The world's crappiest UI feature [benlehman]

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I want to write about a new UI "feature" in Firefox 3.5. I want to explain in depth how much it sucks. But I'm jet-lagged to hell, so I'll just say "the thing where you drag a tab into the window that it's in an it opens up a new window with that tab while simultaneously closing the old tab in the old window" is a crappy as hell feature for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is I have no idea why you'd want to do it in the first place.

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There are 10 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

It's a feature Opera has had for a while. I assume you can also put it back, right?

It is handy for large multi-monitor setups where you want to view 3-4 webpages at once.

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It is not undoable by control-z. I have no idea if you can drag windows into tabs, as my screen cannot accommodate that sort of thing (firefox windows fill the screen.)

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On the other side of the coin, I have always longed for the feature where you drag a tab off the tab bar and it becomes its own window. Sometimes (commonly) I open things in tabs, then realize later that I want to see them side-by-side instead.

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If it was "drag to somewhere offscreen and it becomes a new window" that would be great and make sense. It's the fact that dragging it into the window itself causes a spawn that's a brutally bad idea.

yrs--
--Ben

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Oh, I misunderstood then. That is kind of dumb, yeah.

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Huh, I stand corrected. I thought it was Safari-style, "drag the tab out of the menu bar, and the place you drag it to just determines where the new window appears." The Firefox version does seem much more retarded.

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You can always Ctrl+N up a new window, then drag the tab over to it. I do it all the time.

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The first time I did that by accident, I was like "What the hell just happened??". It's very surprising when you don't expect it. And it's much too easy to trigger it by accident.

Today, though, I had a legit use for it. When I went into work I had a browser session open on my laptop from the night before. I had like 24 tabs open. Half of them were vitally work-related tasks from yesterday. The other half were from last night, and they were open to articles on health care and politics which I wanted to read later but which I really didn't want to have open at work. Solution: Drag all the politics tabs to a new window, bookmark all tabs as a folder called 'read later', then close the window. Problem solved.

So, it has legit uses. But I agree it's way too easy to trigger by accident, and a pain to get back to normal after you've triggered it. Making it undoable with ctrl-Z would help.

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Oh, if you write a more detailed post about the reasons why the feature sucks, I will be happy to give it to the people in the UX department at Moz.

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Let me try to make a topics list here, to expand to a larger post later:
1) Absolutely huge target area for a relatively particular feature.
2) Destroys standard drag-n-drop behavior.
3) Hell on smaller monitors.
4) Not easily reversible.
5) Easily confused with another, more commonly useful feature.

yrs--
--Ben

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benlehman

The world's crappiest UI feature

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