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
apparently someone did look at it but they're not telling us what's their thoughts are (WontFix? Or do they think it's a P5 for some reason?). If anyone is doubting how important Fitts' law is to the user experience: in 2020 a change in Chrome accidentally moved the new tab button down a single pixel, which broke Fitts' law when the window was maximized, and they immediately received a bunch of complaints. They fixed it in about 1 month of it being filed... and that's just the new tab button! So ya, they really should fix this

(here is that Chrome bug https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1136557 )
Over 2 years and this still hasn't been fixed :( You cannot deny that having tabs adhere to Fitts' law is important, because Edge's tabs in horizontal mode do. And if you decided to break this with horizontal tabs, you would be swamped with complaints from users. Fitts' law is important for tabs! So why would vertical tabs not adhere to Fitts' law? There is no valid reason, if there was I wouldn't keep coming back to this. This is such basic common sense stuff folks...