Browser UI

[torkell]

A usability question for you all: of the four following layouts, which of the following positions for the address bar in a web browser is the best? Apologies for the quality of the screenshots - I hacked together the bare minimum of a VB program needed to make these.

[Poll #1427428]
It's interesting that the major browsers use very different layouts. Internet Explorer 7 and 8 both use layout 1, while Firefox and IE6 are closest to layout 3 (ignoring the lack of built-in tabs in IE6). Opera uses layout 4, while Chrome doesn't really fit into any of these (though it's most like 4).

Comments

[olego.livejournal.com]

The latter - I agree, is useful, and it's a shame that other browsers have not implemented that properly. But the former - IE6 interface - I disagree with you on - probably because of the way I define the word "interface".

It's true: I was really fond of IE6 in 2005 - and I thought of it as my main browser. It's fast, and it's clean. There was no extraneous stuff in the toolbar; it was just a browser. But working on multi-tab sessions became really difficult, because each "tab" was actually a window on the taskbar. So I switched to Opera.

And I guess it was then that I redefined "Interface" to include control over most aspects of the browsing: Tabs, Gestures, Easy Page Switching, and Zooming. Yes: I still keep a minimal UI (Back & Forward Buttons, Reload, Address Bar, Zoom, and View Button - no "Home", no Search or Favourites or History buttons because they can be accessed with a shortcut; but I'm addicted and dependent on Gestures and tabs with MRU.

[torkell]

It's something of an architectural design decision, in that the others (Firefox, Opera, Chrome - not tried Safari) have a model of one process for a given profile (Chrome has multiple processes but I believe will still only have one control/interface process for a profile). IE6 on the other hand will let you run as many processes as you like, and temporary state (e.g. session cookies) is not shared among processes. A nice side-effect of having multiple processes with distinct session state is a whole class of security holes just evaporate - assuming you log into your bank's site from within another process, and they use session cookies, then it's impossible for a site running in a different process to hijack that session. There are some problems involved with implememting this though - one I can think of is your on-disk data now needs to be multiprocess safe (without it you only need it to be threadsafe, which is easier).

You make a good point about the interface, Opera is definetely more customisable that IE6 and has
actually useful shinyness. I've not used the gestures, but I do like its tab ordering system and the single-key shortcuts. If it weren't for the multi-process issue and a couple of bugs, I would have likely switched to Opera by now.

I was thinking also of system integration as a whole when I said IE6. I have an address bar to the bottom of my screen (to get it right-click on the taskbar, Toolbars, Address... except Microsoft partially removed it in a service pack because some regulator didn't like it - that's another rant), and it behaves like a cross between the IE address bar and the Run dialog. The integration is excellent - I can type in a website, a folder on my computer, a network share, a program, a file, the name of a favourite, or a search keyword, and it all works with full auto-complete and launches the right thing. On the one hand, that kind of integration is monopolistic... on the other hand, it's incredibly useful (and I believe it will launch the default browser, so if you've set Opera as the default it'll use that).