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Firefox 2.0 available
Firefox 2.0 available
Posted Oct 25, 2006 14:10 UTC (Wed) by ajross (subscriber, #4563)In reply to: Firefox 2.0 available by smitty_one_each
Parent article: Firefox 2.0 available
Ctrl-W is easier to type and works just as well. :)
Also, forcing the user to find and click a button when a keyboard accelerator exists for the same task is only a mild usability problem. Having a button detached from the thing it is acting on, however, is actually a fairly serious one. I haven't done testing, obviously, but I'm willing to bet that novice users routinely failed to understand what that close button was doing at the right side of the window. Putting the button on the tab removes all ambiguity.
And no one else has mentioned it, but note that the close button has been replaced with a drop-down list of all the tabs in the window. This is a great example of a simple addition that greatly improves usability for people like me with zillions of tabs open.
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Firefox 2.0 available
Posted Oct 25, 2006 14:49 UTC (Wed) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
If there is only one close button for multiple tabs, then you can have a race condition where a new tab is being opened at the same time that you are trying to close a tab, and focus might or might not switch to the new tab just as the close button takes effect. (I had this problem all the time, actually.)
Firefox 2.0 available
Posted Oct 25, 2006 22:05 UTC (Wed) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]
It all depends if I'm currently holding the mouse/trackball or not. If I have my hands on the keyboard then the problem does not exist (actually, then a completely different problem exists: that it's impossible to know which part of the web browser has focus, but that's a whole different story and shows Firefox is really designed to navigate with the mouse).
Having the close buttons on the tabs has other usability issues. It is very easy to close a tab my mistake instead of selecting it, especially when you have many tabs open. It's also not very good that the buttons move as the tabs change their width. I guess they had a reason why they changed to having a fixed button position before.
I'm not against change in itself, but changing and then changing back seems a bit unmotivated.