February 25th, 2009
Driving a car requires that you focus your attention on the road and keep your hands on the steering wheel. Towards that end, many car manufacturers position controls (such as those for the radio or air conditioner) on the steering wheel — either on the “spokes” that attach the wheel grip to the steering column, or on surfaces mounted behind the grip, close enough that they can be reached without letting go of the steering wheel.
But imagine if auto makers took this to an extreme, and put those controls at the ten o’clock and two o’clock position, where you hold the wheel, and actually mounted the buttons exactly under your fingers and hands — right on the surface of the steering wheel grip. Anytime you tried to turn the wheel you had to be extra careful that you didn’t change the radio station, or turn on the heater.
That’s what Apple has done with the tabs in Safari 4.
The title bar used to be a nice, clean expanse of chrome that served as an indicator as to which document or application was associated with a window, and served as a safe area to grab and move the window around your screen. Not so in the Safari 4 beta. Tabs have migrated northwards in the browser window, and made their home in the formerly pristine title bar.
Sure, you can still use the title bar to move the window, but it’s no longer a sure thing. The very fact that the tabs are there creates ambiguity. You’re clicking on the title bar and a tab — which part of the interface is going to respond to your click? Will my click select a tab? Move the window? Move a tab?
There’s also the matter of visual clutter. The title bar usually serves as a margin of sorts, to offset the contents of the window from any surrounding items. The tabs intrude on this, and lead to tragedies such as the mess seen in this screenshot from Adam Betts.
If you still think this is a good idea, imagine if other apps started doing this. Maybe Mail could migrate some items from the sidebar into the titlebar…
Or if preference panels started taking a cue from Safari …
Click images to enlarge
I’m sure that part of the reason Apple did this was to conserve space, and allow more room for web page content. But displays are getting larger all the time — my main display at the Iconfactory is roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. I don’t think it’s necessary to squeeze each pixel until it screams for mercy.
John Gruber suggests we give the new tab and title bar layout a chance: “I’m willing to give the new-style tabs at least a week — don’t be a chicken and switch back already.” That’s fine. But you can get used to just about anything. Even if you find you can live with the new tabs, it doesn’t make them a good idea.
February 25th, 2009 at 9:53 am
I’ll definitely agree with your stance. I’ve been objectively trying to use the new tabs, but they keep getting in the way and awkwardly tripping up my browsing.
But that mail mockup is hot, you may be on to something there
February 25th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Just remember that because you have a wall of a monitor, some of us still use the display of a 13″ Macbook as a main display, so saving space is always that you SHOULD try to achieve… This is what apple is trying to do.
And remember not all applications are the same, look at how people now are complaining that Adobe CS4 applications now use tabs, especially for PS, it may work for Flash but not for Photoshop.
And the example of the Preferences I really don’t think applies to this, because they rarely occupy more than half of the screen.
Safari 4 has been out for a day and in beta, so this tabs may or may not be used on the final release, I think they will with some improvement from the feeback they are going to get.
You may be right or not, but just don’t tell that saving screen space is a waste of time, because it is not…
February 25th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
I think 1 insight a lot of people are missing is that a tab is indeed a separate window. So having it in the titlebar makes some sense philosophically (since the titlebar is now actually telling us what documents that window contains). The usability issue is a different matter (e.g., I think hovering over an inactive tab should not bring up new controls) but personally, I think this is just great.
Since the world is moving towards laptops, the space saved is just fantastic on my 13″ macbook.
However, I won’t deny that there need to be changes. I just don’t think the concept is as flawed as some believe.
February 25th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Thanks for fulfilling my wish that “somebody with real design credentials” ream the tabs
You’ve done a good job, ahem, illustrating at least a big part of the problem with the new tabs.
February 25th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
That “tab spam” seems more like a feature than a bug. One of the annoyances with tabs is that having multiple tabs and multiple windows can be very annoying. What window has the tab with that blog entry I wanted again? Safari 4 does a decent job of letting you have quicker access to tabs in other windows. That screenshot actually makes a stronger case for why this is good design to me. Yeah, it’s a lot of tabs, but it gives users easy access to all of them and looks more organized than cluttered.
The examples here don’t work as well because this isn’t designed to be a general design convention – this is about solving a particular problem in a particular way. Yes, it doesn’t work everywhere, but for handling both multiple windows and multiple tabs, it seems to work pretty well.
February 25th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Monitors may be getting bigger all the time on desktops, but:
– Most people are buying laptops. Large-monitored laptops don’t work.
– Desktop screens can only expand so far, due to physical space limitations. You can’t fit ten 30″ monitors of a twelve foot desk.
February 25th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Whatever dude. S works fine by me. Oh, and as a Tiger user, finally, my browser chrome is smooth, finally smooth dot com! HAR HAR HAR!
