i recently installed this firefox extension that adds a little close box to each tab rather than having the one close box on the far side of the tab bar that just closes whichever tab is active. it’s a very simple idea, and the guy who did it might have just thunk it up hisself, or he might have borrowed it from Galeon, which is a relatively obscure linux browser that does the same thing by default.
whatever
if the former, good thinking
if the latter, thanks for taking an intuitive idea and helping to port it to the browser worlds of us mere mortals
i am just writing to say that it’s awesome.
within days i was completely annoyed by every computer without the feature – my brain just cannot understand why you would do it any other way.
that makes me confident that it’s a great idea, and i want to applaud that, but it also makes me think about what it IS about ideas that make some of them so much easier to completely integrate into your world. i think that some of it is the intuitiveness, but some of it is also less directly about the solution and more about the simplicity of the goal and the frequency with which the problem (and hence the solution, when in place) is encountered. this extension does one very simple thing very well, and it happens to be a thing that i encounter dozens of times every time i use my browser, so my exposure to it even within the first few hours of downloading it was very high, and it’s benefit was thus immediately reinforced.
i also downloaded several other promising extensions with the same trip-to-the-candy-store burst of energy. i can drag and drop my tabs now, drag links anywhere on screen to open new tabs, and my home page is learning my behaviors so that it adjusts itself based on the time of day. so far i have only positive things to say about those extensions as well, but they manifest themselves less frequently, less obviously, and less simply, so i don’t think that they jump out at me as much, and i don’t (yet) miss them as much when they aren’t there.
so i think that’s interesting in some way.
we talk a lot about the goal of obviousness in good design – oh, duh! that Is a better way to do it! and i think there’s something there. but it also seems like some kinds of problems lend themselves more easily to obvious solutions… or something.
i’m not going to work it all out right now, but it seemed worth jotting down when i thought of it, so maybe i’ll think about it more later.
and in the meantime you should go download this extension!
seriously!
