We already know quite a few details about Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft’s upcoming attempt to retain – or grow – its market share in the browser world. Standards and speed are the main focus of IE9, and if a video of the upcoming beta release is anything to go by, they’re doing pretty well. Just… Did they just manage to make the interface even less appealing?
Microsoft has fed us a number of builds for Internet Explorer 9, and while theyshowed off the speed improvements as well as the much more modern standards support (95 on Acid3), Microsoft remained tight-lipped on what, exactly, it was planning to do about that abomination they dare to call a “UI” used by the previous two Internet Explorer releases.
With the beta release only a few days away, leaks are bound to occur. A website called IEBest.com (I wish I was making this stuff up) claims to be in possession of the beta release, and has the video material to prove it. Of course, it’s hard to assess how genuine this stuff is, but if it is, the IE9 user interface team deserves a spanking.
Assuming this is real, the interface doesn’t look particularly polished; the tabs feel bolted on, as if they’re not part of the actual program. If it were a screenshot, I’d call Photoshop on that one. Everything does look a lot tidier than previous releases, but one massive problem stands out like a major cringe-inducing eye-sore.
While I’m this close to proposing to Chrome’s UI so I can give her babies, Chrome does have one major problem: lack of tab overflow. If you open boatloads of windows in Chrome, the tabs become ever smaller and less readable, until you’re finally just staring at a white mountain range.
However, at least Chrome will give you the full width of the window to play with. In this supposed IE9 user interface, you’re given just half of the window for the tab bar, because the stupid address bar is in the way! This monumental oversight alone makes me think we’re looking at a fake. This just can’t be real.
If it turns out this is, in fact, real, I’m going to do a massive facepalm.
How can it be any “less” appealing when it doesn’t look at all different from IE8? For once, I’d be glad to have a Microsoft product undergo a major upgrade without having to completely relearn its interface.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4P0qiRL_wI
Just dropping this here, a youtube video of IE9 with the IE8 interface. Right performance and scores by the engine, GUI is just the old one so someone likes to make fakes in youtube at least
I think it’s fake because you can get the IE rendering engine and make a mockup of IE.
Note, the demo does not use tabs. I bet it’s just a window with embedded IE object with a skin from IE8, hence no tabs, no nothing.
We used to make IE clones at the first year of C# programming, the same way people started doing all the videoplayers with subtitles, etc…
That video isn’t the only leak of the new interface you know, look:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/is-this-microsofts-new-internet…
It was spotted on some official Russian Microsoft blog a while back (Aug 25). It looks exactly like that the one in the video. It spread around fast before they took down the post and yes everyone was talking about has badly tight the tabs were too.
It’s not fake—but it is beta.
I think Microsoft have been experimenting with saving vertical space, betting on that fact that the average screen is now quite wide, and [because Windows’ window management is so bad] the browser is always maximised.
Uhm, you do realise it is PEOPLE who maximise, right? Why on EARTH would Windows’ window management have anything to do with it? Put any random Windows user in front of any UI and they will maximise.
Because in Windows, without Exposé, the simplest solution is to just maximise everything and use the taskbar / alt-tab. But in OS X I never maximise anything, my browser stays at 1024×768 and I move it around the screen. I have no need to maximise it.
There’s just something wrong with seeing a 23″ PC screen with IE maximised over the whole thing, the web page sitting in the middle with a vast sea of emptiness either side. I can’t explain exactly how, but Windows just breeds this behaviour where as OS X doesn’t (probably because OS X’s maximise button is completely broken).
Matter of taste does also factor into it. I’m very easily distracted, so I use a mix of fullscreening and tiling rather than Exposé-style helter-skelter stacking.
In fact, to ensure I always can, I wrote a simple X11 equivalent to WinSplit Revolution. (Though it’s been sitting at “usable but not finished” for months now while I work on other projects)
If I can ever find the time to make them behave more like GTK/Qt than Motif, I plan to switch to a full tiling WM like AwesomeWM or XMonad.
Edited 2010-09-07 19:48 UTC
What does the lack of Expose have to do with maximising? People maximise because it’s a habit and because many (I actually checked this) find non-maximised windows distracting. It has NOTHING to do with how window manages windows.
If it did, it doesn’t explain why people who switch to a Mac STILL maximise their windows – and this time manually, because OS X lacks a maximise button due to thick-headedness.
Apple’s maximize makes sense in an MDI though. if you expect multiple documents to be present on the screen, then a maximize button that maximizes to the content rather than the screen is completely with in the realm of sense.
I think you just answered your own question, as Thom pointed out too. It’s just too much of a hurdle to maximize a window on OSX, so people just get used to life without it.
As to why people like to maximize windows, I bet this has something to do with the need for a deeper web browsing experience (leave the computer and its problems and enter the web) and some concentration issues too. A computer desktop is now much more visually complex than the usual webpage background, since the web moved from the Geocities state to something which is much more usable.
