Safari and system design, pt. 3

At the end of the previous post in this unexpected series about iOS Safari’s tab control design, I wrote: This is how interaction systems slowly fall apart. […] It is likely that Safari’s exception will now be treated as “blessed,” and start spreading further. Given enough time, more and more pills will go in whatever direction they want when dragged – and people will learn not to trust any of them. I didn’t quite get this right, as it seems this has already happened. It might have been Safari that used a “blessed” interaction from elsewhere. Conversations with a few readers helped me piece together a larger story of how we got here. I fired off some of my old iPhones and emulators to verify them, and so let’s go back in time all the way to 2007. Step 1: These rotary controls for timers have been here since the first iPhone. Note how you drag the background, not the selection, but that works because the background is styled as a physical object, you see the options extending in both…