Back in the days of the beta/classic debate, much of the focus was on colors, boxes, and surface appearance. Those were the things that changed. What didn't change much were the message navigation methods. Because they didn't change, we didn't discuss that too much.
I think they should be careful about changing much in that regard since SI's underlying design under both the new and old face is both elegant and rich.
I would not want to see a link on SI that force-opens a new window. I open new windows all the time. Right now, I count six of them, but I do so when I want to. If I were on a machine with a smaller screen or with less memory, I wouldn't open those extra windows. When a link is added that automatically opens a new window, the user has no way to override that action.
I kind of like the idea of putting a "send PM" link on the message page, except for one thing: I don't think there's enough room. Adding a text link would complicate a simple design. Adding it as an icon would slow rendering since icons are pictures that require additional connections and possible slow-downs when rendering the page. A simple icon might be OK, but they'd have to make sure it didn't clutter the page or slow it down.
Even if such a link could be added, I'd rather have it defalut to the same window so that I'd have the choice of opening a new one only if I wanted to.
By the way, none of these issues that you bring up are Mac-specific. Although the "right-click" process is slightly different, all of these things work pretty much the same on browsers on any platform. |
