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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."
It'd be great if Firefox would close the current tab when the 'X' in the upper right of the program windows was pressed. Or at least, if this was optional. Most people, including myself, always want to close the current window and have the habbit of cramming the mouse into the upper right and clicking in order to accomplish this.
I stopped using tabbed browsing for this reason. I'd just like to be able to close the current window with that 'X'.
Nit picking - I know...
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I completely agree with the issue of the search box being at the bottom of the screen. I work on a 21" monitor, and it drives me nuts looking down, then on the page, back and forth.
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Isn't it about time that any link that is included in an article is coralized first? Makes the site admins happy, makes the readers happy.
But wait, that might require effort, or even a very small perl script...
Indeed, we are seeing the benefits of true competition in the browser market. People have a better product to choose from, and existing manufacturers are forced to innovate.
Just when people thought that the desktop computing environment had started to stagnate, we're seeing many new developments recently. Most of the developments have been the result of competition from Mac OS X, the Mozilla Project, Linux, and other open-source software.
It's good to know that open source software has the ability to affect a misbehaving economy in such a fashion. But then again, perhaps it's just the system working as it should: there's a demand for new software, and that demand is being met by the open source community.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I agree with most of what this guy has to say, except for the "blank tabs" thing. He wants new tabs to open with the home page, or last page visited, or something. But opening new tabs blank is exactly right. Whenever I explicitly open a new tab -- i.e., whenever I say "New Tab" rather than "Open in new Tab" -- the next thing I do is type into the URL box. IE's approach of having crap already in the URL box just adds steps. If you want a new tab with your home page, then make a new tab, then click "home."
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
- The connection has timed out
That's unbeatable...- The server at www.scottberkun.com is taking too long to respond.
- The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
- If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
- If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.
[Try again]bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
Wonder if, secretly, Bill Gates runs Firefox
Maybe. There's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that he "secretly" runs a Mac, so why not FireFox?
and his "engineers" are buying copying, I mean, Innovating for the next version of Internet Explorer.
Doubtful. If you check out most of their work over at Channel 9, they're being quite arrogant about IE 7. They don't seem to want to be influenced by FireFox at all, and they seem to think that standards compliance should take a back seat to making IE "cooler".
That being said, there is one thing that everyone should keep in mind about IE 5.0. When it was released, IE 5 was the best browser in existance, bar none. It was light, it was fast, it was simple, it was straightforward, and it had real features that helped people. (Such as the ability to save passwords.) Microsoft never properly thanked SpyGlass for their browser technology, but Microsoft *did* take the browser experience to a whole new level.
It wasn't until Mozilla reached somewhere around the 0.8 version that any browser even tried to compete. Even Opera was kind of pathetic in comparison. By the time Mozilla hit 1.0 (and Opera finally got the lead out), IE had held the market for several years. It's only thanks to Microsoft's intentional attempts to sit still that Mozilla, Opera, and now Safari had a chance to play catch up.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
RTFA this time - it's worth it. And get Ben, Asa, and crew to give him a call - not because they need help, but because I think he's honestly on the same wavelength as they are and a fresh perspective can be a good thing. The issues he raises, while relatively minor, are worth addressing.
Anything I type here won't add to it.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Slashdot's story about cats being used as car fuel was on Fark for ages, too. Slashdot has gone so far downhill in the past three years, it is staggering.
The Download Statusbar extension resolves issue 2. I sue it and it works very well.
But we're falling into the classic Open-Source problem...sure that's easy you just have to install this, configure that and whisgoplify your thawasthwuts and it'll work the way it should have done in the first place.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
I have to agree with the bottom browser placement of the find box, and the elimination of the "go" menu. I have NEVER scene anyone use that.
Though I disagree with his take on tabs. I love having a blank tab, because I often prefer typing a URL (or at leat the first few characters) to using the mouse for drop down in my bookmarks. Bookmarks work great if you only have a few, but I tend to bookmark interesting sites that I won't visit frequently, but I nevertheless find interesting.
I never book my frequent sites, my browsing goes like this: slas, cnn, coa, espn, nfl, never takes more than 4 characters to get to where I go most often. If I were to scroll through my bookmark list it takes considerably longer. So for my usage firefox work the best.
Though I would like a little button nextto the URL bar to instantly clear it like in Konq. That makes it much easier in Linux to copy and paste URLS. A pet peeve i have is selecting a URL with the mouse,and going to the browser to "midde click" paste and having the URL automatically become selected, thus wiping out the X windows clipboard. Yes I know I can usually use the seperate cntl-c / cntl-v but that requires switching from mouse to keyboard and back....
Oh well that is just my $0.02
-MS2k
The point isn't that the shortcomings can't be fixed - it's that they shouldn't be shortcomings in the first place.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I like that you can set FF to prompt you on whether or not to accept site cookies and then set your choice as a rule. However, every now and then you find a site where denying cookies won't allow you to browse properly.
But because you've already set a rule to deny all cookies for the site, you have to go to tools->options->privacy->cookies->options, scroll through the list, and change the rule. To my knowledge, there isn't anywhere on the browser or tab (e.g., an icon in a corner) where you can double-click to view and/or change cookie behavior for the currently viewed page. Too bad. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I don't know about the rest of you but I love having all my tabs in one place. It drives me nuts when I needed to open a link in IE in a new browser. It's just easier to organize when there's 1 button in the taskbar to click showing my website titles all lined up in browser tabs.
