[Usability]Extremely narrow toolbar icons

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

Hello again,

sorry for spamming this list, but this just caught my attention and 
I believe it's too important to let it slip.
I read this nice article about distance and size of targets in a GUI,
etc, I guess you all know it. At the end it made a little fun of users
who like to pretend they can work faster with small icons and I felt a
little bit embarrassed. ;) So I tried the "Text below icons" toolbar
mode instead of prioritytext like I did before. First I tested this in
Galeon and found out that it really makes me a bit faster in hitting the
NEW and RELOAD buttons which I used quite a lot and the BACK button was
still large enough (or a big larger), I just need to get used to it's
new position. 
But then I tried Nautilus and found that my BACK and UP buttons are both
extremely narrow. They use only as much width as the text needs. This
results in those (the most important!) buttons beeing the smallest,
while FORWARD and RELOAD (I barely ever use them) are the largest. The
BACK button now is even more difficult to hit than with priority text
and it feels unimportant next to the large FORWARD button.
This is all opposed to Galeon where every button is of the same width
and conventionally large. So I'm wondering, why was it decided to narrow
them down as much as possible? And isn't this really terrible for a GUI?
I'm cowering in fear that Galeon2 will show the same behaviour. Please
tell me that this was just an oversight and not an intentional design
decision. It also breaks the HIG rule that buttons in a row should have
the same width btw, if you see them as buttons. Oh I will hurry to quit
now as there is a terrible storm right above our house, eek!

- Daniel *runs*