I ran into two usability problems today. The other one midly funny, the other outrageous. But not in the funy way.

I more or less depend on Firefox’s ability to automatically restore my tabs and windows between surfing sessions. I have a bunch of fun stuff open in a multitude of windows — i keep work related things in IE and personal stuff in Firefox.

I was checking on some personal thing during work today, so i fired up Firefox, did my thing and pressed Alt-F4, the Universal Chord to Exit a Program.

It didn’t.

Pressing Alt-F4 in Firefox closes the current window. Pressing Alt-F4 in IE and Word does the same thing, which is wrong, at least in my mental model of things. Alt-F4 means Quit. Exit. Throw everything away (but save them first). Good bye. Pasta la vista and auf wiederschnitzel. See you later.

I had now lost twelve tabs in one of my three open windows and they were not coming back. I was pissed, to say the least. And since i don’t know exactly which day i had visited which tab last, they wouldn’t be neatly sorted in my surfing history either.

Only later did i realize that that i could get back my beloved tabs by killing the Firefox process and starting the Fox anew. Smart one, boy, but too slow. When the Fox came back, some magic autosave had already saved the two window configuration, so my third window tabs are now in bit heaven. Damn.

Internet Explorer also has the ability to restore my tabs when i restart that browser, and it sucks even worse than Firefox. When i am about to close an IE window with multiple tabs open, i get a dialog box with two checkboxes. The other one to restore my tabs which i of course want restored (it’s like Word asking me whether i want to save all the text i’ve been editing for the last six hours). The other one, visually nearly identical to the first one, will not save the tabs but also never ask me again about saving tabs, until unset in Internet Options -> Tab settings -> uncheck Warn me when closing multiple tabs (i.e. backwards from the previous dialogue’s Do not show me this dialog again).

So it’s all backward. The close multiple tabs warning box has two options, one “safe” and one “dangerous”. The “safe” one is unchecked, the “dangerous” one has backwards wording (a checked-in checkbox should always mean “yes”, so “Yes, show me this dialog box next time too”)

And the fun doesn’t stop there. If i wanted to emulate Firefoxe’s behaviour of restoring the tabs of a window the next time IE starts … i can’t. There is no setting to do that. If i check in the second checkbox, Do not show me this dialog again, the upper one is magically unchecked and made unselectable! Way to go, folks! You Just Can’t Win^TM.

The other usability problem of today comes from Skype and is merely confusing. I was sending a copy of my work-in-progress thesis to my sister.

Abort. Stopit. Cancel. Turns out i was sending the wrong version so i press the Cancel. Stop it now.

There’s a dialog box that asks whether i really want to cancel the transfer and, much to my bemusement, the options OK and Cancel.

Yes, cancel. I want to cancel, i want to cancel now. But which cancel? Do i press the cancel button to cancel the transfer or to cancel the cancelling of cancelling the file transfer? A simple Yes or No would have been better…