Moving in virtual space and browser tabs

Just reading a short post on Read Write Web (http://www.readwriteweb.com) titled "Firefox to Adopt Chrome's Tab Ordering Feature" (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefox_to_adopt_chromes_tab_o.php). The central point of this is that Firefox is going to copy Google Chrome and ensure that tabs opened up from links appear in the tabbed window next to the one you are currently using.

Now this may seem a very small thing, but to me there's a subtle indication here about the nature of virtual space and how people move within it. Conceptually speaking people are in a certain space when they are reading a web page, and when they click on a link they want to move towards a new space, and they don't actually expect it to be very far away. It's this disjointedness between their internal conceptualisation of where they are and where they went in virtual space, compared to what just happened in real space, that to my mind is the issue that Firefox is now going to change. Opening a tab is a small movement in virtual space that should be reflected as such in real space, i.e. in the interface shift that takes place.

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