Rethinking the UI in Google’s Chrome OS

Early yesterday morning I was greeted with this blog post on Google’s official blog. It revealed that Google is building an OS based on their browser, Chrome. Naturally, this sent ripples through the blogosphere. It should not come as much of a surprise though, if you think about it. For years now, things have been moving online. The web is the platform. Most of the time behind my computer is spent with at least one browser window open. It makes sense to start seeing the browser as a gateway to other applications versus an application itself. While I am not sure that it will be such a success as Micheal Arrington claims it will be (John Biggs elaborates on why), I do believe that this is a move towards the inevitable.

However, it raises some UI questions with me, some of which I already had a few weeks ago. The observations in that post was more a result of the way the applications that are being run inside the browser are being developed. Now however, this news from Google has added to my doubt whether the current incarnation of the browser is an appropriate one. The biggest question mark would be tabs. As great as they might seem, tabs have some inherent usability issues associated with them:

Cyrus: Ok, i seriously don’t get tabs on Windows. Hell, i don’t get tabs on OSX either. In the latter there’s a great system called Exposé for that, and in the former the task bar does the job just great. Once i start using tabs though things go all to hell. On OSX i can’t tell which FireFox/Safari window has the tab i want (since it’s too small), and similarly in windows i find myself scanning the taskbar for a site i was looking at, but i can’t find it because the task bar entry only lists the site that is the currently active tab. This makes it so difficult to actually find the site i want and it ends up being far slower than just having a window available for each site.

Now however, they are becoming a much more important navigational element. Whereas in it’s current inclination, tabs are used to navigate web pages and applications withinan application within an OS, they will eventually be used to navigate web pages and applications within an OS only (read: browser), the behaviour of which is similar to the taskbar found in Windows or Exposé in OSX. This shift in usage will most likely result in a much higher dependency on tabs and I somehow think that it is perhaps good idea to look at how this demand can be met.

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Somewhat ironic is also the way in which applications are accessed: on windows most people seem to click on a icon to launch them (this might vary: I am lost without being able to search for applications). In a browser this might not always be the case: the address bar functions as a sort of smart command line input that allows us to look for and launch online content.

By all accounts however, the current form of the browser will most likely need to be adapted to allow it to fit better into the usage patterns, but also the environment in which it is used.