I’m sure everyone’s done this. Some inadvertently click or drag & drop in the wrong place seeks to reconfigure the appearance of the whole program. For example, in Word drag one of the little vertical bars away from the menu and it becomes it’s own floating window. This is a major source of error for me and a drastic stupidity in design. There is no way to lock the appearance against irrelevant mouse clicks.
Let’s apply this feature to another product, cars. Nearly every car has an adjustable steering wheel and to adjust it you pull a lever, move it to the desired place, and it clicks in. Now, remove the lever so the steering wheel can be adjusted any time you want. We’ve all adjusted the steering wheel at one time or another, but that’s usually 10 seconds out of how many hours of driving; hundreds (12000m/45mph=266h) a year? Would you want this feature or would you jam a screwdriver in the steering wheel well to keep if from moving around?
Letting you reconfigure the interface drastically without a lock is the same thing. Maybe worse, because some parts of the window with these features are UNMARKED. You can click and drag on some area and suddenly realize the window comes off, resizes, becomes tabbed, etc. Also, in high end professional software like programmin, CAD, graphics design there can be a hundred icons, window bars, buttons, etc., each with a different action.
It should be a requirement that the appearance of the application is static, locked, unless a switch is thrown. Then you can move anything around. Someplace consistent for every applciation. It could be right next to the minimize button in the upper right corner.