Vertical tabs should be consistent with Fitts' law

Steel Contributor

I'm loving vertical tabs BUT, it's annoying that it doesn't "respect" Fitts' law: when the window is maximized, when your cursor is all the way on the left of the screen, the cursor should be on top of the tab so you can just click it. Instead, tabs are a little to the right.... With horizontal tabs on top, browsers have be consistent with Fitts' law for years, vertical tabs should too! Please make this change!

21 Replies

You are completely right! I had always thought something was wrong with the Vertical Tabs but couldn't figure it out. Now I get it.
What you say is very important for UX, however insignificant it might seem. 

And just to add: the New tab button IS consistent with Fitts' law, but the tabs aren't. That's really silly. Edge team, please fix this!
Edge team, vertical tabs should not ship until this is fixed. The tabs should be all the way to the left, the fact that they aren't is a real usability issue (Fitts' law)
Edge team any updates on this? I wouldn't call this a low priority issue.... This is really hurting the vertical tabs experience 😞
Edge team, bugs very similar to this have been considered P1's, please take a look at this soon (here is a very similar Chrome bug that was rated P1 and fixed in a relatively short amount of time https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1136557 )
I agree, usually I dont have my browser window maxxed but when I do this is really irritating.
have you tried sending this as feedback? this forum is really like shouting into the void, I don't think I've seen the devs ever follow up on any posts/bug reports/feature requests here.
Hey folks, just wanted to update that I passed this thread to the team for a look. They're aware of this and are tracking the interest in changing the behavior. The best method to get feedback directly to the team is to submit feedback via Edge's "…" menu in the top right > Help and feedback > Send feedback, and let us know what you would like to see. Even though the team is aware of the behavior this time, I recommend submitting feedback on this so the team can see the interest in this change 😃
Thank you Alexandra! Vertical tabs is just awesome, once this is fixed it will be perfect.
Hey Alexandra sorry to bother you about this again but can you please ask them WHY they wouldn't change this behavior? If there was some kind of downside or compromise, I could understand them taking time to consider making this change, but this isn't one of those situations, it wouldn't regress anything... This is a fast and easy change, and it has no downsides, only upsides. It's a win-win
I'm sorry to reply to this yet again (I promise I won't do it again) but one of my classmates just pointed out that Vivaldi DOES already do this with their vertical tabs implementation. Please let the team know. I'm going to have to use Vivaldi until this is fixed 😞

Edge team, other sidebar UI's in Windows respect this. For example, File Explorer, Settings and Taskbar (when Taskbar is set to "Left"). Please just fix this, it's silly and annoying

 

taskbar left.png

settings side tabs.pngfile explorer side tabs.png

This implementation would greatly improve the usability of vertical guides
in this video, former Microsoftie Jensen Harris talks about how an extremely similar Fitts' Law issue took almost 10 years for Microsoft to fix! Folks, it's 2021... it's so depressing that there's still issues like this 😞
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wbnf87dGms
Good point. Just to clarify, this does not mean that the appearance of the floating tabs would need to change (i.e., having the tabs visually flush with the left edge of the screen, which would look bad). It just means that when your cursor is flush with the left edge, next to one of the tabs, clicking in that position should act like clicking on that tab. As has been said, the New tab button already works like this.
Hey everyone, here's a similar request I "filed" having to do with the "Hide title bar" UI. Please give it an upvote so the Edge team knows people want that one fixed too https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/issue-request-make-buttons-and-url-bar-follow-fit...
Folks, this is low-hanging fruit!
Edge team, what on earth is going on here? This should have been fixed by now. I also did a google search about it and found a reddit post (that mentions this discussion!) https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftEdge/comments/pu0rii/why_wont_they_fix_this_issue_with_vertical_ta...
So is this "WontFix" ??
Not saying that it's a good thing but it seems the entire WinUI 3 is made in such a way that certain (most) buttons have un-clickable empty area around them. (You will notice that in the new Settings app the same problem is there, you can't go all the way to the left and click a setting, same with the new Windows app redesigns we're seeing recently, and also in context-menu buttons) Since Microsoft Edge follows the Windows 11, and hence, the WinUI 3 design principles, we observe the Fitts' Law inconsistency. This may also be the reason why the Edge team hasn't looked into this issue yet; maybe they want to keep it this way.