February 25th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
My issue is with the proximity of the tab closure box to the window dismissal button. It’s too easy to close a window instead of a tab. I already find myself using the keyboard to avoid the error.
However, I think putting tabs in the Title Bar is a fundamentally good idea that needs careful refinement. I love the space it saves, and hope to see it in other appropriate apps as an OS standard function.
February 25th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
It seems to me that the Safari 4 developers took a good look at Google Chrome, like it, and included of its design ideas.
I’m not saying that the location of the tabs is a good or bad idea, but I question how much “saving space” had to do with the decision to place them where they are, as opposed to the new paradigm (which Chrome adheres to) that the titlebar belongs to the tab, and not the other way around.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Wishing and hoping that they’re testing this out before implementing system-wide window tabbing in 10.6 or 10.7.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Ok, before we all start panicking from those scary mockup screenshots, can someone explain to me how tabs and toolbar items are similar things? I doubt Apple would ever just start arbitrarily throwing the toolbar into window titlebars. At least tabs in the titlebar make sense on some conceptual level. (They more accurately depict what’s in the window right?)
Anyways I’m still deciding on these myself, but I found that comparison a little misleading
February 25th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
I completely agree, this looks *horrible*. I hope they change their minds about this and hope even more they don’t copy this in other apps. Yuck!
February 25th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
This article is junk. Spend less time on being funny and more time thinking and you won’t have so many problems. The (picture) suggestions of cases when this has been “taken too far” are ridiculous and don’t conform to any kind of rational view of what is being attempted with the “tabs on top” feature.
As someone already noted above, the tabs are in the window title bar because they were essentially little title bars, for little windows of their own, in the first place. They are essentially two of the same thing being merged. To suggest that the inbox folder being represented in the window title bar is anything like the same thing or the same thing “taken to far” is nonsense.
The car analogy is similarly dumb in that a dashboard in a car is essentially a big box of widgets. There is no “proper” place for one item or another on a dashboard nor has there ever been. There are no sub-categories of objects either.
So, … (mildly) funny article, but complete waste of space in terms of what it tries to accomplish. All I get out of this is that you don’t like tabs in the title bar and you think it’s just a “bad idea” but you don’t seem to have any good reason for thinking that.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I love em!
February 25th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Usualy, I do not leave comments, but this is very interesting discussion.
I think the tabs-on-top design is fugly, but I find it functional. I agree it needs more polish, but this is the reason for beta versions.
I think it may be worth to use tabs in other apps (e.g. Text Edit) but one shold always stick with KISS principle.
BTW: I would change the email mockup to use tabs-on-top for different email accounts.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I agree with the problems stated, but on the flip side:
* I don’t often move the whole browser window at all.
* Tabs are LIKE windows, and thus make conceptual sense up there in a way that other controls would not.
I say just make the tab widgets vanish (never appear even on rollover) when a window is in the background, and soften the lines between tabs so they’re not so distinct when in the background. And don’t do clickthroughs to tab functions. In other words, make the whole window title bar work “the old way” when a window is in the background, and make that distinction clear visually (the absence of tab widgets).
Then I’d be OK with the new system, which does have its advantages along with its problems.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Unfortunately I must use Windows at work so I have been using Chrome since it came out. I don’t see what the problem is, I quite like the tab titles up there in the Title bar instead of down below mixed up with the Bookmarks Bar. Yup, as Ryan says, the Title Bar belongs to the tab.
I like that little bit of space back, my 23″ Cinema Display is really not that big anymore, neither are those other vertically challenged widescreen displays.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Displays may be getting larger, but not in the important direction (for computer use anyway), which is vertically.
For whatever reason (it’s been suggested that lcd manufacturers can make more lcd’s from a given sheet of glass or something like that), everybody is pushing HD-oriented screens 16:9 or 16:10 instead of the older 4:3 standard.
For watching movies, the new ratio is great. For actually using the computer to do work (like read documents, web pages and the like), it forces you to scroll more, because you can see less content.
Having the tabs in the Window titlebar gives the user back a little bit more content space, at the expense of usability.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
@ryan:
Chrome works a little differently. Even though Chrome puts the tabs on top, they do leave a titlebar space for dragging the window around (you can’t drag the window around by Chrome’s tabs).
Also, this isn’t the first time Apple but a minefield in the titlebar: they’ve been putting the menubar in the iTunes for Windows’ titlebar space for a few years now.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I confess that I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen the first time I grabbed the title bar/tab. In fact it seems to do the right thing most of the time and with the added benefit of added screen space (always an issue on a 13″ MacBook). Certainly I think it something that I could get used to. I had the same initial reaction with Chrome but am now quite happy with it.
