I read an article yesterday that compares Windows XP to the most recent public build of Windows Vista (build 5270). It looks like it will be a pretty good upgrade to XP, though I have no intention on upgrading immediately upon its release (whenever that may be). However, I got quite upset when I saw a screenshot of IE7. I don’t know the IE team has been doing to the backend of the browser, but the UI they’ve put together is horrific. It doesn’t make any sense! There is no rhyme or reason to it.
Let’s work from the top down. Under the title bar is the navigation toolbar. First off, there’s the new back/forward dropdown, which is now one unified dropdown instead of two (you can’t see it on that particular screenshot, but trust me when I say it’s there). It’s an interesting interface decision, one that I think has the right intent. But this way of showing the user the session history doesn’t really jibe with me. Moving on, the first thing that got my attention was the stop/reload button (they merged the two, something that in theory may make sense, but doesn’t at all in practice) inside the location bar. Why would you put it there. It doesn’t make sense, and it goes against users’ expectations. There aren’t supposed to be button commands in a dropdown box; it goes against every other piece of software designed. It’s isolated from the rest of the buttons on the navbar. It doesn’t make sense to have it there, and it certainly makes no sense to separate the back/forward button from the stop/reload button; now I have to look in two separate places for commands in the same set of functionality. (By the way, who at Microsoft decided that we have so little screen real estate as to necessitate the merging of such buttons? I don’t think people are so desparate for 30 pixels that they want to lose functionality.) Strike one.
Now for the real horrendous design decisions. Next is the tab/navigation (see the home button?)/favorites/command bar. Again, did users need an extra 30 pixels of browser area so badly that they had to take a bajillion (technical term) different things and put them all on one bar? This design lacks any UI coherence. The home page button should be on the navigation bar. Currently, Firefox puts the RSS and security icons in the address bar. The security icon is an indicator of website security, and that seems appropriate to put in there. The RSS button is an indicator of the availability of RSS feeds, and when you click on it you can add a live bookmark to your bookmarks. Basically, Firefox is using the right side of the address bar for transient commands, the availability of which depends on what website you’re currently at. IE7 is putting a nontransient command there where it doesn’t belong. And even if some users get used to it being there, that doesn’t mean they intuitively expect it to be there. IE7’s interface takes away real estate for tabs, which is important if you have tens of tabs open in one window at any given point (I know I’m not the only one.), and for potentially useful tools that are hidden behind the little chevron. And, finally, it just looks like a big mess. It’s not clean; it’s not svelte. It’s really not clear what MS was trying to achieve here.
Oh look what’s immediately under the tab. It’s not the content space, but the menu bar! Why on earth did they put the menubar there? Does each tab require its own menubar? No. The menu bar is meant for commands which apply to the entire browser, not just one tab. It makes no sense to put it there. There is no apparent reason why MS put it there.
It seems like Microsoft wanted to do something different with IE’s UI. While they may have had good intentions, there wasn’t really any reason to radically depart from the general web browser UIs of current browsers — IE6, Firefox, Opera, and their derivatives. I’m reminded of an Apple ad campaign with the slogan, “Think different.” That’s all well and good, but don’t “think stupid.”