Though you’re right, a full-screened web browser on a widescreen monitor is just ridiculous, and can even damage usability when the page is not properly coded.
Edited 2010-09-07 20:19 UTC
that is why Windows 7 has edgeification for window sizing now…. Drag to the top, maximize, drag window to the size, half the screen tiled, Grab the bottom edge of the window and drag to the bottom, it maxes height and keeps the width setting.
I hate going to work on XP now.. I keep wanting to drag a window out of the way or maximize it or tile it with a drag.
http://aerosnap.de/eng/download.htm
I maximize my browser windows, because there is no reason not to.
When reading an article or a thread in a forum I don’t actually need to see anything else on my screen besides the page itself. If I didn’t keep my browser maximized, then all the space wasted by whitespace on the page would just be equally wasted by my wallpaper.
I maximize my browser windows, because there is no reason not to.
When reading an article or a thread in a forum I don’t actually need to see anything else on my screen besides the page itself. If I didn’t keep my browser maximized, then all the space wasted by whitespace on the page would just be equally wasted by my wallpaper.
This is mostly the same reason why I maximize them: there is nothing on my desktop that I need to be able to see all the time so I can just as well have the window cover it all and use the space for viewing a webpage instead. There’s plenty of pages I view that work fine both on wide browser windows and narrow ones, and I prefer to see it all at once rather than having to scroll up and down.
It’s just plain arrogant to claim that only stupid users maximize their windows or that it’s because of the window manager’s capabilities (or the lack of them.)
Not everyone has 23″ monitors you know.
Good point. Especially as laptops and netbooks get more and more popular…
How is the maximize button to blame for terrible webpage coding?
Actually, believe it or not, this is a good webpage coding practice. Very wide webpages are harder to read for a long time, because you (unconsciously) have to move your eyes more and hence more eyestrain occurs. Therefore, every website with large text content and designed with widescreen in minds should have a reasonable maximum width in milimeters/inches set in its CSSs.
Edited 2010-09-07 20:44 UTC
Agreed. There’s a reason that newspapers are split into columns, rather than spreading the text all the way across the page.
I’ll often reduce the width of the browser display when a page is horizontally filled with text. Even on a modestly sized widescreen I’d rather have a narrower column of text for comfortable reading.
This is one of the main reasons why I use Opera: it allows me to tile tabs side by side within the browser window, while the main browser window itself remains maximised.
It isn’t terrible web page coding, it has more to do with economics.
Ultra wide resolutions are routinely ignored just like IE6 because they are such a small percentage of visitors.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#resolution-na-monthly-200908-201008
Yes I know about relative widths but that won’t help fixed content like image files. Even if all images were vector files you would still have all sorts of optimization issues.
Webpages are built around 14-17 inch screens. That’s just the reality of the situation and it won’t be changing anytime soon. As laptops continue to be favored over desktops the situation will likely get worse. I hate browsing on ultra-wide monitors for this very reason.
I have actually found that I am more productive on a smaller monitor due to less eye strain from the reduced amount of glare. If I work all day on a 23″ monitor my eyeballs feel like they sat through a dozen movies.
Edited 2010-09-08 01:28 UTC
In my opinion a big part of the reason for this is that the Windows UI strongly encourages maximisation of windows. It’s how Windows users learn to use the GUI, but that doesn’t mean it’s a particularly efficient way of doing things.
I never used to maximise windows when using RISC OS, or other GUIs with similar window management and application design. Back then I normally overlapped windows and dragged and dropped between apps; usage made easy and efficient by those interfaces.
It’s only when using Windows, with its MDI apps, primitive window management, and massive toolbars/sidebars/panels attached to application windows, that I started feeling the need to maximise everything and alt+tab between windows.
I’m all for the more Spartan toolbars—I find it a lot cleaner and important in the new world order of widescreen displays—but I agree that’s not enough space for tabs. Hopefully we’ll have the ability to have a second toolbar that can contain nothing but tabs.
Edited 2010-09-07 19:18 UTC
This made me smile.
If that is the new IE GUI then MS has scored a new low. Tab bar and address bar on the same toolbar? What were they thinking? Ever since IE6, MS has stuffed up IE’s GUI especially the Favorites bar. Based on my own experience, from the Favorites menu, you can no longer manage the Favorites via drag and drop without closing the Favorites menu first. With IE 6.0, you can right click on a Favorite and select delete, a dialog pops up, you respond and the Favorite’s menu remains open. With IE 7 and 8, everytime you want to delete a Favorite, you have to reselect the menu…It’s such a pain.
Edited 2010-09-08 10:02 UTC
Well, if IE’s UI dissatisfies you but you want to keep website compatibility, you might want to try alternative user interfaces for its web engine, like Maxthon or Avant Browser…
I don’t have complaints of IE9’s UI… unless I press the ALT key and a fricking ribbon pops up instead of usable, readable menus.