Talking of which, perhaps Chrome has the right solution? They have the tabs at the top, just like Safari, but there’s also a sliver of window at the top that you can always use to “grab” the window and move it.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
There is one feature that I use on a regular basis that is now missing because of the tab implementation: the ability to right-click or cmd-click on the title bar of Safari and access a popup of the URL ancestral hierarchy of the current page — this is useful to quickly browse up to a parent folder on a website, or to get to the root of the site.
This context popup on the title bar is, of course, a feature found in many other Mac applications, but I found that I mostly used it in Safari. And now it is gone. This morning I attempted to cmd-click on one of the tabs, and was in full-blown denial when I realized that the feature is missing.
I filed a bug report on it.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Tabs on top is one of the reasons that finally made me switch from Firefox to Safari (Top Sites and smart address bar are others). Saving space IS important if you work on a laptop, not aircraft carrier size monitor.
Browser must be most important and most used application on any OS, so it must be as effective as possible.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
I kind of like those examples…
February 25th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Why does everyone who complains about this imply that, if you click and drag on a tab, that tab will be switched or moved? It doesn’t do that. It intelligently moves the entire window. The only way to select a tab with the mouse is to simply click it. The only way to move a tab with the mouse is to select the tab and click & drag on the “textured” edge. So stop your gripin’ about a problem that does not exist.
February 25th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
You’re pretty wrong on this one. There is the cmd-click which is missing, but otherwise the implementation is pretty neat. No risk of confusion in what needs to be done when using a trackpad on a MBP at least.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Those people advocating the space saving, come on it’s ~21 pixels, that’s barely one line of text on most webpages. You can save that much space turning off the status bar.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Perhaps there are kinks that need to be worked out in the implementation, but I do think that the design concept is the most intuitive. When you look at an actual filing cabinet, you’ll see tabs at the top showing what folders contain. The fact that this real-life paradigm has moved into the computer domain makes sense, and it’s about time. The idea of the title bar displaying what’s in one tab, and repeating that same data on the tab itself, relegated to a level below a tool-bar is not only counter-intuitive to how we deal with tabbed interfaces in a filing cabinet, but it’s also redundant. Get rid of the title bar where ever you can, and give me tabs for my own personal filing cabinets on my desktop.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I didn’t think I’d like the tabs but I have to say after one days use I’m loving the new safari and the new positioning of the tabs. It’s very easy to complain about change but I haven’t run into half of the problems that people are mentioning (e.g. clicking close tab instead of moving the title bar). These are things that will probably be tidied up (along with the click-through issue) before it comes out of beta but overall I think it’s a great update for Safari. I do take issue with the screenshot with the 4 open windows with all of the tabs and the “tragedy” it creates – how many people seriously have a) that many pages open at once and b) would have them in separate windows as well as tabs. That would have been a “mess” in the old safari as well as any other browser so I hardly think it’s fair to criticise based on that alone.
Anyway, it’s working great on my MacBook and I hope this is just the start for a new visual refresh across a lot of the standard bundled apps.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Regarding this: “The only way to move a tab with the mouse is to select the tab and click & drag on the “textured†edge.”
Wrong. While it is true the only way to move a tab is drag the textured edge, it definitely works on a tab that is not in the foreground. I just attempted to move this browser window prior to reading this article (appropriately enough) and, sigh, drug one of my tabs into its own new window.
It’s frustrating. I’m still giving them a chance and really like Safari 4 for most of its improvements…but the tabs need a little refining.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Something I haven’t seen mentioned is the newfound ease with which a user can re-arrange tabs. A novice user may have never known they could change tab order, and even an advanced user could not take a torn-off tab and place it into another window. (other than “merge all windows”).
Giving each tab a “grippy” area on the side makes this feature more discoverable for novices and adds some functionality for other people.
I agree there’s some hesitation now when you go to the top bar. But overall, I think this is better, and I think the tab spam image proves it even while trying to prove otherwise.
I would make the first tab have more of a visual distinction from the close/minimize/zoom buttons on the top left, but I think the overall idea is sound.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
“But displays are getting larger all the time…”
And yet, they are also getting smaller. Popularity of netbooks are on the rise.
In addition, for middle of the road and low end users, smaller screens are still the norm. Most people aren’t rocking a 24″ widescreen LCD with 1900×1280 resolution.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Your illustrations are really quite nice, but they’re not the same as tabs in a browser.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
“But imagine if auto makers took this to an extreme, and put those controls at the ten o’clock and two o’clock position, where you hold the wheel, and actually mounted the buttons exactly under your fingers and hands  right on the surface of the steering wheel grip.”
Actually, this is EXACTLY the way the primary non-steering controls (launch, brake pressure balance, display selection, and radio activator) are placed on the steering wheel of a Formula 1 car. If it is good enough for the most demanding operators of the highest-performing vehicles in the world, the it is good enough for me.
