Safari 4 Beta Reaction
So I saw this page about Safari 4 beta and thought I’d check it out. It looks like it has some nice features, but the new tabs on top of the window look absolutely horrible. But I thought I’d check it out and see if it worked better than it looked.
I went to download a copy, and was greeted with this incomprehensible form:
I have no idea what’s going on with this form. Now, I object to providing my email address to download software, but this is just confusing. You can click on the second field and type into it, but there’s no label. It doesn’t seem to do anything. Here’s the markup for it:
<INPUT class="submit" id="submit" value="" src="" type="">
I guess this is supposed to be a submit button, but obviously it’s not going to work. If I hit enter after providing my email address (using Firefox), nothing happens. If I try it in Safari, I get this:
Download site grief aside, what the hell were they smoking in Cupertino? I can’t see any benefit to moving tabs into the titlebar, and there are a couple drawbacks.
Usability
The new tab placement seems to contradict Fitt’s Law. In a nutshell, Fitt’s Law says that there are five places on the screen that are easier to move a mouse pointer to than any others. They are the four edges of the screen and the current position of the pointer. Apple’s menubar follows Fitt’s Law, because you can just fling the pointer to the top of the screen to acquire it. The right-click menu popularized by Windows 95 is another example; that’s the place the pointer is at.
In general, Fitt’s Law is extrapolated to mean that controls should be closer to the pointer and on the edges. In Safari 4, the tabs have moved further away from where the pointer is likely to be. On the flip side, they’re bigger, so they’ll be easier to acquire.
Quickly browsing reactions to Safari’s new tabs, the response seems quite negative.
UI Model
The other usability problem with the new tab placement is one of the conceptual model of the tabs. With the old version of Safari, the tabs were connected to the document; there’s a direct link between a tab and a document, and it’s clear what the tab represents. With the tabs moved up top, the model changes. A tab now represents a window, not a document.
Now, this isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s definitely an adjustment. And the model is more likely to break down. For the model to be consistent, everything in the toolbar needs to be distinct per tab. If things in that space persist between tabs, things become confusing.
I do think it makes sense with tearable tabs, since a tab can become it’s own window. It’s easier to see them all as windows in the first place, rather than tabs which can become windows. But it looks weird. Really weird:
Expectations
The other part of this is user expectation. Tabs have always been linked to documents, rather than windows. This is an adjustment, and I don’t see a benefit to it. When it comes to usability, expectations matter, and you can’t just go changing things to be different.
Let’s say you were an automobile manufacturer. With your newfound billions in government money, you decide to build an awesome car. It’ll be different, and stand out, and people will just love it. These differences will be baked in, present in even the smallest detail.
What about those turn signals? Boring! Those haven’t changed in ages. Why should pushing the lever down indicate left? Let’s change it! When you push it up, it will indicate a left, and when you push it down, a right.
Objectively, this is exactly as usable as how turn signals normally are. The lever is in the same place, and it moves in the same way. But nobody expects it to work this way, and when people try to indicate a turn, they’ll become confused and angry that they don’t work the way they expect. And turn signals work just fine. There’s so much inertia behind this interaction, you would need something truly revolutionary to impact it.
The new tab placement seems to be a turn signal change to me. Not objectively better, but harder to use because they break expectations.
Discussion