and Eudora

Eudora (e-mail client)

Eudora is an e-mail client used on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also supports several palmtop computing platforms, including Newton and the Palm OS....

 also have this advantage, by having tabs to access the windows.

Disadvantages

TDI windows must always be maximized inside their parent window, and as a result two tabs cannot be visible at the same time. This makes comparing of documents or easy copy-and-pasting between two documents more difficult. Full MDI interfaces allow for tiling or cascading of child windows, and do not suffer from these limitations.

One example of an application that allows either TDI or MDI browsing is Opera

Opera (web browser)

Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...

. Using TDI by default, this application also supports full MDI and can also run as an SDI application.

In order to mitigate these problems, some integrated development environments, such as recent versions of XEmacs

XEmacs

XEmacs is a graphical- and console-based text editor which runs on almost any Unix-like operating system as well as Microsoft Windows. XEmacs is a fork, based on a version of GNU Emacs from the late 1980s...

 and Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's Visual Studio, provide a hybrid interface

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 which allows splitting the parent window into multiple MDI-like "panes," each with their own separate TDI tab set. Tiling window manager

Tiling window manager

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 popular approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor.-Xerox PARC:Although the...

s such as Ion do the same for the entire desktop

Desktop metaphor

The desktop metaphor is an interface metaphor which is a set of unifying concepts used by graphical user interfaces to help users more easily interact with the computer. The desktop metaphor treats the monitor of a computer as if it is the user's desktop, upon which objects such as documents and...

. This provides many of the advantages of both MDI and TDI, although it can still be difficult for users to get used to. The Konqueror

Konqueror

Not to be confused with the Conqueror web browser.Konqueror is a web browser and file manager that provides file-viewer functionality for file systems such as local files, files on a remote ftp server and files in a disk image. It is a core part of the KDE desktop environment...

 browser (available for the K Desktop Environment on Unix and Unix work-alikes, such as Linux) supports multiple documents within one tab by splitting documents. In a Konqueror tab, documents can be split horizontally or vertically, and each split document can be re-split.

Another strategy for dealing with the limitation that only one tabbed document would ordinarily be visible at one time is to allow a tab to be dragged outside the parent window and converted to a separate window (which can itself have multiple tabs). This is supported in the Google Chrome

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...

, Mozilla Firefox 3.5

Mozilla Firefox 3.5

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is a version of the Firefox web browser released in June 2009, adding a variety of new features to Firefox. Version 3.5 was touted as being twice as fast as 3.0...

, and Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9

Windows Internet Explorer 9 is the current version of the Internet Explorer web browser from Microsoft. It was released to the public on March 14, 2011 at 21:00 PDT. Internet Explorer 9 supports several CSS 3 properties, embedded ICC v2 or v4 color profiles support via Windows Color System, and...

 web browsers, for example.

Window managers that provide a tabbed document interface

The following window manager

Window manager

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...

s provide a tabbed document interface:

• PWM
• Fluxbox
  Fluxbox
  Fluxbox is a stacking window manager for the X Window System, which started as a fork of Blackbox 0.61.1, with the same aim to be lightweight. Its user interface has only a taskbar, a pop-up menu accessible by right-clicking on the desktop, and minimal support for graphical icons...
  
  
• KWin
  KWin
  KWin is a window manager for the X Window System. It is an integral part of the KDE Software Compilation, although it can be used on its own or with other desktop environments.- History :- Look and feel :...
  
   - KDE SC's default window manager, since KDE 4.4
• Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0 (1991)
• PekWM

Using Tab in Microsoft Office applications

Office Tab enables tabbed document interface (TDI) of Microsoft Office applications.

Patent dispute

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

 holds patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

s in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 on certain uses of GUI tabs, which are widely held to be trivial patent

Inventive step and non-obviousness

The inventive step and non-obviousness reflect a same general patentability requirement present in most patent laws, according to which an invention should be sufficiently inventive — i.e., non-obvious — in order to be patented....

s. There was prior art

Prior art

Prior art , in most systems of patent law, constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality...

, in both GUI and text user interface

Text user interface

TUI short for: Text User Interface or Textual User Interface , is a retronym that was coined sometime after the invention of graphical user interfaces, to distinguish them from text-based user interfaces...

s (TUI).

Adobe used these patents to sue Macromedia

Macromedia

Macromedia was an American graphics and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California that produced such products as Flash and Dreamweaver. Its rival, Adobe Systems, acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005 and controls the line of Macromedia...

 Inc. for employing tabs in its Macromedia Flash product. Adobe won the case and $2.8 million in damages. However, Macromedia initiated a countersuit

Lawsuit

A lawsuit or "suit in law" is a civil action brought in a court of law in which a plaintiff, a party who claims to have incurred loss as a result of a defendant's actions, demands a legal or equitable remedy. The defendant is required to respond to the plaintiff's complaint...

 which ended in a $4.9 million ruling against Adobe. The suits were settled on undisclosed terms. In 2005, Adobe ended further dispute between the two companies when it bought Macromedia for roughly $3.4 billion.

On April 18, 2007, the intellectual property agency IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc. regarding its infringement upon a US Patent originally filed by Xerox

Xerox

Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...

 researchers in 1987.

See also

• Comparison of document interfaces
• IDE-style interface
• Ribbon (computing)
  Ribbon (computing)
  In GUI-based application software, a ribbon is an interface where a set of toolbars are placed on tabs in a tab bar. Recent releases of some Microsoft applications have embraced this form with a modular ribbon as their main interface. The Ribbon is a contextual interface that offers functionality...
  
  

External links

• Navigation and Module tabs at the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.
• Yahoo! UI Library TabView
• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit
• Scriptaculous AJAX tabs
• Tab Window Demo demo of the Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0 (1991).