I like the new tabs – they do exactly what I want, when I want, and give new and flexible functionality – provided that I use my brain and pay attention. I like that kind of reward-for-input scenario.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
The window height argument is fairly irrelevant (even on a MacBook), since the gain is at most a dozen pixels.
The problem is that the titlebar is sacrosanct: “thou shall not change it.”
Users expect a certain visual hierachy, based on how the other applications on a system function. OS X has a titlebar with a Title, 3 buttons on the left and possibly one on the right. The appearance and structure is consistently applied to every application.
That is: was.
Safari 4 breaks the rule and in doing so creates UI confusion. A cardinal sin. Especially for Apple software.
It reminds me of a previous iTunes iteration (perhaps even the current one?) for Windows, that has the Menubar inside the Titlebar. “File”, “Edit” and other menus straight in the Titlebar!
Gruber suggest to give the new Safari Tabs some time. I gave them exactly 5 minutes before switching back.
February 25th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I bet Apple is making a iPhonePlus/Netbook/Tablet with a small screen and just want to conserve screen real estate no matter what on that thing, and thus create something like this.
That, or they are really trying to innovate, even by braking some of their own rules (and copying some of Google Chrome on the way.
)
February 25th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I’m on the fence about the new tabs. Conceptually, they make sense. The hierarchy is now correct, in that the tab “owns” everything underneath it.
However, in use, there are serious flaws:
1. As you said, there’s confusion regarding how to move a window, because you’ve effectively got two different UI elements mashed together.
2. You can no longer double-click in the tab bar to create a new tab. You have to use the plus at the right of the window, which is a much smaller target.
3. You can no longer drag a tab to move it, because now that moves the window (see #1). Now you have to grab the tiny handle – again, a much smaller target.
4. Because of click-through, you now have to be careful where you click to bring the window to the front. It’s easy to accidentally switch to another tab or, worse, close one.
5. Since the tabs stretch to fill the length of the window, it creates kind of a “moving target” – as you open more tabs, previous ones shrink down and move further to the left. You lose some muscle memory.
The idea itself is not inherently bad; these are all things that Apple can address. I just hope that they do so, and in the process make these new tabs available to developers so we don’t end up with a mess of third-party apps that all do it differently.
February 25th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
The new tabs are a huge improvement on the small screen of my 12-inch Powerbook. The gain of 22 pixels (not “a dozen”) is getting on for two lines of 12-pixel text for me, and it really does make pages easier to read.
In Safari 3 I tried to gain window height by doing without the toolbar (accessing it with Command-L when I needed it), but this was very tedious. (Obviously I already hid the bookmarks bar and the status bar, there was no loss in doing that.)
On such a small screen there’s nowhere to move the Safari window to (it already fills the screen), so there are none of the problems with clicking on the wrong bit of the tab when intending to move the window.
So I am hoping that Apple keep the new tabs (as a user preference, at the very least).
February 25th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
I’m still not really used to the new tabs, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it.
And I think It’s fundamentally a good idea. At the moment tab implementations are a mess. They never quite work the same and they all look different. Apple should turn these new Safari tabs into a system wide thing, available for all developers. Think of it as a consistent way for windows to be docked together (and torn apart). I think that way it certainly makes more sense.
This has several advantages:
- Expose could take advantage of this and “spread out†docked windows (the same goes for the Dock, at the moment a right click on an app only shows a list of your windows, not their tabs)
- Tab behaviour is no more inconsistent and confusing
- Developers get tabs for free
It’s a slight departure of our long learned mental model of how windows chrome works, but I do think that it’s about time that tabs get picked up by OS developers because they have become such a fundamental part in many UIs. This doesn’t mean that all apps should suddenly sprout tabs, you still have to be careful and look if the concept fits the app. Your examples are just plain silly. I’m all for using the title bar for tabs, but certainly not for other stuff. (But it would be great if e.g. Pages or Keynote started using those new tabs.)
The new tabs also makes more sense: if you think of tabs as a way of docking windows together (and that’s – fundamentally – what they are) this is something that should be indicated in the title bar, not below the tool bar. And if we survived all those years with the 300 pixel resizer we will certainly survive with much bigger tabs that allow for window dragging. There will have to be some learning involved, but not much. If they all would behave the same that would be not a problem.
February 25th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
One point of the design that’s being glossed over is that dragging the title/tab bar does not change the selection. However you might dislike the visual design, the interaction is not hampered one bit.
I vote yes on the new tabs.
February 25th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
I’m not really having a problem with the design of the tabs, but I’m having a hell of a negative transference issue. Every time I want to select a tab, I’m reaching for the old location – only to have to stop, look more closely, and move the mouse.
Not working for me.
February 25th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Completely agree. This decision presents such serious usability problems, it’s hard to see how it made it even as far as a beta.
To all those people saying how much sense it makes – I don’t think anyone’s arguing that there isn’t _any_ sense to the arrangement. I like the idea, and want to like the implementation; but they’re such a pig to use, it’s completely impossible. Sometimes good ideas just don’t work out.
February 25th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Dunno, frankly I think you’re reacting based on what you’re accustomed to. If you just forget what a tab is for a second, it would make perfect sense, aesthetically & functionally, that the title bar would get segmented into “tabs” to represent multiple documents. and come on, that screenshot is bogus. what are you going to do, spend 10 minutes lining up title bars so you can confuse yourself? the one thing I’m annoyed by is that I can no longer click anywhere on a tab to move it. oh and the new tab button is out of reach (and you can’t double click on the tab bar to create a new one).
February 25th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
I think you need to give them a few more days at least… I think there is something amiss with Safari 4’s execution of tabs that Chrome got right – they immediately felt natural on Chrome, but I am willing to be after a few more doors you’ll never want to go back.
February 25th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
I hate tabs in the title bar. They don’t belong there, and it’s a gross violation of Apple UI guidelines. Please, everyone write Apple and tell them how badly this idea sucks. I would like to see Mac OS X retain the simplicity, elegance, and consistency that makes it the greatest OS made today. Otherwise, I might as well use Windows. It certainly would make my life easier in some ways. Not better. Easier.
February 25th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
If you use tabs, then you’re an advanced user. Then you can understand how it works. Most probably you rarely move safari windows. I for one, have always my Safari window reach the top of the screen and it doesn’t need to be moved.
What’s most important is to have content first. What apple sells first is Macbooks. 13″ screens. Pixels are not so abondant as on your 30″ which probably accounts for 1% of apple user base.
Eventually and conceptually, the “stacked windows” approach of Safari 4 makes much more sense than tabs. Tabs are not a solution. They are completely illogical in the exact same way you describe commands: the arrows in Safari 3 should have had effect on all “tabs” instead of just the “foremost” one.
Have a beer, wait a month, and I’m sure you’re sold.
February 25th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
I didn’t like them when Chrome had them and I still don’t like them when Safari copied them.
It saves maybe 20 pixels of vertical space at the expense of making the UI in that area a mess, my favourite side effect is maximising the window on Windows, if you double click on the titlebar (fairly common action) you’ll also change tabs, unless you only double click on the current tab.
February 26th, 2009 at 12:03 am
Here’s hoping Apple provides a -choice- of location for the tabs – THAT would be nice.
February 26th, 2009 at 12:04 am
I want to like the new tabs, but the problem I have is that if your mouse is moving a tiny bit when you try to switch to a tab, it drags the window… Rather annoying but I don’t really see a way around if it’s the title bar.
February 26th, 2009 at 12:38 am
The argument that tabs-on-top fixes the “hierarchy problem” is wrong. There is no longer a container for the application – the function of the title bar. The red/yellow/green bubbles act inconsistently with their hierarchical location (which is what? the left most tab?) Tabs clash with apple’s document model but are an obvious benefit to browsing. This change doesn’t resolve the tension for me…
February 26th, 2009 at 12:39 am
I’m already used to these tabs from Google Chrome, where they work a little better. They become quite handy.
February 26th, 2009 at 12:40 am
Thanks for the replies everyone. Most of the arguments and counterarguments have been made multiple times now, so I’ll just clarify a few things from my point of view:
I’m perfectly fine with the idea of “tabs at the top of the window”. Conceptually I agree that it makes sense. I just disagree that they should be all the way up in the title bar. In fact, here’s a mockup Adam did with the tabs at the top of the window, but still below the title bar. You could even make the title bar a little more shallow if you were gung-ho on saving space, but there should be a little something up there dedicated to letting you move the window around, and to providing a small visual buffer.
In fact, if you did that and also slightly increased the vertical offset for cascading windows you could still maintain the advantage of being able to visually find a specific tab among multiple windows (which has been the best argument I’ve heard so far for the new arrangement).
Next, I realize that you *can* move the window without accidentally manipulating the tabs, the point is not that you *can’t* – the point is that it becomes *more difficult* in proportion to the number of tabs you have open. Previously, to move a window I had a wide *uninterrupted* expanse of chrome available to grab onto. Now, with every tab I open I introduce two areas within that expanse that I have to avoid when I want to move the window. Sure, I can deal with it if I have to, but you just can’t argue that it’s not a hindrance to usability. Keep the tabs at the top of the window but leave a title bar above them and you totally eliminate this problem.
