Re: [Usability] Tab consistency

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 23:55 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:

> Given the giant mess Firefox made of their Preferences dialog, changing it
> though several iterations during their 1.x cycle and flushing down the
> toilet years of techincal support Netscape built up, and ending up with an
> interface with absolutely no flexibility to invitably add more options
> later, I do not for a second trust that they are doing thourough usability
> testing.  

Well, I did say "user feedback", rather than "user testing" :)  They're
not necessarily the same thing, as we all know from our experiences with
GNOME.

> Harsh but I'm highly skeptical about their move to put close
> buttons on every tab.
> 
> The GNOME HIG states "Forgive the user".  Puttting close buttons on every
> tab is not very forgiving of users who accidentally close a tab and then
> realise they want to reopen it. 

Well, personally I welcomed Firefox moving to this model (perhaps
because I'm used to Safari on OSX), rather than having Close way over at
the right where it used to be, disconnected form the thing it was
operating on.  IIRC they experimented with another model where the Close
button only appeared on the active tab, though, which might have been a
safer default.  (You can probably still configure it do that in the
about:config page, I haven't looked recently.)

If you close a tab accidentally, it's usually not hard to recover it
from the History list, so it's reasonably forgiving in that sense.
There's possibly a case to be made for Undo being able to recover closed
tabs too, although traditionally Undo has never been able to "un-close"
tabs or windows in any type of application that I can think of.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems