Google Chrome: UI Disaster
Safara 4 Beta was released early this week, with several prominent UI changes such as tab bar on top, speed dial, and history/bookmark search from address bar. Thom Holwerda of OSNews fame, an avid fan of Google Chrome, soon tested the Beta and regarded it as a UI disaster. However, in doing so, Thom has made himself a hypocrite.
Thom's main beef with Safari 4 Beta is that the Safari team stole a fantastic idea from Chrome, bastardized it, and claimed it as their own. Here's what he said:
To me, it seems like Apple had heard that "Chrome has tabs on top", but instead of just being honest and admitting that Google got it right, they set a goal for themselves to make as many arbitrary and useless changes as possible so they could still claim they were innovating.
What Thom failed to realize is that the Chrome team stole not one, but two fantastic ideas from Opera, bastardized them, and claimed them as their own. By that, of course I mean tab bar on top and speed dial.
Opera has had tab bar on top by default for years, and has done it in the right way. You see, in Opera, it is not just about having the tab bar "on top". You can put the tab bar on any of the 4 edges of the window (top, left, bottom, right), and the point is that anything at the opposite side of the tab bar belongs to the tab. The back button, the search box, the page itself, anything at the opposite side of the tab bar belongs to the tab. There is nothing special about this design decision, even though Chrome and Safari both try to make a big deal out of it. If you design a tabbed browser from the ground up rather than retrofitting tabs to a prehistoric browser (ahem, Firefox), this is the only sensible design. This is what Fred Brooks mean by conceptual integrity.
And then we have speed dial, a great feature introduced by Opera about 2 years ago. When you open up a new tab, you will be presented with 9 numbered squares, and you can assign a website to each of the square. Clicking on an unassigned square will pop out a selection list with the top 10 most frequently visited sites and all currently opened sites, followed by a shortened address bar where you can enter a URL manually (with history and auto completion). Clicking on an assigned square or using the shortcuts of CTRL + 1-9 will then bring you to the site.
As you can see, these are 2 fairly simple ideas. There is little room for other browsers to show their innovative touch here, but the Chrome team managed to do it anyway. Kudos. So what they did to the tab bar? It was placed not just on top, but on the very top -- it got merged with the title bar.
At first glance, Chrome merely copied the tab bar on top idea and made a few tweaks. Unfortunately, the tweaks it made violate the principle behind the idea, which is a clear separation of the tab bar and the tab's content. Let's use the bookmarks bar as the example here. In Opera, the bookmarks bar, if enabled, appears above the tab bar (below the menu bar, to be exact, since the tab bar can be placed at other edges). In Chrome, the bookmarks bar appears below the tab bar (below the address bar, to be exact). Is there anything about the bookmarks bar that is specific to the current tab? Nothing. It is global. If you add a bookmark, each Chrome tab in each Chrome window will have the entry in its bookmarks bar. When a global control like this appears in the per-tab content area, it breaks conceptual integrity.
In a tabbed browser environment, there are always things that are global to the whole browser, and things that are local to a particular tab. By being innovative and merging the tab bar with the title bar, Chrome leaves no room for the former. It cannot say to the users that whatever they do in one tab will not affect the other tabs, because it will.
You may argue that this is the correct design for Chrome, given that Chrome spawns a new process for each tab, so a tab can stand on its own as a full application, and all controls can be local to the tab. Well, explain to me why there are 2 chrome.exe processes if I open 1 tab, and 3 chrome.exe processes if I open 2 tabs? That's right, because one of them is the global process. You can't run away from that. Anyway, tying the UI to the implementation details is usually a bad idea, so this has little merit to begin with.
The merging has other implications as well. In Opera, I can double click on the title bar to maximize/restore the window, and I can double click on the tab bar to open a new tab. Chrome can only cater to one of these, and it picked the title bar. That's definitely a sane decision, one that I believe will be made by most people when faced with the question. But why put yourself in the situation to make such a decision in the first place? Why can't we have both?
And what will happen when Chrome get ported to Linux? Unlike the Windows land, there are proper Windows Managers in Linux (ironically). A well-behaved Linux application doesn't mess with the title bar. I have hundreds of applications installed, and not one of them mess with the title bar. Even Dialo 2, when played in windowed mode, has a proper title bar. If Chrome team decides to make the Linux version a good citizen (e.g. relying on something like Netbook Plasma Theme), does that mean I can then double click on the tab bar? But that would make it inconsistent with the Windows version.
And what will happen when Chrome users with wide screens come to their senses and start demanding to have the tab bar at the left edge? Where shall the bookmarks bar be placed then, will the window be split horizontally first and then vertically, or the other way around? Has anyone in the Chrome team ever thought about this when the merging decision was made? Doesn't seem to.