Regarding the space saved – it’s been said already but we’re talking a minuscule amount of space here. I understand that not everyone has a giganormous display – my home displays are much smaller than my office display. But even so, the usability you’re losing is not offset by the 20 pixels you’re gaining, in my opinion.
Finally, regarding the @Geekboy’s Formula One steering wheel remark – as far as I can tell, Formula One steering wheels have a ton of controls, all easily accessible from the grip, but none of them are actually *on the grip area itself* which is what my analogy was suggesting.
I see the title bar as another control – it’s a control for moving the window around, just like the corner resizing grabber is a control for resizing the window. The Safari tabs to me are akin to sticking some checkboxes and radio buttons directly on top of a submit button.
February 26th, 2009 at 12:48 am
If saving space was the objective, why not just have the tabs along the side of the window instead of at the top? I dunno about you, but my 13″ MacBook has plenty of horizontal space to fill.
February 26th, 2009 at 1:04 am
Even something like this would be a huge improvement – just a dedicated chunk of titlebar to the right of the close/minimize buttons. A constant area where tabs would not intrude, and you could be guaranteed a safe place to grab for a window move.
February 26th, 2009 at 3:46 am
@Jon Bell: I seem to read your comment as saying that, in Safari 3, it was not possible to drag tabs from one window to another. This is not true; once you had ‘ripped off’ a tab (and, of course, before you had released it), it could be dropped into another window as one would expect.
@Gavin McKenzie: I never knew that the cmd-click feature you mentioned existed in Safari 3, and now discover it just in time for its disappearance … what a shame!
February 26th, 2009 at 4:05 am
Another issue with combining tabs and the titlebar is that it’s almost impossible to select a tab when you’re using a Wacom tablet instead of a mouse; when you move the pointer only one pixel you’re suddenly dragging the window instead.
February 26th, 2009 at 4:25 am
To be honest, the whole thing is a bit of a mess. And, why can’t Apple stop fiddling with their GUI? Safari 4 looks just different enough from the rest of Leopard to mess up the clean and tidy unified look that they *finally* achieved in 10.5. Why??
February 26th, 2009 at 4:29 am
Oh, one more thing: I’ve seen so much comment about other aspects of the redesign, and none about this, that I figure it must just be something strange in my set-up—am I the only one who has lost the reload button on the left in favour of a button on the right for reporting bugs?
February 26th, 2009 at 5:05 am
I think the tabs are a great idea, and quite honestly, the points you’ve attempted to make against them don’t hold up under any degree of scrutiny.
Sure, you could end up with a cascade of browser windows, each with multiple open tabs — but nobody does this. Even if anyone did, though, your screenshot could as easily be used as an argument in *favor* of tabs-in-titlebar as against them — all open tabs in all windows can be seen at once.
The comment that it’s unclear what will happen when you click on the titlebar is easily deflated too. There are very clear markings to indicate the small draggable corner of tabs, the close button, and the button to create new tabs. Again, returning back to the real world here, I just ran through a little test sequence here: I moved the window, created a tab, dragged it somewhere, closed another tab, and repeated the process 5 times. I never once missed or had any trouble targeting the various UI elements.
There is no reason to assume this type of UI element would spread to other applications either. Quite obviously it’s been done in this case to maximize the browser’s viewport area, and it does that rather nicely I might add. What it also does is puts the content (along with the address bar, which is different in each tab and therefore belongs with the content) *inside* the tabs — which is really how it should be, if you think about it.
I knew there would be backlash from the Mac community, which is surprisingly conservative for fans of the company who *sets* all the trends, but hey, knock yourselves out. Go on and keep telling Apple what to do from the backseat, while they do all the actual driving. You can thank them later, when you eventually realize you like where we’re going after all.
The tabs are a great idea. Deal with it.
February 26th, 2009 at 7:14 am
@Jason Sims
We’re not talking about what you can do when you’re looking and acknowleging invisible UI elements, we’re talking about quick glances and estimates as to how we want to achieve our goals.
That is, I make look over onto the other side of my screen, flick my mouse over to grab the window, accidently close the tab I want and then curse the odd placement of Safari’s new tabs.
Normal users might not make these mistakes as often because they need to look to see what they’re doing but experienced users, like experienced drivers, know where everything is so they often move windows (or adjust the CD player) without even needing to look.
February 26th, 2009 at 7:44 am
Good discussion here.
Since Apple releases Safari Beta 4 (first of all, read: Beta), a lot of people started discussing about tabs. It doesn’t matter if there were improvements at other levels (performance, security, css support). And this is normal because people avoid changes, at least visual and operative changes.
Now talking about Safari tabs, I agree with the people telling they are a good UI improvement for many reasons: screen space saving, order, yes, but most important is metaphor and coherence.
