Fri 21 September 2007; 263

Design of tab menu in IE

23:39 Fri 21 September 2007; 263 | by Ryan | in uncategorized

Technology should make our lives easier and design should make sense.

Microsoft introduced tabbed browsing in IE 6, but the tab menu is difficult to use and doesn’t make sense to me. I only sometimes use Internet Explorer, so I only recently encountered this.

IE6 tab menu

Any tab can be closed by clicking on the x on the right of each tab, but the right-click menu also has “close tab” at the top and has new tab at the very bottom. That is the reverse positioning from Firefox — as well as MS’s office programs like Word that have New at the top and Quit at the bottom of the File menu.

This gives an easy redundant option for closing a tab even though correcting an accidental new tab is much easier than accidentally closing a tab. If you open a new tab and don’t want it, you can just close it. If you accidentally close a tab you could lose work and at best have to find where you were by looking in your browser history or your own memory.

MS introduced tabbed browsing in this version though other browsers have had it for years. I can’t imagine what the reason for having it that way is. Would it be a bizarre measure to avoid patent infringement?

Greyhound not sending extra buses

23:29 Fri 21 September 2007; 263 | by Ryan | in uncategorized

Last year during licensing hearing for FedBus officials from Greyhound said that they would send an extra bus for even one person over the capacity of the regular bus.

I recently took the bus from Toronto to Kitchener last night. The bus was full and there were three people waiting at the University Avenue and King Street stop.

The driver told them that the dispatcher would not send another bus, but that they could get on and stand in the aisle.

That experience counters the statements of Greyhound, but there’s more.

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