Scrolltabs

Bret Victor / June 25, 2007

Scrolltabs are an alternative to conventional web browser tabs. Scrolltabs merge tabs into the scrollbar.

All content appears on one long page, allowing the user to scroll through it in one fell swoop. Navigation is reduced to a single dimension, but the benefit of tabs (ability to jump quickly among a set of websites) is retained.

Controls

Here are the controls for this demo:

Creating tabs

To open a link in a new tab, click while holding ⌘ (Mac) or “control” (PC).
To jump to the tab immediately, hold “shift” as well.

Jumping to tabs

To jump to a tab, click on the tab in the scrollbar.
Press “left-arrow” or “right-arrow” to jump to the previous or next tab.

Managing tabs

To reorder tabs, drag them up or down in the scrollbar.
To remove a tab, drag it left, off of the scrollbar.

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Here are some fake websites, so you can play with scrolltabs:

Source

You may download the OpenLaszlo source code for this demo.