UI Thoughts on FireFox 2

I downloaded the latest release candidate for FireFox a few nights ago, and have been using it for a while now, and I've found myself with some fairly strong opinions about my experience.

Visually speaking, the user interface is a slight improvement over the previous one. They're both clean UIs, but the new one looks slightly better on Vista. What's more, I've had less issues running FireFox 2 on Vista than I have with the 1.5 series. For instance, the interface no longer goes entirely unresponsive until I deactivate and reactivate the browser. Paste seems to always work, and so one. So it's easier to be productive with it.

Unfortunately, they've changed the behavior of the tabs in such a way that I think I will probably go back to 1.5 because of (unless I can find a way to switch the tabs back to the old behavior). Visually speaking, the tabs are fine. But usability wise, they are a step backwards for me.

For starters, the tabs now house the close button individually. This may work well for some applications where the tabs are meant to stay open for longer periods of time (such as with a programming IDE), but for an application where the tabs are meant to come and go rather quickly, this is a bad idea. To begin with, each tab now takes up an extra 20 to 22 pixels, so you can fit less tabs on the screen at a given time. But even more annoying than that, your spatial memory is entirely thrown for a loop -- trying to close a number of tabs with the mouse means having to hit a constantly moving target. In previous versions of FireFox, the close widget was on the far-right of the tab bar, and it was a stationary object. So you could close multiple windows by using your spatial memory.

The next thing which annoys me is that the the tabs no longer make good use of space on the window -- they do resize, but it's a much, much larger size. In part, this is because the space taken up by the close button. But for readability, the size only gets to a certain width, and then you have to start scrolling the tabs. This is a reasonable enough approach, but scrolling should be an absolute last resort. Many websites supply an icon in the tab, and this icon allows you to easily identify what content belongs to which tab. So even if the tabs are very small, you can still get a decent amount of information quickly. What's more, if there's confusion, the tooltip will clarify the website, or you can simply click on the tab to see what's there. When you scroll, you lose information that you have no hope of getting back without a lot of clicks. Now, I know they added the drop-down arrow to see the entire list -- but that's extra steps I now have to take to get information I previously had instant access to.

Finally, the last annoyance I have is with regards to the tab closing behavior. When I close a tab, I expect some visual response to happen. Instead, I'm jarred into wondering what I just did. A good example of this is by opening up two new tabs side by side. Now click the close button on the right one. See what I mean? There's almost no visual indication of the close operation because everything happens so very quickly. At least give a very small animation to the close (such as the tab sliding from right to left) so that my brain doesn't go "wait, didn't I just close that?" Speaking of closing tabs, it used to be that closing the last tab closed the entire browser window. Now it brings up a blank tab. This makes for a bad user experience for a few reasons, the most annoying of which is that an action which used to close the window no longer does so, in a jarring fashion. What's more, there's no visual indication that you can't close the last blank tab -- the close button is still enabled, but when you click on it nothing happens.

Now, I realize that this isn't released software. But it's in fc stages, so I'm pretty sure the behaviors aren't going to change. And I also realize that some of these behaviors make sense for a large number of people. However, I frequently have 10-15 tabs open and am constantly navigating between them. What I've found with this release is that my productivity is noticeably slower -- and not just because I've not given it a chance or gotten used to it. It's because the older version was designed more for my usage pattern than the newer one. If I can find a way to get the old tab behaviors back, then I'd gleefully use the new version of FireFox. But if I can't, then I'll be sticking with 1.5 until I'm forced to update.