Tabs are many windows marged into one. So it’s coherent that they behave like title bars; the adress bar and buttons are related to tabs because the url you are reading is for the active tab, so they are better positioned below.
Ok, according to UX laws like Fitt’s and Hick’s, the smaller the element, the harder to interact. The action of arranging tabs is slower beacuse the draggable area is small. But this is not really a problem beacuse the action to arrange tabs is not essential for browsing, is an ocational and miscellaneous action. Usefull, but not extemelly necessary.
When you design UI’s, you have to make choices based in what are your users doing with the application. If the user is browsing, facilitate him the tools and necessary space for browsing. In the car design metaphor, is like improving the cockpit for driving, maybe reducing load space. Yes, if you have to load a lot of cases when you go to vacations that’s annoying, but for driving from home to work and from work to home, it’s better to be comfortable in the vehicle.
In conclusion, the discussion about tabs is a mix of fear to change (naturally human) and wrong perspective.
(PS: sorry if I misstyped, don’t have change to review :S)
February 26th, 2009 at 7:47 am
How about having the windowframe from OS 8 platinum back, but extended over the top as well? It can flow into the frontmost tab and stoplight buttons and give you a solid area to drag the window with without wasting all those vertical pixels that the current tab setup does.
Clicking through to the tab is just stupid, but I expect that that will be done by the time this is released.
February 26th, 2009 at 9:59 am
So true. I think they’re terrible.
Google Chrome has a far superior implementation of these top style tabs. The tabs still look, feel and behave like tabs and the title bar is still clear and separate. Much nicer to look at, much easier to read, much hard to @#!$ stuff up.
Safari 4’s interface as a whole is a poor man Google Chrome at the moment. It’s an obvious and inferior rip off.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:01 am
We’ve had tabbed web browsing for how many years, and yet the only browser to get it right (that I’m aware of) is OmniWeb. Horizontal tabs are fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons, not the least of which is scrollability. I use a 13″ macbook air, and giving up some horizontal real-estate is no big deal. However, with only 900 pixels, height is another matter.
With vertical tabs I have a list that’s easy to scan. I have a scrollbar so I have an idea of how many tabs I have open. The position of the scrollbar gives me an idea of where a particular tab is, making navigating to that tab simple and easy. None of the horizontal tabs can do this without sacrificing even more precious vertical space.
When will application designers realize this?
February 26th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Perhaps the issue here is that the idea of clicking on the title bar to drag the window is a little bit dated. Back in the 1990’s the WindowMaker desktop would let you hit CTRL while moving the mouse over an active window to drag it.
Mac OS X utilities such as:
- Zooom/2: http://coderage-software.com/zooom/
- MondoMouse: http://www.atomicbird.com/mondomouse/
- WindowDargon: http://homepage.mac.com/tconkling/windowdragon/
I use these to map the “fn” key on my mac, or the “ctrl” key on my desktop to the “window move” action – this way I never waste time moving the mouse to the title bar just to move a window.
If you do adopt such a workflow, and do treasure your screen real-estate (even with my 24″ iMac i’ve never got enough pixels) then Apple’s new tabs could be a great solution!
Personally I can’t wait to see these tabs added for Mail, iTerm and Adium!
February 26th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
@Anthony: I like that idea. If they must have the tabs at the very top of the window, at least leave an area of blank space that acts as a “normal” title bar so you can click and drag the window from there. Then they can let you drag the tabs by clicking anywhere on them, just like Safari 3.
As it stands now, the Safari 4 interface makes it easier to move the whole window than to move a tab. This seems backwards to me – personally, I rearrange tabs far more often than I move my Safari window.
February 26th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I think they’re OK, but there’s one thing that I find a bit confusing. The icon/texture for moving a tab around has always been resizing things, not moving them. It makes no sense. They should change that.
February 26th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
You are spot on, Apple is for reasons beyond me creating a very very VERY crappy solution to a problem already solved. If you can’t *improve*, don’t change things. I tried chrome in windows and utterly hated it. Do not put anything in the space where I grab and move windows, it will never ever ever work. Painfully pathetic design.
And living with it is the very definition of living with Windows. The reason I use OS X instead is to get away from Windows and all the things I will have to live with that Microsoft has screwed up. Will Apple ruin OS X as well?
February 26th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
This is what happens when Steve isn’t there to say NO.
Someone decided that the Google Chrome MDI was a good idea, and copied it, then hacked a few extra pieces onto it.
Bad idea, bad execution. Total violation of the HIG
February 26th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
I’m always intrigued when new things get tested in interface design.
Honestly, I’m more interested when there’s a clear usability reason for exploring new ways =)
In the tabs-on-top case, it ain’t clear. Space savings and clearer presentation of the document hierarchy are very bland reasons.
