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.

Today I read yet another criticism of the GTK+ file selector dialog. And I must say, the criticism is completely valid, but nothing new. The GTK+ file dialog has always been one of the shames of the open source world.

Anyone reading this who doesn't agree and hasn't yet looked at the screenshot included in the article linked to above, please go check it out. There is no way that the appearance and layout of that dialog can be justified. It goes beyond a minor bug or annoyance, to the point of the dialog being unusable.

The poor state of the GTK+ file chooser dialog has been noted by a number of other people in the past. This artice, from 2007, goes step-by-step through the pains one must endure to just save a file using the GTK+ file selector dialog. There is an Ubuntu Brainstorm idea from 2008 that is calling for improvements to the GTK+ file dialog. There is a forum post from early 2005 pointing out the various UI design flaws of the GTK+ file selector dialog, plus a screenshot comparison to the much better KDE file dialog. Even regular GNOME users feel it is confusing and needs improvements, and it is also inefficient to use.

In fact, we can go all the way back to this archived screenshot from the GTK+ Web site, apparently taken before the end of January 1999. As we can see, there has been little real improvement over the past decade. While the file selector dialogs of other UI toolkits and environments have evolved and improved over time, the GTK+ file dialog started out lousy, and has remained that way for years. And I don't think it can be salvaged. What's there now needs to be trashed, and re-implemented properly, drawing from the more usable file selector dialogs of Qt, FOX Toolkit, and even Microsoft Windows.

A public beta of Windows 7 was made recently, and one area that has seen some change is the Taskbar. Not everybody is happy with these changes, either. One article that I read focused on how it's difficult to tell which applications are running, and which are not. I have to agree with the points that were made there. It really isn't immediately obvious which items on the Taskbar represent executing programs, and which are just icons to start the applications.

One of the commenters to that article, going by the name technology, suggested at 3:04 PM that it doesn't matter if one can tell whether or not a given application is running: In the majority of use cases, what does it matter if a program is running or not? If I want to browse the internet I click on the Firefox icon. If I want to check my mail I click on the Outlook icon.

I have to disagree very much with this stance. Not everyone starts an application, uses it, and then closes it once done for the time being. Myself, and many others, start an application, use it, let it continue to run while we move on to some other task, come back to the application sometime later, use it some more, move on to another task, and so forth.

I may have several different instances of PowerShell or cmd.exe open at one time. Depending on the task, they might have been changed to different working directories. Some may have also had certain environment variables set. What I don't want to be doing is starting up a new instance of say cmd.exe, when an existing instance has already been adjusted to allow me to perform a certain task.

I would like to see Microsoft make some changes here. It needs to be clear to users which icons represent applications that are currently executing, and which are icons that can be used to start a new process for a given application. Starting new processes and managing existing ones is a core aspect of using a desktop environment. Mistakes here can have significant productivity impacts for the desktop environment's users.