In graphical user interfaces, a tab is a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents. Having tabs allows an application to have multiple documents in a single window. They are commonly used in web browsers, text editors and preference windows.

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

An example of tabs in gedit

[edit] Usage

Tabs in modern GUIs were introduced by IBM Common User Access.^{[citation needed]} They became widely used to make option-laden dialog boxes easier to understand and navigate. They were designed to group similar or related options into one tab pane. Later, some applications based their main document switching mechanism on tabs, using a tabbed document interface.

[edit] Browsers

Tabs became very popular in web browsers, where they are used to switch between different webpages without having to switch top-level windows. NetCaptor introduced the tabbed browsing interface as we know it today in 1997. It was followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, Opera 4.0 in June 2000^[1], MultiZilla in April 2001^[2] (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite), Mozilla 0.3 (codenamed Lucia) in October 2002^[3], Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.

An example of Mozilla Firefox (version 3.5) with three tabs open. Each tab shows a different webpage, thus saving screen space by getting rid of multiple windows.

Numerous special functions in association with browser tabs have emerged since then. An example 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 marks tab families with different colours.

[edit] Patent dispute

Adobe Systems holds patents in the United States and Europe on certain uses of GUI tabs^[4], which are widely held to be trivial patents. Some argue that there was clear prior art, in both GUI and text user interfaces (TUI).

Adobe used these patents to sue 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 which ended in a $4.9 million ruling against Adobe. The suits were settled on undisclosed terms.^[5] 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 researchers in 1987.^[6][7]

[edit] See also

• Tabbed Document Interface
• Ribbon (computing)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Navigation and Module tabs at the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.
• Yahoo! UI Library TabView
• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit
• Scriptaculous AJAX tabs