im guessing yall added this because safari does it, but this is one i think should be thinked about a bit more: changing tabs shows the tab being moved into position as if its been swiped in (sorta).
my criticisms:
- doesnt help with navigation. having the webpage move into place when swiping the tab in is less jarring than it magically replacing the current wepbage, thus improving navigation. but when i select a tab from the tab menu, i am not doing such a motion, thus the animation (and its wait time) dont improve the experience as im expexting the tab/page to just be there already.
- inconsistency leads to disorientation. when swiping a tab in, the webpage AND the tab is moved into place (as seen in the vid attached, altho this animation is strange itself as theres parallax for some reason). this is logical and makes sense; the metaphor here is that youre moving a big scroll of pages from one page to the adjacent. the animation when selecting tabs from the tab bar doesnt match this. the tab header doesnt move; the url is simple replaced with the currently selected tab's url. not only does this break the metaphor, but it occasionally makes for a bizarre and nauseating animation where as the tab drawer is moving back into place, the currently selected tab's webpage moves into place in the opposite direction (this can also be seen in the video). and what happens when a tab is selected from the top of the list when the current tab is at the bottom? does it scroll all the way thru, like how discord scrolls thru its emoji pages? i havent tried this yet, but if it doesnt, the metaphor is broken again, and if it does, youre nullifying the benefit of being able to tap a tab and go directly to it instead of swiping thru all ones tabs.
i applaud orion for being a browser that takes all that is good (and neutral, for consistency's sake) from safari and discards or fixes the bad. many companies like to put visual metaphors into their software. i posit that a visual methaphor's purpose is to help the more visually/spatially thinkers to navigate their computing devices by helping them build visuospatial maps in their mind while navigating. i also posit if you break your own metaphor, you not only throw away any benefit, but you make it harder for these persons to use the software. this is why i urge the orion team to either improve the animations, remove them, or allow us visuospatial users to disable them.
