The world's crappiest UI feature

[benlehman]

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.

Comments

(Jono here)

[(Anonymous)]

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.