Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Why Safari 4’s new tab layout is detrimental to usability

While there were many good improvements made to Safari 4 beta, I hope that Apple considers bringing the tabs back to their rightful place, or at least offering an option for classic tab view. Here are the reasons I believe the new tab layout is actually detrimental to usability.

1. Fitts’s law. When I click to open a new tab, I previously had immediate visual feedback that this had occurred. Now I have to look past two additional rows of screen real estate (the shortcut bar, and the url bar) to spot the change. I have already had a few times where I command-clicked a link to open in a tab and had a bit of trouble spotting that the tab had actually opened. Not only does it affect the distance my gaze has to travel, but also my mouse, when going from page content to clicking between tabs I now have to pass two additional rows.
2. Inconsistency. Up to the release of Safari 4, all Mac applications had a uniform title bar. The top line of the window was reserved as a place to display the window title. Now the top line is taken up by tabs, making this application behave differently than every other. Not only is this visually inconsistent, but if you click the corner of a tab you can end up dragging the tab instead of the window. You can also (with admittedly small probability) land on the close tab icon when trying to drag the window, which will not enable you to drag at all. While both of these events have small target areas, and thus low probability of being hit, the fact that it’s possible makes it a worse choice for usability.

Why did they do it? I am guessing that eliminating the standard title bar and using that real estate for tabs enables us to gain about 25 pixels more vertical space for actual page content. But I don’t think 25 pixels of content is a fair tradeoff for the usability problems introduced by the change.

Update: Restore your sanity:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

not to mention, that if you have 2 or 3 opened tabs, you have to navigate more than half the screen with your mouse just to reach the 3rd tab, which is totally stupid imho, specially coming from Apple. Most apple fanboys are telling me “new tabs are just a matter of getting used to”…. why i have to get used to something that sucks is beyond me :/

I’m a little unsure about them, but I’m willing to give it a try. Screen space is nice to have, but I’ll agree the tabs might not be worth it. In any case, I believe there’s a sneaky way to change them back to the old style:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/02/24/safari-4-defaults

Thanks Trevor! Here’s the magic sauce that turns on the old tab layout (run in terminal):

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

I noticed both things, but suspect that the impact of both will diminish with a few days use. OTOH, gaining 25 px is good. So I’m waiting to decide whether I’m pro or con until I’ve used it a while.

Looks like they ripped off Chrome. So, MS follows Apple in design, is Apple now following Chrome? ;P Sorry, I couldn’t resist.