Tab Close Buttons

John Gruber at Daring Fireball just asked why on earth Adobe would put the little 'X' close buttons on the right of the tabs in the Mac version of Photoshop. Macs, of course, traditionally have the close window buttons on the left.

I expect that Adobe has no good reason for doing this - that they are simply transferring something from the PC version to the Mac with minimal changes. However, whether by design or accident, it's occurred to me that it's actually better that way. The close button has some big problems on the left.

Safari vs. Firefox

It's a problem I've noticed in Safari - a program which uses tabs and has the close button on the "correct" left hand side. What will happen is that I'll move the mouse pointer to the next tab - that is, from left to right - and click on it so I can see the webpage. In doing so, I usually close it. Why?

Because the close button is the first thing I encounter in the new tab.

It's natural to click on the tab to select it as soon as the mouse is over it but that's disastrous in this case. You lose the webpage you had open and have to fiddle around to get it back. It's a habit I'm finding really hard to break. I got used to the Mac way of doing things in a week flat after I switched from Windows but this one still occasionally gets me a year later.

Firefox, like Photoshop, puts the tab close buttons on the "incorrect" right - and like Adobe I imagine they had no particularly good reason for this. However, it does mean that you don't accidentally close tabs when flicking between them via the mouse.

Windows vs Tabs

It occurs to me that it's more natural to have such controls on the right hand side. English speakers read left to right, which means that the right hand side is where our eyes will be when we stop reading. This has a host of minor effects on our behaviour - such as the fact we turn pages from the right - which then bleed through to UI design. Webcomics, for example, will usually have their "previous comic" and "next comic" buttons on the bottom right of the comic.

Which side the window controls are on is an extremely minor issue. It might make a little more sense to put them on the right but we aren't really turning pages here. Plus, the top bar of a window is pretty clear anyway so there's not much confusion or clutter.

Which side the controls are on for tabs is far more important. Switching between tabs is like turning pages, and it's done far more rapidly with far less manoeuvring room. As such, you're going to want the close button as far out of the way as you can.

Or We Could Just Do This...

There are other ways around this for Safari. It would be easy to eliminate click-through on tab controls. This is what Firefox does when the tabs get too small to allow much room for error. In fact, it actually gets rid of the close buttons altogether, leaving just one in the active tab.

Safari happily leaves them in and at the smallest tab sizes, the clickable area for the close control is about a quarter of the size of the entire tab. When you're rapidly clicking between multiple tabs, mistakes are inevitable, even for someone who is quite used to the tab close buttons being on the left.

Pending other fixes such as eliminating click through, I'm with Firefox and Adobe on this one: I prefer the close button on the right. It's inconsistent, and that's unfortunate, but I can't help but prefer that to losing my work.