Safari 4 Beta: UI Disaster
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 28th Feb 2009 11:47 UTC
Apple A few days ago, Apple surprised everyone by releasing the first beta of Safari 4, the company's latest version of their WebKit browser. While I generally love Safari on the Mac (my browser of choice on that side of the fence), I've never felt as comfortable with it on the Windows side of things. In any case, this latest beta has made a very bold move in the interface department, and I'm sad to say that it's not for the better. Let me explain where it went wrong for Apple.
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RE: What?
by Nelson on Sat 28th Feb 2009 15:56 UTC in reply to "What?"
Nelson
Member since:
2005-11-29


Sure you better now than Apple when it comes to software design.


This is an article about User Experience. Who would know better about User Experience than..oh I don't know, a user?

The "Apple knows best" argument is silly when you think about the amount of people who use their program.

Perhaps they did some usability testing, maybe they put some of the best guys in the field on the product, but your sort of blanket statement is misleading at best.


That makes zero sense, what are you talking about?


Chrome puts the Tabs on Top as a UI overlay, as opposed to a weird frankenstein mashup of Tab and Title Bar.

If you look at Chrome on Vista, they extend the Glass into the Client Area, and overlay the tabs ontop. You still have a region which you can interact with in the form of a title bar. Tabs are tabs and the title bar is a title bar.


what makes you think that you can tell you know better than some professionals with such arrogance? You don't write software, so you would not be better than a 6 year old in doing it, would you?


First off, that's a logical fallacy. You can't flatly say that because X believes that Y is true, then Y has to be true.

It's ridiculous to think like that, what is so wrong about someone else forming their own opinion about a product, and writing an article on it?


Let me get it straight. You are neither a software expert nor a professional in designing user interface nor even a software evangelist. You have absolutely no record on software UI design and engineering, so why are you pretending that you know about it? In other words, this means that when you allow yourself to judge about someone else work on software, please have the humility to do it in accordance to your competence.


Again, he's the user. One of those who ultimately has to deal with the product on a day to day basis, if his opinion is to be rendered useless, then what is the point of even making a product like this available to the general public?

You're being incredibly dense.


I do believe that there are good and bad aspects on this design (and come one trying to say that Chrome makes it better is totally stupid as the same fundamental problems arise with Chrome), but that should be said, not your collection of non-sense. Also you are certainly not old enough to
have such arrogance towards some people who certainly were coding when you did not realize that you were on Earth yet.


Chrome does not suffer from such problems, at least not to the glaring, and in my opinion, embarassing extent that Safari 4 does.

You've said arrogance many times in your post, but the only one coming off as arrogant is you.

Crap, does not make any sense, you are saying nothing that makes your argument to be considered. Why the 3D effect should change when you have more tabs? Making it lighter would render the tab difficult to locate among a lot of them and it would certainly be not consistent.


For all the ranting you seem to do about UI design, you seem to be unable to grasp the concept of using color contrast to focus attention. The way Apple is doing it (At least on Windows) works, but it's not the best way to do it.



What? Read yourself.....　Again you fail to explain what you mean by spatial memory, spatial memory of what, tab title, location, content, what?


He pretty clearly says that it's the size of the tabs.
You're rushing through his words and losing your objectivity.


And why it does not wok on this design. You are just expressing your personal feeling without to explain why the implementation is flawed by design.


Look up the concept of spatial memory, and muscle memory. Basically, it boils down to the user not having to constantly readjust where his mouse should go to.

If you have a stationary target, you are more efficient, but if you have a moving target, such as a variable sized tab, and to add ontop of that, additional variable targets such as the Close Button and Move Tab button, it further complicates interaction.


Couldn't we argue that such behavior gives more feedback on what it is going on to the user? And what is the resize handle you are talking about? The handle does not serve for resizing the tab, but only to move it. And why you bother that they move, of course they move as tabs are added, and what? They belong to each tab, so the user does not need to follow their displacement every time he/she adds a tab.


Sure you can, you can also argue that the moon is made of cheese. It does not make it a good argument.


Also the handle for tabs in background only appears when you move your mouse over it, so how it moves does not matter because the user anyway sees what he/she has on the active tab.


Doesn't really matter if the size of tabs are constantly changing. Safari definitely has the more erratic behavior when it comes to this, as opposed to every other browser.



By the way what a real UI designer thinks about Safari 4?

http://blog.cocoia.com/2009/02/24/safari-4-ui-breakdown/

Read it and don't pretend that you know better than him.


You mean, there's an article written by a person. An authoritive subject on a completely subjective matter? Irrelevant.

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