Software Bashing » browser

14×14 pixels ought to be enough for anybody.

fboender — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:14:17 +0000

I've got pretty lousy vision. I've never had it tested, mostly because I can never read the signs on the shops so I have no idea which one's an optometrist, but I'm sure they're pretty bad. I've also got a fairly large screen resolution (1680×1024), so maybe this is just me who's annoyed by it, but why are the close buttons on tabs always so incredibly small?

Firefox. The activation area of its close button on tabs is only 14 by 14 pixels:

Chomium's is even smaller! 12 by 12 pixels! Do I look like a mouse-ninja to you?

Internet Explorer 8 only does it ever so slightly better with its 17 by 16 pixel buttons:

I'd understand it if there wasn't enough space available, but look at the screenshots above! Plenty of space left to make the button bigger. Just a couple of pixels can make such a difference! It could have been like this instead:

That's a whopping 24 by 23 pixels, without the rest of the tab having to give up any space to the button at all! You can even hide most of it if the mouse isn't near it, if you really care about aesthetics and such. In fact, Firefox's finder bar (that's the same application boys and girls!) does it a lot better with 21 by 20 pixels:

If they can do it in the finder bar, they can do it in the tabs, I say, darnit. And here I was thinking Microsoft, and even Mozilla Foundation if my old alcohol-wornout brain remembers correctly, had all kinds of usability experts on their payroll? Guess this slipped through the cracks. Or maybe it was crack that inspired this shit in the first place, who knows.

Password trap

jubbink — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:18:35 +0000

When it comes to browsers a lot has changed over the past few years. One of the great things that all major browsers now support is opening browser windows within the browser window. They call this feature 'tabs' (probably because somebody thought that a computer should work the same like this 1960's file cabinet at your local city hall). Personally I love tabs, it prevents my taskbar from becoming overly cluttered with open browser windows since I tend to have anywhere between 2 and 8 active tabs.

So this one day you run into a great site and you feel like registering there. So you register and open up your 21st century mail-client which of course works in your 21st century browser and you open the mail. You find the link where you can log in. You are prompted with a HTTP authentication dialog.

"Ah, username and password" you think.. "in my mail, let me just.. hey WTF!?". That's a pity isn't it? There is absolutely no way you can do anything with your browser before you do something about that dialog. And the nice thing about HTTP authentication is that it asks up to 3 times for you to log in, even if you press 'Cancel'. Because who knows, perhaps you didn't want to press 'Cancel'.

Why can't i just interact with my browser when this thing pops up? Now for this particular case I had an easy username, but what if my username was not that easy and I would want to copy/paste both my username and password? I'd have to open my mail in a different browser window or copy/paste it to my favorite text editor. Thank you 21st century tabs!