Tabbed browsing UI changes considered painful
As an experiment I started using Flock Beta 1 instead of Firefox today. So far it’s going well, with one major issue.
Firefox (at least up to the current 1.5) has a close button over on the right hand side for closing the current tab. It looks like this:
To close the current tab, you click the X on the far right.
Flock, on the other hand, has a close button for each tab, like this:
To close the current tab, you click the X on that tab. Easy, right?
Unfortunately, after a couple years of using Firefox I’m pretty used to clicking that X on the far right side. And when you have a bunch of tabs open in Flock, there is an X on the far right side: the close button for the rightmost tab. So I see it, click it, wonder why my current tab is still there, and then realize that I just killed the rightmost background tab. Doh! I’ve done that about 10 times so far, and sometimes I don’t even remember what I had there other than that I was planning to read it.
Suggestion for browser developers: If you’re going to change the way tab closing works, add an “undo close tab” feature at the same time. That way people can at least recover from accidentally closing tabs until they get used to the change.
The Firefox developers have acknowledged that putting the close button off to the right was a mistake. I believe FF 2.0 now has per-tab close buttons just like Flock. Ironically I think that IE7 does it right - you can’t close a tab that’s not in focus. Clicking on a background tab’s “X” just brings it forward.
All of this doesn’t make the change any less frustrating of course :-)
Comment by Ken Norton — June 16, 2006 @ 5:26 pm
I’ve been using Flock for about two days now. I don’t have this problem, because I always used extensions to get the same behavior in FireFox as Flock does by default.
Many firefox extensions can work with Flock, I believe. Have you considered one of the extensions with extra configuration options for tabs, and perhaps it can be used to configure Flock properly with its tabs. The internal configurations and mechanisms for tabs in Flock should be compatible.
If it does work, that would be a good sign of the real future power up Firefox, and the move from the browser from an application to more of a platform than every before. It will be great one day when any extension/plugin will work with any base application that is compatible with what it does, or something along those lofty, big-dream ideas.
Comment by Calvin Spealman — June 16, 2006 @ 8:48 pm
Calvin -
Flock has a bunch of extensions available at http://extensions.flock.com/extensions. I couldn’t use Flock as my primary browser without at least the Web Developer and FireBug extensions, so I was glad to see that they have them. From the description here it sounds very easy to modify Firefox extensions to run in Flock. Hopefully in the future it won’t require modification at all.
Comment by Abe — June 16, 2006 @ 9:24 pm
Abe & Calvin,
Most firefox extensions do work in flock, but aren’t configured to do so. We (Ian specifically) just implimented a hack to the extension manager to allow flock to install firefox extensions warning you that the extension was written for firefox and may not work.
Also getting how the (x) works isn’t easy. Many people like the ability to close tabs they aren’t using (instead of having to switch, close, be taken to another tab after it closes, then switch back).
Undo tab close is an interesting idea though!
Comment by Jesse Andrews — June 17, 2006 @ 12:25 am
If you do go back to firefox I highly recommend the Tab Mix Plus plug-in. It adds functions like “undo close tab” and “duplicate tab,” which are quite handy.
Comment by Scott Johnston — June 19, 2006 @ 10:35 am
Jesse - I remember when I switched to firefox (from Galeon if I remember correctly), I didn’t like the single close button on the right. Having a per-tab close button does make sense. My problem isn’t the idea, but the way it combines with my muscle memory to create unexpected data loss.
Other than undo-close-tab, some possible ways to improve the behavior would be to make clicking anywhere on a background tab bring it to the front (as Ken suggested), use a mouseover effect to highlight the entire tab that will be closed, or make the close button close onclick intead of onmousedown, so you have a little more of a chance to realize you’re doing the wrong thing.
Scott, thanks for the suggestion - if and when I do switch back to FF I’ll check it out.
Comment by Abe — June 19, 2006 @ 11:02 am
I started using the Tab Mix Plus plug-in and appreciated all of its functionality, but I too had a problem with having no X on the far right to close the current tab. To help me out, I followed the instructions from this web page to make the active tab easier to distinguish.
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips
Instead of the: rgb(222,218,210) that they suggested, I used (255,255,102) to get a pale yellow background.
Here is a link for different colors:
http://www.web-source.net/216_color_chart.htm
Hope this helps.
Comment by Robert — October 5, 2006 @ 10:22 am