Like most of TG, I’m a big fan of Google Chrome and Gmail. Recently, I’ve noticed just how much I’ve become indoctrinated by the functionalities in each. I’d go so far as to say it’s sort of ridiculous that other browsers and web mail clients don’t do these things.
The feature in Chrome which allows you to move tabs around is perhaps the lesser of the two, but it’s still totally awesome. For those of you who don’t know, you can drag a tab between two Chrome windows. You can even pull a tab out of one window and make it its own window. I tried this in Firefox today, tried to pull a tab into another window so I could see stuff side by side, but all that did was make a shortcut on my desktop. Sigh.
But there is no way that Gmail’s shift+click shouldn’t be in every single web mail client ever. You know how you can select one file in Windows or iTunes, and then click while holding shift on a file further down on the list and wind up selecting everything in between? Yeah, you can do that in Gmail. And it’s awesome for clearing out, say, Twitter spam. Hotmail, unlike Gmail, both gets real spam in the main inbox and doesn’t have this feature. So you have to click each check box, or select all and then deselect the ones you want. Come on, Microsoft! Get with the times. Same problem in Yahoo! Mail.
There’s no reason for these features to not be in everything. And I do mean everything. I’ll even admit that, after using an iPhone for a bit, I wanted to move stuff around in Google Earth on my laptop via touching the screen, which of course didn’t work. But there’s no reason that all screens shouldn’t be touchscreens, either. You might say that we learn these behaviors out of habit, but they make sense.
