Re: Feature: option to open windows as tabs

[Roland Knall <rknall () gmail com>]

I think before we submit this patch, we should agree on a general UI
concept going forward.

TL;DR: I think tabs for the main window is the wrong approach and will
alienate a lot of users


There are basically three main uses for tabs in an application (besides
from preference dialogs).

The first approach is your basic webbrowser, who displays multiple webpages
in each individual tab. This actually is something Apple tries to enforce
anyway and others do as well, but always the content of the tabs are
similar. It is always a webcontent or a textdocument, .... They can be
opened and closed individually and do not care about or influence each
other. The Wireshark equivalent would be a capture file. IO Graph and the
packet list do influence each other deeply, as does the packet list and
every other dialog.

Now in the second approach (e.g. iTunes or music player application), you
may have tabs which present you the same data in a different method  (Album,
Artists, Playlist, ...). In these cases the tabs are always present, their
view can be toggled, but in reality they are always there. Equivalent in
Wireshark would be, that all dialogs are generated on capture file load and
be always there, but hidden.

If tabs are not used for the main window, the usually are being used as
utility tabs (see your favorite IDE e.g. QtCreator, Visual Studio, Eclipse,
...). This would be the third approach. They present additional information
to the main document, a search possibility, graphical representation, ....

Wireshark's dialogs do not present different, independant data (first
approach), but in the most cases an aggregated view (third approach) and
sometimes an alternative view (second approach). Therefore, making them
tabs to the main window is contradictory (as stated above). Users would
have a program which operates very different to other programs they use
daily. Making dialogs tabs to a utility window (byte view, packet detail)
seems more to be the natural method. And then they can be dockable as well.

One last (but important) argument is screen size. A lot of people have big
screens now. The tabbed approach for the main window really only makes
sense on smaller screens. On a big screen tabs do not lead to a better
utilisation of the space, making the work with a lot of tabs more
cumbersome.

regards
Roland

Am So., 6. Mai 2018 um 09:37 Uhr schrieb Paul Offord <
Paul.Offord () advance7 com>:

> > I *think* Windows DLLs may also function as shared libraries.
>
> They do.  One instance in RAM mapped into the virtual address space of any
> process referencing the DLL.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wireshark-dev <wireshark-dev-bounces () wireshark org> On Behalf Of
> Guy Harris
> Sent: 05 May 2018 19:25
> To: Developer support list for Wireshark <wireshark-dev () wireshark org>
> Subject: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Feature: option to open windows as tabs
>
> On May 5, 2018, at 10:04 AM, Peter Wu <peter () lekensteyn nl> wrote:
>
> > Memory usage will probably suck due to exact copies of the process,
>
> On most if not all UN*Xes, the executable image's code and read-only data,
> and libwireshark's/libwiretap's/libwsutil's code and read-only data, should
> be shared between all of the processes.
>
> You won't, however, share the results of reading in configuration files,
> e.g. the new fields added by reading in the RADIUS and DIAMETER
> dictionaries...
>
> ...unless they're read in by the UI process, and handed to the dissector
> processes as (read-only) shared memory.
>
> I *think* Windows DLLs may also function as shared libraries.
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