This post attempts to walk a fine line between hyping up the work the author has done and recognizing the contributions of... largely the wrong people.
- There is a pretty popular Firefox extension called Tree Style Tabs, by "Piro". It is awesome, it is actively maintained, it works great. It has around 100k active users.
- Some time later, "philiKON" (Philipp von Weitershausen) made a smaller extension that just shows tabs vertically. "It is heavily inspired by and borrows ideas from the excellent Tree Style Tab add-on", its page says. I used it for a while, but it fell into disrepair and I switched back to TST. Vertical Tabs has around 5k users.
- Finally, "Vlad" made a fork of Vertical Tabs to fix it up a little, since philiKON had abandoned it.
So who does Mr. Henein credit? Mainly himself and his colleague Vlad. Vlad is credited as the author of Vertical Tabs at the beginning of the post, although what he was not "something [Henein]’d be willing to trial" (ouch). It needed Henein's touch to "bring this add-on to a level where users would find it delightful and usable enough to at least give it a fair shot."
But still, he does credit his pal Vlad for doing most of the work, and even throws in a mention of von Weitershausen in the middle of the post, without explaining what he has to do with Vertical Tabs.
No mention at all of Piro or Tree Style Tabs, even though it was the inspiration of Vertical Tabs, and to this day is used by orders of magnitude more people. In fact, its existence seems to be intentionally removed. "The hypothesis I was hoping to validate was that there was a subset of the Firefox user base that would find value in the layout that Side Tabs enabled. I wanted to bring this add-on to a level where users would find it delightful and usable enough to at least give it a fair shot." I would say that TST, its over 2 million downloads over at least 7 years, and its 100k active users validate that hypothesis pretty well.
I think this is a pretty shoddy way for Mozilla to treat a member of its community. There is an add-on that introduced all of these ideas to Firefox, is well-known and appreciated by Firefox power-users, and has been tirelessly maintained for seven years, yet they go and act as if "side tabs" (he even slipped his own new name for it in there) were some amazing new area of cutting-edge experimentation, while giving a hat tip to a derivative of a derivative of the original extension.
And then all the flowery rhetoric: "This is how great things are built; rarely from scratch, but more commonly on the shoulders and brilliance of those who came before you." "I’ve had great response on Twitter from developers and users who love the add-on and who can’t wait to share their ideas and thoughts. It’s awesome to see ideas take shape and grow so organically like this. This is collaboration."
Maybe I'm crazy, but the whole thing just rubs me the wrong way.
Presumably he wasn't necessarily aware of TST? I wasn't.
I don't see anything wrong with crediting where he found his inspiration. There's always a chain to these things, presumably TST wouldn't exist without Firefox, which wouldn't exist without IE or Netscape, which... which wouldn't exist without the wheel... fire...
Plausible deniability is extremely thin here. TST's inspiration is credited in the first paragraph of Vertical Tabs's Readme on GitHub (even in Vlad's fork), and in Vertical Tabs's description on addons.mozilla.org. In fact, if you google "Vertical Tabs" the first result comes with the snippet "This Firefox add-on arranges tabs in a vertical rather than horizontal fashion. It is heavily inspired by and borrows ideas from the excellent Tree [...]".
On top of that, Mr. Henein is a Mozilla employee and has several colleagues who are also working on vertical tabs (he mentions Vlad, but also Stephen Horlander, one Hayden, and there are others who are not mentioned by name). Basically, there is a group of people at Mozilla who is (finally, after seven years) looking into officially supporting vertical tabs. How likely it is that none of them has ever heard of TST, or found out about it while researching this feature? I'd say it defies belief.
It takes active, deliberate effort for Mozilla to ignore the community's efforts in this field. It is certainly more satisfying to a designer's narcissism to pretend that he (with some help from his pals) is bringing forth a bold new creation, but it is an especially egregious attitude to take for a community-based organization like Mozilla.
These things used to rub me the wrong way in the 90's, but I've learned to take it in stride. I think it's great that people are rediscovering and trying out old ideas in new systems, and perhaps the understandable belief that something's never been done before isn't so bad, if it motivates them to keep trying out different ideas in new contexts, and leads to even more great stuff that's never been done before, or even just re-implementations of old ideas that aren't as ugly as they used to be the first time around.
So many "modern" user interfaces are such cargo cult carbon copies of each other (like tabs along just the top edge, or that way "flat" is such a big fad these days), that it's easy to get the impression that anything slightly different is actually original.
Back in the day, we had no choice but to draw "flat" user interfaces, because all we had was black and white, and moving the cursor across the screen was uphill both ways!
Pffffft. Agree. Terrible writing. Omnibrowser, camino, opera, and even google chrome had this. There was an extension i used in 2006/2007 called vertigo which was popular but stopped working in ff 2 [1]. Also check out [2]
[1] http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2007/09/firefox-extension-vert... [2] http://www.sidewise.info/