Safari and system design, pt. 2

Around the time I was writing about iPhone’s Safari breaking the expected “tap to jump to the top” gesture, a conversation on social media pointed to yet another thing that this tab control does strangely. A typical use of Safari means two groups of sites: a regular set on the right, and “private” pages on the left (this is what Chrome calls “incognito mode”): As expected, you can tap on either label, and switch to the relevant group with ease: It also feels like you could slide it – and you can, except… …you immediately encounter a Scroll Lock problem. You are not dragging the pill – you are dragging what’s underneath the pill. To switch, you have to go the other way: You can immediately intuit some inherent unpleasant complexity of the whole system – not just in it “going the wrong way,” but also in how it creates room and then contracts it, in two separate steps, after you’re done. The reason is that you can actually have more site groups than just the initial two. You can even…