Fugly Friday: Untabbed is a horrid-looking search engine assistant

Fugly Friday is making a bit of a comeback! If you come across a worthy website, do drop us a tip. To start things off, let's look at Untabbed.

The concept is nice since some users might not want to open a new tab for checking out Google search results. Those same users may also not be aware of the myriad of browser extensions that already let you do this, so why not make a website that serves the purpose? Okay, that much makes sense. Even the name and the URL (untabbed.com) are great. So the press release looked great. But that's when things started to get very ugly.

When you go to the site and perform a search, you're confronted (or is it affronted, really?) with a faux Windows XP taskbar. Each result that you click opens up in a huge new "window" with a Vista-like skin (with minimize, maximize, and close buttons that actually work!) and an utterly inexplicable Chrome-like icon. Now, if that's not cluttered enough, there's all sorts of stuff going on in the upper-right corner, too. You get a cluttered social bar ("Liked it? Tell others!"), a cramped news feed, and even credits, right there in the middle of the layout (a very conventional location for credits, right?).

This is how an idea that sounds great on paper can turn out horribly wrong in the real world. I say keep the domain and the idea, and just start from scratch.

Tags: fugly, fugly friday, FuglyFriday, google, search, untabbed