Pinderkent

Apple recently released a beta of their Safari 4 Web browser. This release brings with it some relatively significant UI changes. The change that is perhaps most obvious, especially in the Windows version of Safari, is the placement of the browser tabs. By default, they are now within the title bar of the main Safari window: This is a most unfortunate place to put the browser tabs, with this location causing a number of usability problems.

The first problem is that it's unexpected. Although there has been some UI consistency loss within the Windows world over the past decade, I don't recall us ever seeing behavior like this in such a well-known application. The window title bar has solely been for identifying the window, selecting the window, and performing other manipulations of the window itself. It has always been "outside" of the application, physically and in terms of functionality.

A related problem is that of selecting the window. The mere act of giving it focus by clicking on the title bar can inadvertently cause the displayed tab to change. This can be pretty annoying, and now requires the user to be more careful where the click in the title bar when giving focus to Safari.

This is perhaps the most subjective of the problems, but I just find the title bar to now be distracting. It's much too "busy" now. Aside from the application icon in the top-left corner, we now have a mix of tab borders, close buttons, browser title text, the button for creating new tabs, and the typical three minimize-maximize-close buttons at the top-right corner.

Another significant problem occurs when running Safari fullscreen under a RDP session, or under a virtual machine like VMware. Such software can optionally put some command buttons centered at the top of the screen, to allow for the parent window to be minimized, maximized, closed, options adjusted, and so forth. While such a panel can usually hide itself, I've always found it useful to leave it expanded. Traditionally, such panels have slightly overlapped the title bar of any maximized windows, but have otherwise been unobtrusive. Unfortunately, they now obstruct a core feature of Safari. In the best case, the tab is only partially hidden, or totally hidden in the worst case. One must reduce the size of the Safari window just to switch tabs, and then maximize it again.

This idea should be considered a failure. It's a complete mistake to put such core application functionality into the window title bar like that. It doesn't work well for the user, other applications too easily interfere with it, and it's much more distracting. Worst of all, there's really no added benefit. Whatever small amount of area is gained within the browser window does not make up for the inconvenience and problems the new tab position brings.