Why the Safari4 UI Sucks
Today when I announced that Safari4 sucks on Twitter you would’ve thought I killed a kitten. Apparently when something is in beta you have no right to claim that it sucks as if being in beta gives you a right to suckage. Beta gives you a right to have a couple of bugs for testing, but beta doesn’t give you the right to come up with a messed up UI for your application.
What’s that you say? I just need some time to get used to the new interface? It’s a web browser. Why do I have to get used to a new interface when I have been using browsers for over 12 years? Let’s just get down to the problems.
I want to drag
My desktop uses a 30″ monitor. With a monitor that big you are going to move windows around. Safari doesn’t use a title bar which is the place I usually go to so I can drag a window around. Instead there are tabs there. Well when I click and hold a tab I expect to be able to move the tabs around, but now I click and hold a tab to move the window around. Maybe I can still move tabs around, I’m not sure, I gave up.
Tabs go so far away
Like most people who are reading this I love to open up a ton of tabs when browsing the web. See a link I want to checkout? I tab it. Now when I want to go to the tab I have to skip over my bookmarks list and the address bar. Why can’t I just go to my tabs right above the content? Matter of fact why do I have to look up higher to figure out exactly where am I at in my tabbed madness?
Open up a ton of tabs and eventually you can’t even read the titles of the pages you are on. Why even bother with title tags in our html anymore? Why move the tabs in the first place? To copy Chrome? Save some vertical space since the title bar was taking up so much to begin with?
Hell on my laptop it’s even worse. The tabs are touching the top of the screen where the actual application menus are. I want to go to my BullieBoard! tab, not File->SaveAs dammit.
Refresh is over there
Backward. Forward. Refresh. Stop. All browser conventions that have been around forever. In Safari4 what do I get? Backward. Forward. Where is refresh at? Oh it’s in the address bar after the RSS button. How did that make any sense?
Oh just press F5 you say. Well I don’t want to use a keyboard shortcut. I want to go where the refresh button has always been and click it. What exactly was the point in moving it? To allow for a slighty longer address bar? Once you start to get passed 20 chars in the url I kind of stop paying attention so I don’t need a longer address bar. Even the Chrome developers were wise anough to keep Refresh where it was.
Too cute
Apple simply got too cute with this one. I’m all for UI innovation. Hell, most of the conventions on the iPod aren’t traditional, but I don’t mind reading a manual for a physical product. Having to figure out a web browser is lame. It’s not as if these changes made the application siginificantly better. These changes were just made to do something different, not better. They just got too smart for their UI.
At least it’s fast, but that speed is countered by how much time it takes me to remember where the tabs are and figuring out how I can refresh a page. I know, I’m an idiot for not being able to figure out and quickly adjust to a browser. Please forgive me.
UPDATE: Seems me and Anthony Piraino are in agreement. Great discussion follows.
5 Responses
Ben Bleikamp / 02.25.09
Most of the complaints seem to be based on what you’re used to from using Firefox or previous versions of Safari, not actually poor UI decisions.
You can still move the browser around by clicking on a tab, and if you click on the far right of a tab you can drag it to reorder it or move it to another browser window completely. It was not obvious to you, but it was to me – there is no proof it will not be obvious to most users.
The tabs being on top also provides more real estate for the content of the web pages, which I am a fan of. This is a personal preference. While the new location takes getting used to, there is nothing inherently wrong with it.
Refresh being on the far left is annoying. Agreed. I want it next to my other key browser actions.
My question would be, if you’ve never used a browser before, would these UI changes actually take that much work to figure out? Sometimes forward progress takes relatively drastic change that “power users” might find annoying at first, but in the end is better for everyone.
Paul Scrivens / 02.25.09
So to drag a tab I have to make sure my mouse is held over the small tiny right corner of the tab? How is that better UI design in any way? Maybe dragging tabs is a power user thing and I understand being used to Firefox (and every other browser on the planet) can cause me to bulge my eyes when trying out Safari4, but again I’m not seeing the changes as progress.
I have no problem with progress when in the end it makes my experience better. I’m not seeing how these changes will make the experience better in the long term. I have to move further to navigate within the application (tabs) and the one page convention that isn’t with the rest of the page conventions (refresh) is locked up and hidden away in the url bar and all of this for a couple more sentences of content?
To me that is going at it with some fresh eyes and I have no doubt if I used the browser everyday after a while I would get used to it as we all do with anything we use. Just don’t see why we have to get used to it though.
Paul Scrivens / 02.25.09
Bah and on my laptop I’m trying to bounce around tabs and most of the time the whole window moves. Stay still dammit.
Marco (Griffith) Jardim / 02.26.09
It’s a general convention in user interfaces that when you click a title bar on any application, be it web or offline app that you can drag the body of the said title bar. As such, when you click on a tab and hold it, you immediately expect to be able to drag the said tab, and not the whole browser. It makes no sense.
Since we’re going on a lim and comparing it with Chrome why don’t you do it in this case? Yes, having the tabs drag’able would make it a bit harder to move the browser around, a bit counter-intuitive because most people are used to dragging applications when they drag them from the title bar. But it’s not counter-intuitive enough to justify such a bad UI decision.
The position of the refresh button didn’t bother me that much because I’m used to using F5 to refresh my pages, like most browsers have and continue to do. But oh… wait, refresh is CMD+R…
Given that those are probably the two things that I do most in a browser (drag tabs and refresh pages) it’s pretty clear that Safari 4 isn’t the browser for me. It might be for someone else, just not me.
Kudos to their web inspector though.
Ben Bleikamp / 02.26.09
My point is “general conventions” need to be challenged sometimes. The tabs being at the top gives me an extra 30-50 pixels of screen real estate on the browser. As a designer, that is an extra 30-50 pixels of content that I can get in front of users without forcing them to scroll.
Yes, it takes getting used to and doesn’t work like the old way, but that doesn’t make it bad. The Start Bar didn’t work like Windows 3.1, but people got used to it and it was better.