Thursday 6 May 2021

Eudora versus Pandora - Tabs for mailboxes (and web browsers)

The web browser that I use most of the time is Waterfox, the so-called Classic version of it which I have carefully tailored with a set of old-style XPI add-ons in order to maximise my browsing efficiency and comfort.

When I get newsletters in my mail client's Inbox, I usually launch multiple news article links from each newsletter and often finish up with at least twenty or thirty browser tabs open at once. Within each Waterfox window I have configured the Tab Mix Plus add-on to display multiple rows of tabs, looking like the following:

imageWith this Waterfox add-on, how the tabs are displayed and browser features are handled is controlled by a myriad of useful options. Here is the Tab Mix Plus "Display" panel for configuring the Tab Bar:

image

And currently I have selected "Multi-Row" with up to three rows of tabs to be displayed:

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On other Options panels I've set tabs to have rounded top corners with the active tab coloured yellow, and clicking with the middle mouse button to close the highlighted tab:

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All in all, this add-on does an exceptionally good job of managing tabbed windows and what happens upon various mouse actions.

The above is all a precursor to reviewing how Eudora and Pandora handle tabs.

Here's the Eudora tab bar, with lots of mailboxes open. There is no way to control the tabs' relative locations
image

As more and more mailboxes get opened in Eudora, the tabs become narrower and narrower, until they reach a tiny size that displays only Eudora's  generic mailbox icon, If you hover the mouse over a tab, thankfully the tab's title is displayed as a tool tip:

image

When there are fewer tabs, the tab labels gradually start making an appearance:

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If you right-click a tab, you can close it thus:

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My criticism is that this requires two button clicks and I wish it would be better if -- as mentioned above for Waterfox browser (also for many other Windows apps) -- a single centre-button-click could be used to close the tab. Some of us would save hundreds of button clicks per day if this were implemented in Eudora.

Moving now to Pandora Mail client, here's an example of its tab bar with more than five or six mailboxes open. The tabs are of fixed size, and they don't shrink in width as more mailboxes are opened, but instead scroll horizontally. The red circle indicates where you cause the tabs to scroll left or right:
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I've found that such horizontal scrolling becomes rathe tedious when you have more that bout ten mailboxes open. You must click on the "X" at the right-hand end of a tab, or as with Eidora right-click the tab and select "Close" as follows:

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In conclusion, I'd really appreciate it if Pandora gets the ability to display multiple rows of mailbox tabs -- a selectable number of rows -- and to allow centre-clicking on a tab to close it.

Furthermore, in many other Windows apps (browsers, and more) you can rearrange tabs by dragging them to new locations in the tab bar, and Pandora should get this capability too.

Kryptonite puffs, anyone?

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