The Invisible: ‘A Piece With a Lot of Screenshots About the Close Tab Behaviour in Google Chrome’

Excellent, detailed analysis by Basil Safwat regarding some very clever UI design in Chrome’s tab-closing behavior.

(But he’s wrong that it excuses putting the close buttons on the right. It’s a grammar thing — in the Mac UI grammar, close buttons go on the left. Even if you buy Safwat’s “least-funky behavior” argument, I’d argue that Chrome’s clever (but subtle!) tab-resizing-on-close behavior is far less funky than putting close buttons on the right side of a Mac app. I think Google put them on the right simply to stay consistent with its Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS variants — putting cross-platform consistency over Mac OS consistency. Update: And “Firefox does it too” is not a ringing endorsement for good Mac UI design. Firefox is a poster child for crummy fake-Mac-UI cross-platform ports.)

★ Thursday, 10 December 2009