I’m a devoted Mozilla user, and a heavy user of its tabbed browsing facilities. I have the scroll button on my mouse set up such that clicking a hyperlink with it means “open in new tab” – a feature that I use a lot in my daily weblog reading. I end up with an accordion effect, where the number of tabs open grows and grows, and then shrinks as I reach the end of one line of meanderings, growing again as I pursue another avenue.

But, in a move of wonderfully insane design decisions, someone decided that the command to close an individual tab should be Ctrl-w and the command to close the entire browser should be Ctrl-q.

This means that approximately once a week, whilst trying to shut down a single tab, and go to the next in line, I accidentally clip the edge of the ‘q’ key in passing, and thus close down the entire browser, losing all record of the 10-20 tabs I probably had open.

This probably wasn’t even an accidental decision, or a “well, we only have 2 letters remaining” approach. Someone probably thought that “close one” and “close all” were similar enough in nature to put the keys side by side. Both keys are often used in other applications for purposes. It almost makes sense. Except it’s so completely wrong. And so completely annoying.