Basil Safwat does a very thorough comparison of the the tabs in Mac Safari and Chrome, pointing out the subtleties in the close button positioning and behavior. While Mac close icons are on the left by convention, Chrome positions them to the right of the tab and keeps them visible, while Safari positions them to the left and only displays the close icon on hover. I initially had to relearn the close button position because Firefox also places them on the right. Both handle tab resizing in a way that allows you to close multiple tabs while keeping the cursor in one position while clicking the close icon repeatedly.
Check out theinvisibl for the screenshots and complete deconstruction.
Am I wrong or in Safari 4 beta close buttons were on the right, then they placed them back on the left in the final release?
Yes, I think they were on the right initially.
The main thing that bugs me about Safari's tab behavior is the lack of the magic resurrect-tab command: CMD + Shift + T (I believe it's CTRL + Shift + T on PC). For when you accidentally or prematurely close a tab, and want it back.
There is an excellent debate about this issue.
http://tr.im/IaWA
Thanks for the link to that thread, Taldar. I personally think that for Chrome the best solution might be to put them on the left and put the favicon in the right. For Safari, provide a way to keep the close button visible all the time. For both, the OS conventions would be adhered to, and for Safari, preventing errors due to accidental clicks would help as well.
OS conventions outweigh this "convention through logic" approach to putting close tab buttons on the right.
"Close tab should be on the right" is a false extension of a reasonable assumption that "users will want to close their newest tabs first". The problem is that the left/right positioning of the close tab button isn't necessarily temporally influenced.
The other interesting thing is that they're making it easier to close tabs. Yet when compared to say, Opera, re-opening closed tabs in Chrome is actually quite a mission - it's not a "primary" accessible function.
To quote Jakob Nielsen:
Error prevention
Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
I'd say closing a tab is an error-prone condition, especially considering how easy it is to accidentally double click or double tap. To take another:
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
To me, Google is just demonstrating yet another reason why they fail at HCI. They may have tested it, but, like their fadey home page, seemingly failed to consider that search isn't necessarily the primary function of google.com, especially considering how many people use search bars in browsers these days.
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