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It bewilders me that any rational UI designer would be so arrogant as to make the unilateral unchangeable decision for all their users that they should only have tabs on one side, be it the top, bottom, left or right of the window. Why restrict users to using tabs on only one side and one side only? What's so special about that side, and bad about the other sides? What if the user is left handed, or has a tall monitor, or a wide monitor, or lots of windows, or only a few?

While you're at it, why not just remove all the arrow keys from the keyboard except one? Then users can argue over whether the left-arrow key is better than the up-arrow key, and users who don't like having only an up-arrow key can buy a keyboard with only a left-arrow key.

But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, so there are no arguments about which arrow is better: you just use whichever arrow you want, whenever you want.

Most people prefer to use all four arrows at different times for different purposes, and put their tabs along all four edges, too!

I, too, remember when GUIs (not UXs!) respected the user's desires, workflow and general agency. That's not entirely gone yet, but it's going. Heck, Office 365 updated lately and now I have this ongoing little contest of displaying the tiniest number of coworker Teams comments in the hugest amount of white space. The results beggar belief.

Edit:

Teams (it's a Chrome browser window, but that's not really relevant to my rant) is taking up like two square feet on a 4K monitor, and 3-6 messages plus links to a couple attachments are all it will show me - along with enough white space for another 300 channel names (but only channel names, nothing else), headings the size of movie trailers, just oceans of space and garbage I don't need and can't use.

In an ideal world, there'd be some way to adjust the layout a bit, and in fact when we used Slack before Teams, that was pretty easy: you move the divider between channel names and messages to the left, thus giving less space to channel names, more space to message content. Done.

But that's too much power to allow a user to have, in these modern, enlightened times. So while Teams has such a divider, there's no provision to adjust it. Want to see more than a handful of messages at the same time? Gonna need a bigger monitor. Probably 55" would be a good size.

Of course, that's one example out of a billion. It's not that software won't cater to my particular workflow... it's is that software no longer allows me to make reasonable adjustments to support a workflow that works for me, and in fact removes still-remaining means to do so on a regular basis.

Really it's the whole "you're holding it wrong" mindset that I get so tired of. We all labor under our own constraints and just a little leeway on basic customization goes a very long way to making software more usable. Just let me view more than six messages at once, ok? Please?

I was less than satisfied about they layout of the buttons in xcalc, so I built a version of the window manager that let me specify the root window containing the windows to manage, and gave it the window id of the xcalc window, so it put window frames around each calculator button so I could move them around, resize them, even close them into icons (bigger than the button) if I didn't want to use them. Not what the xcalc or window manager designers had in mind, probably.

Software maintenance is not the primary cost of a configuration option. The biggest cost is the customer support load [1]. This is especially a problem if the customer manages to get the application into a "busted" state.

Your complaint, where the software is less convenient than it could be because the sidebar is too big, will never result in a Priority 1 Customer Support Ticket. Adding the ability to resize a sidebar can actually cause that to happen.

Someone accidentally resizing the sidebar to become unusably small or large and calling support because they don't know what they did or how to fix it will describe it as an emergency. This is not a lie, since the thing they need to get at to complete their work is impossible to get to without resizing the sidebar, and they don't know how it happened or how to do that. They resized the sidebar while trying to drag and drop something else, and since they weren't using it at the time they went some twenty minutes without even realizing anything was wrong, and now they've forgotten what they did.

Hopefully, it escalates up the support chain until someone finally manages to figure out what happened, or it escalates high enough and the customer is willing to give remote desktop access to a support tech [2]. If you're not lucky, they just give up and switch to a program that, hopefully, doesn't break on them.

Source: I used to work the support line for customer-facing software. I don't any more, but I still work directly with customer success agents, so I still regularly see this exact kind of problem.