"It's only thanks to Microsoft's intentional attempts to sit still that Mozilla, Opera, and now Safari had a chance to play catch up." Well, someone needs to tell me why MS stopped developing anything new for IE until Firfox came along? Huh, what was that? Oh, something about that is how monopolists act?
If they produce a clone of Firefox then it's OMFG M$ IS TEH SUXX!!1! THEY NOTT INNOVATEING!! LOLOLOLOL!!!1!
If they don't then they're arrogant.
Uncanny.
The point isn't that the shortcomings can't be fixed - it's that they shouldn't be shortcomings in the first place.
And most of them aren't shortcomings at all.
Find is at the bottom of the screen for a reason (and a good one). However, it should be positionable by the user.
Tabs opening blank is the *CORRECT WAY* to do it - as another poster pointed out. "I'm opening a new tab, I'm not cloning an existing one." New means *NEW*, not "clone of what I'm vewing now." When I open a *NEW* tab, it's because I want to go somewhere else, not see the exact same thing I'm already looking at. If you want to visit a link in the page, use middle-click, which will open a new tab, and load the link (which is more user-friendly than cloning the tab and forcing the user to click on the link - one action rather than two.)
I've never used the Go menu, but some of the responses are interesting - it holds a global list of sites visited, shared between tabs. In a non-tabbed browser it's pretty useless, but combined with tabs, it becomes pretty cool.
Absolutely! It can screw up a site's visual presentation, but being able to actually read the content is more important than what some graphic artist thinks "looks cool".
I suppose the use of all Flash for sites is the graphic designers' revenge, but more often than not, sites that use Flash exclusively are just that - flashy eyecandy for people who can't/won't/don't want to read.
But tabs opened by clicking a link, and choosing open in new tab SHOULD inherent the history from the tab with the link.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Do you get mad at Microsoft for this IE broken-ness? Or do you get mad that the braindead web "developers" who insist on using px for their font sizes?
There are plenty of legitimate cases where a designer builds to pixels. There is no reason that a feature in a browser which tells the user it can scale or zoom fonts shouldn't do that to all fonts.
Browsers determine what to do with web content, not the other way around.
- A
Firefox goes against IE behavior and starts each browser instance from scratch. IE intentionally brings the browser history into the new window: the bet being that users who want to continue from where they left off can, and those that want to go their home page can do that with one click.
That has to be my least favorite IE feature. Open a new window when you're on a poorly-designed dynamically-generated page, and all sorts of unanticipated behaviors can happen when Javascript re-executes and triggers server-side behaviors through GET arguments passed to dynamically-loaded graphics. At the very least, you get to wait for some slow-ass ad site -- cough cough atwola.com cough coughnew window, not a copy of an old one.
How about we do something completely old-fashioned and make this a configurable option with the status quo behavior as the default?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
"Wonder if, secretly, Bill Gates runs Firefox.....and his "engineers" are buying copying, I mean, Innovating for the next version of Internet Explorer."
a.) I seriously doubt Bill Gates is worrying about the minutia of IE's features.
b.) Duh. Somebody at Microsoft is using FireFox, looking at its strengths, and making sure Microsoft isn't behind. Just like the FireFox team did with IE. It looked at what IE does and duplicated it. This is typical of products in competition.
I wonder if anybody was ever modded interesting for complaining about Open Office stealing features from Office.
"Derp de derp."
What about this: as you type your search text, all occurrences in the web page are highlighted, but the screen's viewport does not move until you hit 'enter'/'next match'?
The tab thing seems to be the most contentious issue between them. Personally, I don't understand why anybody would want to see the same page in a newly created tab when they user ctrl-t. Scott is suggesting just that. I like a nice blank page that loads in milliseconds and doesn't steal the focus from the URL bar.
IE's "new window" behavior is just braindead to me. Why would I want a copy of the same window I was just on? I want to create a new window so I can do something new. It isn't called "same window" and shouldn't act like it. When something has to be loaded into the new window it often takes a lot of CPU and the page can then steal the focus from the url bar so I can't copy something into it.
Please UI is not why peole use IE.
The average smuck uses IE for a variety of reasons.
Through the late 90's I would try nearly every browser, OS, and email package.
My favorite email package? Airmail for the Amiga; it had some fairly idiotic issues for setting up, but it was still better than anything else out there.
Favorite browser? NONE I loathed them all. Netscape, IE, Hotjava, Voyager, Aweb .
Favorite OS, tossup between Linux running BlackBox WM, and Amiga OS 3.1 . The biggest limitation of the Amiga OS was the lack of a built in TCP/IP stack. Mac OS 8 was a buggy downgrade from System 7. Win9x? Bring up Netscape and IE and watch your system reboot. NT 4, at least worked somewhat, but I still felt like I was pushing a boulder up a hill. NetBSD, I only used .9x to 1.1 it was very much a work in progress, especially installation. Though I did get the experimental bootloader to work.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
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!
No, the middle mouse button is not available out of the box. My laptop computer's touchpad has two buttons, and Windows out of the box doesn't support chording to emulate a third button.