The death of the stop button

In my opinion, one of the best recent innovations in software design is the removal of the ‘stop’ button from transport controls in media players. Whilst I would consider this to be important in it’s own right, it is also significant for what it represents: a departure from the practice of making software interfaces that emulate hardware interfaces.

What, no stop button?

I am surprised by how many people I point this out to who hadn’t previously noticed it: the ‘stop’ button is disappearing from graphical interfaces for media playback. Examples include, youtube video playback, VLC media player, iTunes, the iPod GUI, JW FLV player and Totem. The majority of these GUIs go one step further, and only give you a pause or a play button depending on whether the player is playing or paused; no stop button.

Examples of applications that do still use a ‘stop’ button are: Winamp, mplayer, xmms, and XSPF Web Music Player. After using interfaces with the dual play/pause button and no ‘stop’, these interfaces feel cluttered, the stop button feels like a waste of space.

So why was it ever there?

On a mechanical playback device, the pause button freezes the current playback position, but leaves the mechanism running. The stop button completely stops the mechanism allowing the possibility of other actions (rewind, fast forward, eject). So by analogy, perhaps developers feel that the stop button should ‘release’ the soundcard driver, making it available for other applications. Apart from the fact that there are a number of solutions to soundcard resource sharing that don’t involve a stop button, I suspect that the main reason why software retains this graphical idiom is simply tradition, familiarity.

Familiarity breeds contempt, doesn’t it?

I think the important thing to notice about this, is that the removal of the stop button isn’t a complete break from tradition. It’s not the complete removal of all transport controls, replacing them with keyboard shortcuts, or a redesign of the traditional triangular ‘play’ icon. Instead it is a non-feature - the subtle absence of a feature…