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Comment by cunthorpe | Hacker News Reader

This was obvious from the start. The new design was beautiful but it was an accessibility nightmare.

This change looks pretty awful so I hope they just reach the Chrome v1 style and be done with it. Let's be honest, Chrome v1 was the peak of browser design and browsers are still trying and failing to improve it.

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I dunno, I was never enamored with Chrome style tabs. They work ok, but they’re awkwardly tall (more so than needed for adequate hitbox size IMO), and visually they don’t fit in on anything but ChromeOS.

I haven’t heard any complaints about accessibility. Was it a usability nightmare? (Probably! I definitely winced looking at screenshots imagining all the moving targets.)

Each tab is a checkbox (selected or not), an input field, a drag handle for the page and a drag handle for the window, depending on how fast you start dragging and in which direction. If you hover it it shows a set of buttons, but if it’s focused the buttons disappear entirely and can’t be dragged or closed at all.

They hid a few buttons in a tiny dropdown that appears on hover; They kept a completely useless clickable lock icon in the middle-ish of field so now there’s a little chance that, while trying to do any of the above, you’ll end up with a popup that you have to close instead.

One example: You can't close other tabs directly once they've shrunk - you need to bring up a menu on the tab. If you do click on the left side of the tab (where the x would be), it'll expand and now your cursor is ... somewhere. Maybe over the x! Maybe over an extension icon! Maybe over another tab! Never mind, move the cursor to the x and oh no, you've missed it by a pixel and now you've activated the address box which also disables the x. Which means you now have to click somewhere else outside the address box and navigate back to the x for closing.

(On a system where you have the infinite Fitts width of the menu bar, it seems perversely insane to have these tiny shifting boxes that mess you around.)

Ironically enough I remember seeing the Chrome style tabs and thinking, hey, they really look like the NeXT tabs - cool!

But I could be wrong.

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