The screenshot proposed to bash the tabs almost sold me the concept – yeah it’s cluttered in a way we’re not accustomed to, but it make very easy to know what tabs are opened and how are grouped.
Then I realized that I almost never have such a precise cascade of windows on my workspace, and anyway selecting one in the middle would have disrupted the effect.
So in the end, it’s look like it’s no much more of an unneeded cosmetic exploration.
Anyway, the ankward part in dragging those tabbed bar windows is all in the presence of those move and close tabs widget. I know that they have to be self evident for the sake of the casual users, but it would be almost ok if a preference allowed to remove them, leaving the close and move action to customizable modifier keys + click combos (or middle clicks or whatever for people with multibutton mices).
Windows with title tabs without buttons on them would be dead easy to drag around.
February 26th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
in regards to the “tab spam” screenshot, i believe the new tabs-on-top design would actually help access tabs from multiple windows quicker since they’re clearly visible from anywhere. the problem doesn’t lie in the implementation of tabs in safari 4 beta but in a clear difference between active and non-active windows. it seems that, with ever subsequent update, Apple has been making this distinction more and more difficult to distinguish. fix that, and there shouldn’t be a problem.
February 27th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
A few random observations…
First, I move windows in Safari *all the time*. I like my Safari window fixed at the top-left of the screen, but websites are commonly opening links in a new window unless I notice in the status bar and remember to cmd-click to open in a new tab; worse, Safari remembers that as the default window location and opens new windows at that location. So I am constantly moving windows around, and anything that interferes with that is a problem.
Second, I ‘get’ the point about document hierarchies and how window content is subordinate to the tab. But: a) I have to question whether this is more of a geekly mindset than a typical end-user mindset; a lot of people I know don’t logically organize things in hierarchies, certainly not to this degree. b) I think the title bar as a single, consistent and dependable entity is at least as important a concept for window management, if not more so, than a logical hierarchy; by putting tabs there, you are making it a variable, unstable element. The title bar on windows without tabs will look and behave differently than title bars on windows with tabs, and indeed title bars with tabs will look and behave differently from each other depending on the number of tabs they contain. Title bars are the foundation of the windowing system, and the windowing system is the foundation of the GUI; foundations need to be stable and behave in a reliable, consistent fashion.
Third, if you *have* to put tabs in the title bar, I agree with the idea of a buffer space between the close/minimize/zoom widgets and the first tab. In ref to b) above, at a minimum you need at least one stable zone in the title bar to anchor the windowing system, and a buffer area would at least give you *something* there. It would also address the issue of putting the tab-close widget and the window-close widget too close together.
February 27th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Oh, yes, a couple more comments:
First, my laptop is my main machine (though a 15″ Pro rather than the 13″ MacBook), so yes, I understand the need for space saving. But I don’t think the need for space is bad enough to put tabs into the title bar.
Second, to address the Formula 1 car analogy: sure, they want all the controls right on or as close to the steering wheel as they can. They are also expert drivers and spend Ghu knows how long training themselves to use a complex control layout, and operate in an extreme edge-case environment where even a small efficiency gain is worth a large initial training investment. There’s a *reason* you don’t see that kind of layout in ordinary passenger cars. Going the F1 route is going against the very design philosophy of MacOS.
February 27th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Tabs had to be implemented in the title bar, it is the only option that works. Your argument is really against the use of tabbed windows, and not their implementation.
Let’s hope they quickly do the same in Preview, where multiple documents appear identically to a single multi-page document, where opening another document (in the first case) merges it with an already open document (in the second case).
March 2nd, 2009 at 11:13 am
Your analogy is terrible.
I agree with your point, somewhat. But your making more fuss about it than is justified IMO.
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Saving vertical screen space seems to have become important. Has anyone told the FileMaker folks? They’ve gone out of their way to use it up with no particular benefit. Anyone see a benefit?
March 5th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
i see a lot of people talking about the controls on the tabs, the arrangement of the tabs, the conceptual pros and cons of tabs-as-titlebar, etc. but very little about the text on the tabs, which is the most important part. the window title is a really really important part of the mac UI, and in my experience most window titles are truncated when i’m browsing with safari 4 and have more than a couple tabs open.
and obviously there’s no consistent spot for my eye to go when looking for the title. used to always be top center and surrounded by whitespace but now it can far left, far right, 3/4 left, etc., and intermingled with all the inactive-tab titles.
for me this design actually discourages tabbed browsing because it’s so disorienting when lots of tabs are open.
i imagine that if this design idea takes off (if, say firefox adopts it too), then a lot of web sites will just add a fixed-position faux title bar inside of the content area, to make up for the browser deficiencies (there goes your gained space).
March 10th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
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