Half a Monkey

February 24, 2009

Unsafe UI

The most prominent new feature of Safari 4 Public Beta is Apple's Google Chrome-inspired tabs-on-top combination tab/title bar. It's not a bad idea, but the design, while clever, is flawed.

Tabs-in-the-middle has always bothered me. It doesn't make sense conceptually. The tabs control the visible page, sure, but all the controls above the tabs also reflect which tab is frontmost. They belong inside the tabs. That the tabs-in-the-middle is conceptually irregular is evidenced by Apple's bizarre original decision to turn the tabs upside down. Apple wasn't comfortable with their position either (though it had already been established as the standard position by Firefox), so they reconnected the tabs with the controls and disconnected them from the page. Same problem upside down.

Tabs-as-title-bar is its own kind of confused. The two competing interests of tabs and title bar overwhelm each other. The title bar is the only way to move the window, so dragging must move the window. That means you need an extra widget to drag the tabs. Clicking a title bar brings the window to the front, same as clicking a tab. But now clicking a tab in the background brings that tab and the window to the front. You can even close tabs while the window is in the background; since Safari still has no undo for closed tabs (without Saft, that is), you have to be extra careful where you click to bring the window forward. It's no longer a "safe click", leading to distrust. That's not good UI.

That said, I'm happy to see Apple experimenting like this and doing so publicly. That's a dramatic and welcome shift in behavior. They haven't fundamentally changed any aspect of window controls or behavior in years. So maybe it took Google building a browser out of WebKit to get someone over at Apple to start thinking outside the (window) box. Either way, I'm glad they're doing it. I just hope they're not too stubborn to evolve it into something more useful and less anxiety provoking.

Posted by brendan at February 24, 2009 10:35 PM

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