Chrome’s browser tabs – logical position vs usability
If, like me, you subscribe to a number of web-related blogs in an effort to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world of websites and the internet, you’ll have heard all the chatter about Chrome, Google’s new web browser. I reckon it sounds good in boring, but important, ways – more stable, faster javascript, ability for certain components to crash without crashing the whole browser. They say they’ve re-thought the web browser from scratch, and it seems they have addressed some important issues that maybe no-one else, committed to extant browsers, would have been able to – but from the point of view of allowing people to use the web in new and exciting ways it’s a bit of a dud. Firefox’s add-ons, and even IE8’s anticipated new features are far more innovative, flexible and of use to users.
One immediately obvious attempt by Google to break new user interface ground is the positioning of their tabs. All existing tabbed browsers (Safari is the example in the picture) put the tabs below the address bar. Chrome, on the other hand, puts them above.
This makes sense, as the address bar is the address of the web page in the tab – the address of the whole browser doesn’t actually make sense when a browser supports multiple tabs.
But does it make the browser easier to use? I think not (although one has to assume the people at Google have tested it thoroughly and found the opposite, or at least inconclusive evidence either way).
Often I open up numerous tabs for the sole reason of wanting to hop between them. In this situation I can imagine the address bar getting in the way, both physically (you have to move the mouse further to get from hovering over the page and clicking on the tab), and conceptually (In these days of super-doopa search, and long, dynamically generated URL’s a website’s URL doesn’t take on the de facto role of “page title” it once did. It could be argued that putting the address bar physically within the tab adds semantic clutter rather than information of high priority to the user. Putting it outside the tab makes it less of a distraction).
So to sum up, I think it’s a good example of when the logical, ideal way to set up a user interface doesn’t necessarily equate to the most ergonomic way.
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Tags: address bar, chrome, Google, position, tabs, usability