Following the posting of my previous entry, I tried Firefox 4. It was then that I realized another huge problem with the latest browser versions, or, more precisely, the latest “trend”.

The “tabs on top” idea. It’s completely against the entire concept of tabs at all. Let me explain.

Now, we are already familiar with tabbed dialogs and tab controls; the basic idea is you have a set of tabs, and clicking on that tab brings the “contents” of that tab to the front. One of the tenets of a good UI design is the completely scrap tabs if you need to have multiple rows, with horizontal scrolling being acceptable as well. The main reason for this is that when you clicked a tab that was “behind” (on top) of the row, it would move that entire row of tabs to the  “front” so that it’s tab would connect to the client area.

The thing is, the main idea here was that the tab was “connected” to something. With the “tabs on top” approach, it’s not even close to following the whole metaphor of actual manilla tabbed folders as much as it is just randomly putting a UI element at the top for no reason. only items that are changed should be present in the tabs client area. With Chrome, you’ve got the addressbar (changed) favourites (not changed) bookmark bar (not changed) options button, not changed, etc. with firefox 4 it is worse, every single element is underneath the “tab-bar”. I can’t even begin the express my confusion. What the hell happened? Did UI developers all become mentally incapable of basic reasoning?  Having “tabs on top” hasn’t been done before because it’s stupid, not because it hasn’t been thought of before. My old editor that I wrote had a plugin that would show active documents as tabs, I accidentally put it on top and I quite remember saying “hmm, maybe I should make it an option?” and responded to myself “No, only an idiot would think having the tabs on top was a good idea” Tabbed browsing works great, but you aren’t going to improve it by shuffling some of the UI elements around any more then you will increase the likelyhood of getting a royal flush by simply shuffling a deck multiple times. And last time I checked UI design wasn’t supposed to be a game of chance anyway.

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