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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

> In placing the close button on the right, Google have assumed that in the majority of cases, users are going to be wanting to close the most recently opened tabs first (likely to be the ones to the far right of the tab group) and have accordingly placed the close button on the right.

Really? Doesn't it make more sense that Chrome is primarily a Windows/Linux program where the close-window buttons are at the top-right, and Safari is primarily Mac where the buttons are at the top-left.

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Is Arabic language Chrome more likely to be installed on a Mac? That would support your theory.

A quick google image search for Arabic versions of windows shows that they have the close button on the left and the window title on the right. So it is possible that chrome is simply mimicking windows behaviour.

Why? My theory is just that browsers are developed primarily for English, and that both Safari and Chrome put the close-tab buttons on the same side as the close-windows buttons for their respective primary operating system. Chrome in Arabic was developed as an afterthought, and it was just easier to flip the whole UI around.

Why would they save work on the in-tab UI and make the close-tab X button on the right? The window control buttons are on the left like any other Mac app, and the same goes for the closing X button on the Developer Tools frame. Both of those are on the right in Windows. As you saw with the Arabic screenshot, they've already done the work to allow the closing X buttons to be on the left; if they wanted the Mac tab closing buttons to be on the left, they'd be on the left. It's not just a holdout from Windows.

While this seems plausible to me -- I'm on Linux, and other tabbed apps like gnome-terminal place the close-window button on the right -- I think that Chrome's behavior makes the most sense anyway. When you close a tab, tabs shift towards the left. Meaning that the left-most tab in your browser is always the oldest tab, and generally speaking tabs on the left are older than tabs on the right (precluding the possibility that you manually rearranged the tabs). So since tabs on the left tend to be the oldest, they're also the least likely to be closed soon, and tabs on the right tend to be younger, so they're more likely to be closed soon. Hence the close-on-the-right behavior.

Except that by default, Chrome opens new browser tabs adjacent to the tab you're reading. When I command-click a link in an older session of HN, the new tabs don't show up on the far right (unless all the tabs to the right of the HN tab were opened from this window in this way).

I would actually prefer all tabs open on the far right because I tend to use tabs in a very random access way and Chrome forces me to think more.

I'd assume they measured it with real user usage.

You're much more likely to close recently opened tabs though.

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