Trying to be too clever with the title bar has put Chrome in a lose-lose situation when it comes to porting to multi-platforms and adapting to changes.
Meanwhile, if the reason behind the merging is to have more screen real-estate for the actual web page, it baffles me why Chrome still doesn't support the full-screen mode. The saving of 20 or so vertical pixels due to the merging is definitely nice, but if I am using a so-called netbook with a limited screen size of 1024x600, I'd definitely love to have the ability to use all 1024x600 pixels for browsing purpose.
Well, enough about the tab bar, let's move on to the next idea bastardized by Chrome, the speed dial. While the Chrome team can claim that they came across the novel idea of tab bar on top all on their own, anyone with or without a clue knows that the "Most visited" page in Chrome came from Opera's speed dial. As I mentioned earlier, this is a very simple idea, one that makes you go "Ah, why didn't I thought of this before" when you first use it. There is almost no room to implement it wrongly, but the Chrome team somehow managed to strike again.
Ok, imagine this. You have a phone that remembers the numbers you have dialed and how frequent you dialed them. Then, every time you press that big fat button on the phone, it will bring up a screen with the 9 most frequently dialed numbers. While in this screen (and only in this screen), pressing 1-9 will then dial the corresponded number for you.
How useful will that be? Well, the answer depends. If you are the kind of person such that every time you flip open the phone, you'd like to see who have you been calling most frequently before deciding who to call, then this feature is a godsend for you. If, however, you are the kind of person that do not have the aforementioned mental disease, this feature is totally useless.
The speed dial, in both phones and browsers, serves a useful purpose. It lets you put something you deem as important at a prominent place, and allows you to reach it with the least effort. It has nothing to do with frequency. You may have speed dial #1 associated with that particular girl's phone number, using it once a year just to confirm that she is not dead yet. Your speed dial, your choice.
In comparison, the most visited page is way smarter. It determines what appears on the page for you, because it is smarter than you. It determines the order things appear on the page for you, because it is smarter than you. You do not have the ability to quickly go to your top favorite site (e.g. sayap.com) by pressing CTRL + 1 from any tab, because you are not smart enough to determine the order. If, like most people, you have been using Google Search most frequently, then you have no choice but to crown it as the super universe page number one (pronounced with Japanese accent). If you just come across a fantastic site (e.g. sayap.com) after using Chrome for 6 months, you can't make it appear in the most visited page other than launching a Chrome DDOS attack to the site. Of course, the site owner would then have to take down the site, leaving you with another useless entry in the most visited page.
To be fair though, I believe that the most visited page feature did indirectly give us something very useful. Firstly, ask yourself this: how could such a useless feature get past user testing? Well, the only reasonable explanation goes like this. A bunch of guys were given Chrome to beta test for a week. After a week, in each of these guys Chrome installation, the most visited page was invariably filled with porn sites. This, of course, can be a major convenience, provided no one else will be using your computer. To overcome this shortcoming, the Chrome team gave birth to something that solves the common problem faced by at least 50% of the mankind -- the infamous incognito mode (a.k.a the porn mode). At this point, the testers became too busy to test this new feature (who can blame them), and nobody give a damn anymore to the most visited page, which got to stay in the browser. Makes perfect sense, isn't it ;)
So, to recap, the Chrome team stole some fantastic ideas from Opera, bastardized them, and claimed them as their own (just read the last page of the comic if you disagree with this statement)
However, unlike Thom, my main beef with Chrome is not that the team stole some fantastic ideas from Opera, bastardized them, and claimed them as their own. No, it is not.
My main beef with Chrome is that the team stole some fantastic ideas from Opera, bastardized them, claimed them as their own, and still shamelessly regarded themselves as making some new open standards and asked others to follow suit and copy from them.
The way I see it, the only new standard set by Chrome is that it is now perfectly fine to steal ideas from others without credit, bastardize them however you want, and still feel good about yourself. Incidentally, this standard is being followed closely by the Safari team, as proven by Safari 4 Beta that comes with a combo tab/title bar that is completely unusable and a "Top Sites" page that apparently "will change to match your evolving tastes". Marvelous.
The Safari team deserves at least a pat on the back from Thom for a job well done.
P.S. This post may make it seems like I consider Chrome as a bad product. Actually, I think it is pretty good. If you work on Chrome, in particularly the backend components such as the multi-process architecture and the javascript engine, I think you are indeed very cool. If you work on Chrome and your name happens to be Ben Goodger or Chris DiBona, well, you sucks.