[1]: Or, if you won't take it from me, take it from Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/

[2]: Some companies just don't do remote desktop control support. This is so that they can directly tell their customers "we never ask for control of your computer, so if someone claiming to be us asks for it, they're a scammer." Remote desktop access is a dangerous way to do tech support because, if you accidentally wind up talking to a scammer instead of a real support tech, they can wreak havoc with that level of access. OTOH, the company I work for sells software that works with barcode scanners and printers, and I really don't feel keen on trying to talk people through setting them up so they work properly...

> Someone accidentally resizing the sidebar to become unusably small or large and calling support because they don't know what they did or how to fix it will describe it as an emergency.

And that's why you have an in-house support departments whose job is to solve these issues. It's like buying a tractor, then relying on the company several towns away to provide repairs.

Customizability is good. Because when I settled in a workflow, I don't want to see things I don't want occupying space or distracting me. It's like not using part of the desk because you're supposed to have piles of books in this place.

I'm not advocating to have trillion of options a la VIM. But anything except the core purpose of the software should be customizable in some way, including the options to hide it.

> And that's why you have an in-house support departments whose job is to solve these issues.

There's a market for software that doesn't require that.

Small companies don't have in-house support departments. They contract with an IT provider. Big companies do, but theirs isn't materially different than the contracted one (a typical "big company" is really just three small companies standing on each others' shoulders wearing a trenchcoat). Their purchasing decisions are going to be based on what they think will reduce the amount of support calls they have to deal with.

> It's like buying a tractor, then relying on the company several towns away to provide repairs.

John Deere software locks their parts. They haven't gone out of business, so a lot of farms must be doing just that.

Edit: This is not an argument against RTR. Anyone who's willing to break a warranty seal and tinker with the inside of the computer or tractor they own should be allowed to do so. Being able to customize is good. Being able to accidentally customize is bad.

For me, Pidgin with the MS Teams plugin solves this problem. Now I can chat with others on Teams, using a program designed for chat.

If you say "Teams" the rest is just redundant. It is the worst piece of UI ever created.

> But all keyboards have all four arrow keys,

Please don't tell that to UX experts. They will replace all four with a hamburgher menu. /s

I agree that it is odd, even from an "efficient market hypothesis" angle. There are people who use Arc literally only because of the very well-integrated and implemented vertical tab bar (versus, oftentimes jank & ugly addons in Firefox/Chrome). In other words, we (humanity) have to create and maintain an entire new browser just to solve this one problem for users that could, very easily, be a checkbox in a settings menu.

Same with Windows 11; I know one person who refuses to upgrade literally only because the Windows 11 taskbar is bottom-of-monitor only; they don't support moving it to the left or right-hand side of the monitor.

Its actually unhinged. Our industry was filled with years, decades even, where we were so excited and proud to build things to be as powerful as possible, to do as much as possible. Nowadays, companies want to build the least they can possibly get away with. Its sad what we've lost.

If you squish vertical tabs so as to have as few characters shown as horizontal tabs you'll have plenty of horizontal space for an apples to apples comparison.

When chrome first started getting popular many Firefox users were on vertical tabs, and it was not lost on me that chrome was made for small screen laptop users. A smart design decision even if it feels gimped for vertical tab users.

> chrome was made for small screen laptop users

Makes sense if one considers how many 13” Macbooks and original MacBook Airs were likely being toted around the Google campus in the late 2000s, with Macs being the predominant development platform there at the time.

Further down the road in 2011, Chromebooks appeared, most of which are on the smaller side which also acts as incentive to keep Chrome usable on smaller screens.

Desktop Safari and MS Edge are also decent in this regard, likely a result of their parent companies being makers of popular small-screen computers.

> (2) But: Monitors almost always have more horizontal pixels than vertical pixels. So, actually, a vertical tab bar better-leverages the aspect ratio your monitor is built at. This feels true at 16:9 and greater aspect ratios

This is true, and as a vertical tab bar user, it's important to me. However, when every app follows this logic and decides it gets to have a sidebar (or two!), all of a sudden I'm looking at a lot of apps that are barely usable unless they're maximized.

I often find myself thinking 'hey, fuck you, $APP! those pixels are for my vertical tab bar!!'