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by nirvdrum 2389 days ago
Doesn't constantly changing the tab size violate Fitts's Law? I'm sure Google did some sort of study on this, but it seems to me that Chrome's shrinking tabs break a fundamental model of usability. I personally find this problematic not only because the target area shrinks, but also because I can no longer read anything on the tab, so I'm forced to hover over them.

I'd love to read any study on the usability of the Chrome approach if anyone happens to know of one. Maybe something on SIGCHI?
1 comments
olah_1 2389 days ago
Idk what Fitt's law is but I assume it's something like "don't make things disappear when the user expects them to be there".

In that case, I think Firefox violates this. Your tabs are just gone when you could have sworn they were there a second ago...

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nirvdrum 2389 days ago
Your assumption of what Fitts's Law is isn't quite correct. Wikipedia has a description of Fitts's Law [1], some of the follow-on work in that space, and its application to HCI. There's a multitude of books, papers, and blog posts that deal with the application of Fitts's law to UI design and usability, so I'll let you pick your favorite source and go with that.

In broad strokes, the time to accurately complete a task is proportional to the distance to an item and inversely proportional to the size of the item. So, having to scroll tabs increases the distance -- potentially a lot. But, constantly shrinking tabs reduces the target size. I think you'd have to do an amortized analysis on this one because upon a the creation of a new tab the Firefox model only makes that new tab harder to get to, while the Chrome model shrinks all tabs, making each harder to click.

But, I could buy that there's some threshold here where Chrome maintains a tab size that still doesn't appreciably increase error rate while improving distance by eliminating the tab scroll. I'd expect that minimal tab width to be much larger than Chrome's true minimum tab width. But, I'd be shocked if Google didn't run usability studies on this. I just haven't come across anything on my own.

[1] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

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olah_1 2388 days ago
Based on my own experience, I think Chrome hits the nail on the head because usually the only helpful thing in terms of finding the right tab is (1) the favicon and (2) the general position of the tab among the other tabs.

General position is particularly helpful because, from left to right, it roughly represents "time opened", earliest to latest.

Firefox doesn't help me find the right tab just by including an 8 character width along with the favicon. Might as well just get rid of those 8 characters.

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