July 16, 2004Document-splitting in Web browsersIt's not very easy to innovate in the Web browser business. Except for tab browsing and pop-up blocking, we haven't seen a lot of innovations these past years (and certainly not from IE, which has been stagnant for more than five years now, although there seems to be some change on the horizon). Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox can certainly be commended for trying to innovate constantly, but it's quite interesting to see that even their valiant efforts haven't yielded a web-browsing experience that is radically different from the way we were surfing five years ago. I started thinking about this and I couldn't come up with any big hole in usability or functionality that I would really like to see in my Web browser. Except for... document splitting. This is a feature that has been present in Microsoft software for years now, and it allows you to split the current document in two different parts that can be scrolled independently. This is a very useful feature for all kinds of documents : Word, spreadsheets, even Java source files (still waiting on this feature to make it into Eclipse), etc... And of course, Web browsers. Just recently, I was reading an article that showed a figure at the top and which constantly referred to this figure in the rest of the article. Right now, the only thing I can do is: open a new window, paste the current URL, move that window side-by-side with my current document and resume reading in the original window. All of this would be so much easier if I could split the original document horizontally or vertically with just one click and drag... Does anyone know of such an extension for FireFox, or should I file an RFE? Posted by cedric at July 16, 2004 08:10 AM Comments
I don't know of a FireFox extension, but for Java, or any other type of Source Files, IntelliJ IDEA has it. I would like to see it in FireFox as well. So please file an RFE. Posted by: Tim Haley at July 16, 2004 08:28 AMKonqueror has had that feature for a long time. You can split your window horizontally or vertically and recursively. You can get half-way there: the FireFox all-in-one gestures extension has "down-up" to open the current document in a new window, thus saving the trouble of copying and pasting the URL. Or if you prefer a new tab, down-up-down. But AFAIK, Moz/FireFox doesn't have the ability to tile two document windows. Opera does, and it also has the down-up "duplicate" gesture, so maybe that's the place to look. Posted by: Doug at July 16, 2004 09:19 AMWould implementation of this yield "a web-browsing experience that is radically different from the way we were surfing five years ago"? I don't see it... right-click, open in new window, no cut-n-paste needed Posted by: mjasnows at July 16, 2004 10:15 AMYou could use Mozie http://www.zeit.ca/mozie/ to emulate the effect, then you can see how much of a productivity boost you really do get.. I don't see it myself, the only times I've ever used split views was purely by accident when trying to resize windows, it reduces the size of each window to such a degree both become rather useless IMHO. Posted by: Richard Osbaldeston at July 16, 2004 11:12 AMI've had a simple idea to solve your problem without modification to the browser by using HTML frameset and JavaScript. It shouldn't be too difficult to write a JavaScript which takes an URL as a parameter and creates a HTML frameset composed of two resizable frames which load that same URL. You then create a bookmarklet which takes the URL of the window document et voila! I've published the bookmarklet on my weblog (http://www.jmesnil.net/weblog/) if you're interested (I can't manage to paste it in this comment...) Posted by: Jeff Mesnil at July 16, 2004 01:24 PMIt looks like the sharepoint thing is taking off as well. Theyre especially good for accountants. We are actually developing our own customised versions for each client now: http://www.pearl-scan.co.uk Post a comment
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