Chrome’s UI is great but it’s also always the little details that kill it for me. After enjoying Chrome’s instant search (search results and pages load while you are typing) tremendously on a Windows laptop I once again decided to make Chrome my default browser instead of Safari on OS X, at least for a time. That was a week ago and I’m already back to Safari.
The problem was Chrome’s behavior when tearing off tabs. On OS X I usually don’t surf fullscreen, most of the time I have two windows with several tabs and varying widths open, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not. Creating two windows and placing them about right is easy with Safari, I click a tab and drag all the way to the screen edge where I want the window to be. (I basically click and flick my finger to the left or to the right on the trackpad, it’s impossible to miss.) The window will be placed with all its content on the screen. Quickly creating overlapping windows by tearing off tabs is also easy. You just have to drag down. Again, nothing will leave the screen.
Chrome doesn’t allow you to be so careless. The tab will end up exactly where your mouse is pointing even if that means that most of the window is not visible on the screen. You cannot quickly flick with your finger to create a second window and place it in roughly the right spot.
It was a very frustrating experience for me. Chrome really is nearly perfect in all other respects but such a glaring shortcoming is not really tolerable for something I use as frequently as a browser. I prefer how Chrome handles closing tabs but I much more often tear of tabs than closing several of them. (I also tend to use the keyboard shortcut for closing tabs but that is not an excuse for Safari to get closing tabs wrong. The right answer when someone brings up problems or clever tricks when using some application with the mouse is definitely not to say “But there are keyboard shortcuts!” I don’t think you should ever use keyboard shortcuts as excuses for botching an app’s behavior when using the mouse.)
As a (windows) mouse user, having the tab tear off and sit right where I expect it to, directly underneath the cursor where I point it to, is desired behaviour.
I don’t understand why you would want that. What’s the use case? Don’t you nearly always want all of the browser window to be on the screen? You can still drag the titlebar if you want to drag the window off the screen but when do you actually need that? I can’t think of any scenario.
Meanwhile, positioning windows with the flick of my finger instead of bringing my mouse painstakingly in the right position seems just so preferable, I don’t even understand how Chrome’s behavior could ever be preferable. It’s not so bad on Windows because there are drag areas on the left and right of the screen to quickly allow you to create two windows next to each other but this functionality doesn’t exist on the Mac. (It also seems like a lame workaround.)
(Safari creates a little proxy image of the browser tab when you tear it off – maybe 200 pixels or so wide – with your mouse centered in the middle of it. If the newly spawned window doesn’t move off the screen the new window will spawn centered on your pointer, this is the expected behavior given the visual representation. All is nicely and logically animated. Chrome would obviously also have to change the way they visually represent torn off tabs if they want to implement this behavioral change though as to not confuse users.
Here is how this looks – imagine a mouse pointer in the middle of the little proxy window, it will be spawned all the way up to the right edge as soon as I release the mouse button: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/tabs.png)
The problem was Chrome’s behavior when tearing off tabs. On OS X I usually don’t surf fullscreen, most of the time I have two windows with several tabs and varying widths open, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not. Creating two windows and placing them about right is easy with Safari, I click a tab and drag all the way to the screen edge where I want the window to be. (I basically click and flick my finger to the left or to the right on the trackpad, it’s impossible to miss.) The window will be placed with all its content on the screen. Quickly creating overlapping windows by tearing off tabs is also easy. You just have to drag down. Again, nothing will leave the screen.
Chrome doesn’t allow you to be so careless. The tab will end up exactly where your mouse is pointing even if that means that most of the window is not visible on the screen. You cannot quickly flick with your finger to create a second window and place it in roughly the right spot.
It was a very frustrating experience for me. Chrome really is nearly perfect in all other respects but such a glaring shortcoming is not really tolerable for something I use as frequently as a browser. I prefer how Chrome handles closing tabs but I much more often tear of tabs than closing several of them. (I also tend to use the keyboard shortcut for closing tabs but that is not an excuse for Safari to get closing tabs wrong. The right answer when someone brings up problems or clever tricks when using some application with the mouse is definitely not to say “But there are keyboard shortcuts!” I don’t think you should ever use keyboard shortcuts as excuses for botching an app’s behavior when using the mouse.)