You know, sometimes people try to make things better by changing something that already worked. Or, just to be different, some people like Google’s thought of putting tabs on top of the browser window, cause supposedly it makes sense. Well, here’s why it doesn’t, never did, and shouldn’t.

Distance

One thing I learned while designing interfaces was that the less distance you could get the mouse to travel, the better. Google’s theory is that the address bar should be closer, so they ripped out the bookmark bar and put the tabs on top. This way, the address bar and incidentally the search, is really close of access. I won’t even explain how Safari 4 worsens the situation.

So, why would it be worse if the address bar is closer? Just think a bit, what do you do on the Internet? You type addresses all the time? No, nobody does. The first thing you’ll do is click around within a site, fair enough, browsers don’t have a say on that. The second thing, you’ll be multitasking your way with multiple tabs (why do you think Firefox got so popular). And maybe, you’ll be hitting other sites via bookmarks, cause everybody’s got Google as their homepage. But really, the thing that goes on top, except the freaken close button is the address bar! Not the tabs. I always find myself going “crap, the tabs are so uselessly far on Safari, or Chrome for that matters, just a tad not as bad”.

Meaning

Google’s thought is that tabs belong to the top because each represents where you are. As in, the selected tab is kind of the window title. But I can’t help but think a tab is actually better represented immediately before the content, in a way that says, this is me, just under my title, and what you see on top is your browser and everything else that goes with it.

Safari

I’ll have to admit Google at least makes the tabs big enough for them to make sense and for my mouse cursor to actually be able to grab them. It’s just ugly when you put it full screen and the tabs get stuck completely on top without breathing space, blame that on Vista’s stupid full screen functionality, or on Google’s hack into the Windows’ native shell.

In any cases, Safari 4’s brilliant engine is literaly obliterated by the sheer unsuability that its tabs gives. They feel too far, are broken in functionality (you have to drag the ‘handle’ to re-order them, draggin them regularily just drags the window around) and get small, lacking in visibility and feel cramped very fast (yes, even on OS X).