February 2, 2006

In Stop Stop Stop Hurting the Internet John Rentzsch says “My God, they’ve made metal look good.” (A reference to the unloved Brushed Metal theme that Apple used for a while, and is now most prominent on Safari as other Mac apps move on.)

On top of the looks of the thing, they’re dropping buttons (“Stop Loading” and “Reload”) and moving things around from the places where all browsers have always had them. Safari’s take on the “Stop”/”Reload” buttons is especially nice, where they’re combined. (“Reload” turns into “Stop” while a page is loading making it more of a “Loading Control” button.) What kind of thinking is that?

And wtf is going on with squeezing the tab bar between two other tool bars? Do these people not use tabs? I have no less than five tabs open at any given time, and it’s usually closer to ten.

They have such a chance to grab some cred here, and they’re getting close to squandering it before they’re out of beta. I know it must be hard to be under the microscope like this and who knows what sort of orders they’ve got from higher ups at Microsoft, but man. This just doesn’t look very good.

For reference, here’s the official MS blog post that Rentzsch is talking about. There’s interesting feedback there, too, bearing in mind that most, if not all, users of a beta web browser are going to be self-selected and that IE and Microsoft are so polarizing.

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