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)
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)