I want to preface this rant. I appreciate diversity and competition. Also, I'm not just an MS or Apple hater. If they make a great product I'll consider using it. I try to look past brands and use products that solve problems well.
UI design is all about disclosing information. Shapes, proportions, perspectives, colors, reactions and transformations! There are infinite ways to go about expressing ideas when speaking the language of design. In order to prevent a colosal goat fuck of a UI, each expression must be executed judiciously.
In the world of browser UIs, we've managed (at a mind-numbingly slow pace) to refine core concepts through trial and error. It's iterative. But it's now painfully obvious that there IS A RELATIONSHIP between all these crazy little bells and whistles on the screen.
Starting with THE MOST IMPORTANT PART...
- The document, belongs to the location.
- Controls that affect the location (stop, refresh, fav, etc.) belong to the location.
- A location belongs to a tab.
So, placing tabs between the location and the document produces a broken metaphor and a lack of conceptual continuity. This may not be apparent to the user (at this point in time), because they assume that computers and computer software is somewhat beyond them anyway and they just need to learn how it works.
Microsoft said 'Most people use 3-4 tabs'. I think someone at Microsoft also said 'No one will ever use more than 64k of RAM'. So they crammed the tabs onto the same plane as the location bar. This is not innovative. It actually equates to 15 pounds of shit in a 10 pound bag.
So in conclusion, if you absolutely have to be in the browser market, why not start by capitalizing on the good ideas and then mix in your cool features. Just a thought.
As I said on twitter, I agree the design decision of IE9 and Safari are strange and counter-intuitive with respect to tabs and address bars.
However, to point out one thing about your rant, regarding the "all on one line" part. IE9 actually responded to public criticism from their platform previews, and in the RTM version of the browser, you can now have the tabs on a separate (albeit below) bar. What I think is important is not the configuration change itself, but that the IE team actually listened to the public on something. I can just imagine the internal debates raged furiously on both sides. What's good is, in the end, they listened to the "vocal minority" who complained about not enough tab real estate, and at least gave us something marginally better than before.
But yeah, no taking away from the fact, this UI decision (by both browsers) is rather inexplicable and strange. That having been said, I've been using IE9 as primary browser for several months now, and I have adjusted to the early frustrations I had.