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IE UI Designer On His Switch To FireFox
wellington writes "Scott Berkun (who worked on UI design for Internet Explorer 1.0 thru 5.0) talked about why he switched to Firefox. In addition to five reasons why he switched, Scott also detailed five UI flaws in Firefox."
http://mirrordot.org/stories/5f281d8294a2f11becb28 7b476c6bb6b/index.html
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
You can re-order tabs in Firefox 1.5b1. It's really nice! I haven't experienced a single crash yet either, check it out.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
You should read Asa's reply to this article.
:-)
Read it here.
It's very interesting.
Why I switched to Firefox
It's a sad day and a good day. For years I've held onto my IE install out of love. I worked on IE 1.0 thru 5.0, and was one of the people that designed much of its UI. But my love for the past has faded. Last week I switched to Firefox: and I've been happy.
Why I switched:
1. IE is a ghetto. There are specs I wrote for UI features in 1998 that are unchanged today, 7 years later, in a world where browser usage has changed dramatically. I've watched bugs that I fought to have fixed in 5.0 become regressions, appearing in 5.01 and surviving in 6.0. Even though it's the product I was proudest of, using it now makes me sad - it's been left behind. I do read the IE blog now and again - smart folks are working - but there's nothing for me to install.
2. Bookmarks work. The Favorites UI model in IE is the same one we built in 1997, when we knew most of our users had 20-40 favorites. It was made to be super simple and consumer friendly as most of the population was still new to the net. This UI is effectively broken today, designed for people that don't exist. The Favorites menu and Favorites bar show links in different orders, the organize favorites dialog is just weird, multiselect doesn't work: favorites is a sad forgotten place. This was by far my greatest frustration with IE, even though I'm responsible for much of the original design.
3. Firefox has quality & polish. IE 5.0, for its time (1999), was a high quality release. Really, it was. Joe Peterson, Hadi Partovi and Chris Jones fought hard to give the team time to do lots of fit and finish work. We did fewer features and focused hard on quality and refinement. Firefox feels to me like what IE 6.0 should have been (or what i expected it to be after I left the team in '99). It picked a few spots to build new features (tabs), focused on quality and refinement, and paid attention to making the things used most, work best. The core UI design is very similiar to IE5: History/Favorites bars, progress UI, toolbars, but its all smooth, reliable and clean.
4. They made a mainstream product. One of the big challenges in designing software is balancing the requests of earlier adopters in the community, with the needs of the majority of more mainstream users. After playing with mozilla on and off I was afraid firefox would be a built for programmers by programmers type experience. It's not. I don't know who in the firefox org was the gatekeeper on features and UI, but I'd like to meet him/her/them (seriously). They did a great job of keeping the user experience focused on the core tasks. If you're reading please say hi.
5. Security isn't annoying. . The press makes security into such a huge deal, but I'll be honest. I don't want to think about security at all. I'll do what I need to, but mostly I want the system to take care of it and stay out my face. Nothing in FF makes me feel safer explicitly, I just don't deal with as many warnings, settings and other details. I know from the PR that security in FF is better (even if only because it's less targeted by spyware, etc.) but I'm pleased that the product doesn't remind me of how safe I am all the time.
Problems with Firefox:
I'm a UI design guy, so many of these are UI related. (Added note: I'd used FF on and off, but since I'm now 100% some of these are complaints might fade in a month of usage. Stay tuned).
1. Find UI. Why does the find dialog appear at the bottom of the screen? I agree that a dialog box (semi-modal) can be a mistake if you're doing multiple searches, but flipping a coin for placement (top vs. bottom), the top is a better choice for any UI, especially if it's going to look and act like a toolbar. I can't move it so it earns a spot on this list. However, the overall implementation isn't circa 1992 like the IE one. It highlights, it searches on type, & it warns on unfound items - nice..Firefox find
I like it better.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I've personally found middle-clicking to be the way to go. Takes a day or two of getting used to, but it's a very handy feature. Middle-click a link to open in a new tab. Middle-click a tab to close it. Plus it works in Opera and half works in Safari (it only opens new tabs - thankfully each tab has a close button in Safari).
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
use mouse gestures - only closes the active tab...
The best extension I've used on mozilla/firefox/opera, and the main reason I switched
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures
am I the only one that noticed that at least four of the five Firefox UI "flaws" can be fixed with extensions?
first flaw: Retro Find
second flaw: Download Statusbar
third flaw: Clone Window
fifth flaw: Menu Editor
I do love that at least my copy of Firefox completely destroyed the design of his web page. Either that or it's just really ugly, but what did I expect from an IE designer?
Stop sounding like an idiot. The site worked fine last nite, he disabled CSS becasue of the increase in the amount of traffic he is now getting.
I guess this is a case of "to each his own." I love the search box - and indeed, the whole dialog - at the bottom of the window. I never liked the "popup" dialog for finding text in IE, so a docked bar works better for me.
The issue of bottom versus top is a little more nitpicky for me. In my mind, if the search dialog were to spontaneously appear at the top of the window, then one of two things would happen: (1) the HTML text/image/whatever at the top of the window would suddenly become hidden, which I would find distracting, or (2) all the HTML text/images/whatever would suddenly bump down a few lines to accommodate the appearance of the search bar, which would also distract me.
Since I (and presumably most other users) typically read a web page from top to bottom, scrolling down as necessary, the search bar appearing at the bottom of the window only covers up things I haven't yet read, so it's not cumbersome.
I work on dual 18" screens, and I almost never maximize a browser window to fullscreen - I prefer to work in a window roughly 1024x768, so glancing down doesn't pose a problem for me.
But like I said, to each his own (:
When you're not looking, this sig is in Latin.
Asa already addressed most of his critique.
If you prefer to use about:config then change accessibility.typeaheadfind to false.
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You can do this in FF 1.0x as well.
in about:config, set browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to True.
-cheers
Change your home page to a pipe-delimited list.
c om/|http://www.drudgereport.com/|http://finance.ya hoo.com/|http://blogorrhea.blog.blog/|etc.
http://slashdot.org/|http://fark.com/|http://cnn.
For more information, click here.
>> 2) not good keyboard access of the search bar. No useful history, up+down don't do anything.
CTRL+K Should take you there. CTRL+L will take you to the Address bar. CTRL+F will take you to the "Find in this Page" bar.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Wow. That's awful. Bad Slashdot. The general case should be:
URL1|URL2|URL3|...|URLN
For more information, click here.
Am I the only one that uses the middle button? It opens new tabs (middle-click a link) and closes old ones (middle-click the tab). No need for plug-ins, the functionality's right out of the box!
There is already a solution like what you propose.
I use firefox and greasemonkey with this script installed.
Problem solved.
Peace