Betalogue

I admire Apple for the way that they have implemented the tabs in the latest Safari beta. One problem I always had with tabs is that switching tabs would cause the window title in the title bar to change — but that title bar was not visually part of the tab, so that was inconsistent from a UI point of view.

In Safari Beta 2, the currently active tab actually forms a continuous brushed-metal area with the tool bar and the window title bar — so effectively the user gets the sense that the window title bar is part of the tab as well. So now when switching tabs the change in the window title bar makes sense.

It’s a detail, but it’s important.

Now I’d like Apple to take things one step further: I constantly find myself tempted to transfer a given tab from one window to another. One is not always as organized as one would like to be: I frequently open a tab in a new window only to realize that I actually wanted to add that particular tab to an existing browser window. In ORDER to do this, I’d like to be able to simply drag-and-drop tabs from one window to another, much in the same way that palette tabs can be dragged-and-dropped from one palette to another in Adobe’s programs.

Would make sense, wouldn’t it? There’s not much danger of people moving tabs around accidentally, since there’s no other situation where people would click-and-hold on a tab and drag the mouse. But if there is any concern, make it optional by requiring that a modifier key is depressed at the same time.

[This item was submitted to Apple through the Mac OS X Feedback page.]

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, April 15th, 2003 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.