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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."
Wonder if, secretly, Bill Gates runs Firefox.....and his "engineers" are buying copying, I mean, Innovating for the next version of Internet Explorer.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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I'll see your window closing issue, and raise you by a can't-reorder-the-tabs. So close, but so far, on that one. Be interesting to see if MS's tabbed behavior addresses that.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Stories like this always leave out my favorite Firefox feature. It's such a small, easy feature to implement, but it has such a great impact:
Easy font resizing. Ctrl-plus to make fonts bigger on any web site.
Whenever I show this feature to somone over 40, it immediately sells them on Firefox.
Sure, it's possible in IE too, but not for every site. Some sites are coded in such a way that text resizing doesn't work in IE. But in Firefox it always does work for any text.
Ctrl+w closes the current tab or, if no tabs are open, closes the current window, which is not quite but very close to the behaviour that you are asking for.
I agree with some of his points regarding Firefox.
The download box is annoying. It should be attached to the bottom in the same manner the find is. I prefer my find on the bottom (he wants it on top), but I agree you should be able to change it in a preference. And yes, the Go menu is pointless.
The tabs issue is tricky. I love my tabs. I think they are great. My one annoyance is that when there's a dialog you can't change tabs. The dialog should be attached per tab, not for the whole window. but maybe that's something within the toolkit that would need to be changed, not just firefox.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Actually, what I like alot is the way Opera handles this. They put the 'X' on the tab itself. IMHO, it makes for less mouse movement and just seems easier when closing a tab.
my 2 cents...
Slackware
It's funny, after reading his write-up, I realized I'd never even seen Go menu before.
Sure enough, it's there, and I never knew it. That's probably a good hint that I don't need a "Go Menu," as it looks pretty useless.
I think he's right about "Find" as well. Although the bottom quick-find is very cool, there's no short-cut (or even this feature at all) for an advanced find dialogue.
It's also odd he mentioned that Firefox should retain the last URL when opening a new window - this is perhaps the IE feature I hate the most, with a passion. Often I'm simply viewing a large site and want to spawn a clean window (since there are no tabs) - it has to reload the whole thing over again.
I'm sure there are people here who automatically assume an IE developer has no place telling Firefox suggestions, but I think some of these are good.
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
I'll go one step further - first, the search box doesn't belong on the bottom, but secondly - find-as-you-type itself should be a user-disablable option.
In the meantime, I use Retrofind as my solution to the problem. Retrofind is a Firefox extension that replaces FAYT with the old-school semi-modal dialog box.
If I'm 37 PgDn keypresses into a long SlashFark thread, and I see that someone's replying to user "foobar", and I want to find the original comment, I do not want to see the browser window jump up to 32-PgDns (landing on "foo", "fool" or "foosball") when I type "foo", only to land on the 28-PgDn level of "foobar"'s post.
Why not? Because it's bloody hard to remember that I'm 37 PgDn keypresses (or 37% of the way through the scrollbar, etc) into the thread when I just wanted to "Find 'foobar'". If "foobar" doesn't exist (maybe it was a typo, maybe it was beneath my moderation threshold), but "foo", "fool", or "foosball" does, I've now completely lost track of where I was in the thread. I want to navigate if, and only if, the string exists - and I want to do it when, and only when, my eyeballs and brain are expecting it.
Those are the most egregious examples, but the more I tried to use find-as-you-type, the more I decided it wasn't for me. In comparison to the old find-in-page dialog, FAYT felt the web browsing equivalent of auto-focus-stealing, auto-raising windows on the desktop. FAYT is not a bug, but at least for me, it's a misfeature.
I'm curious - am I alone in this opinion?
"Everytime I hit Cntr-T and see a blank screen I think Im in Word."
WTF? I absolutely hate the fact that you duplicate a page in IE when you "open a new page", that's quite insane! If I open up a new page I want new content.. quite simple.
Also the fact that doing CTRL-T makes the cursor appear in the area you type the url is absolute magic... CTRL-T write name of webpage, enter, CTRL-T name of new page, enter, CTRL-T etc.
Thank you for that nice behaviour Firefox!
There is never an absolute "win" in the software market. The "winner" at any particular time will be the piece of software with the widest acceptance. Of course, that may change over the course of time, and most likely will. But it is better to see a piece of software "win" based on its quality (ie. the "best" software), rather than "winning" due to anticompetitive business practices.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
only really make sense if you view Firefox as a browser for ex-IE users rather than an independant product on its own:
The search in page field at the bottom makes perfect sense to me for a couple reasons - first, the user very rarely cares WHERE it is located as they probably aren't clicking on it with the mouse, if you want to search for text in the page you type '/' and whatever the hell you want to search for. You have to have your hands on the keyboard to enter the text you are trying to find, so why the hell would you want to use the mouse anyway. Secondly, it is less frequently used than the address and web-search fields and therefore shouldn't clutter up the interface - that is also why it is usually hidden. For anyone used to VIM, nothing in the world would seem more logical. These are perfectly good design decisions, who cares if IE users have to adjust a bit? In fact, not *everyone* is even familiar with IE - I know I never had internet access when I ran windows 10 years ago, and I've probably only used IE maybe 10 or 12 times in all of that time. We need to quit viewing everything in the context of "what would Windows do?", and just write software that does its job well.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
"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."
This was my number one frustration with IE. When I want a new browser window (or tab) I want a blank one. I want my browser to be fast and responsive. I DON'T want to wait the second or two that it takes for IE to reload the page (that I don't even want) for the new window. Often it doesn't even grab it from the cache...it actually re-downloads the page from the internet. So I learned to hit Escape immediately after Ctrl-N to stop the reload. And as far as I know, you can't turn that feature off. Meh. I use Opera now. It's nimble and responsive. New tabs are blank. In the extremely rare situation where I actually want to reload the current page in a new tab, there's Window/Duplicate in the menus.
And then he mentions home pages...just out of curiousity, do any of you use a home page? What do you use it for? My homepage is set to blank in all my browsers. Google is the site I visit most frequently, but I've got the search box on the toolbar so I never have to actually go to Google.com and then type my search criteria. I can't think of any site that I would want to load every time I launch a browser. But maybe that's just me.
That may make some readers happy, but not all of them. My employer blocks access to the coral cache and to some other public proxies that can be used as anonymizers. If all links were automatically coralized, reading slashdot would become painful because I would have to edit every link in order to be able to view it, including links to sites that are not slashdotted. So for those who have similar "no anonymizers" policies at work or at school, the problem would be worse than it is currently because all links would be blocked, not just a few.
Keep in mind that most "big" sites linked from Slashdot do want direct links to them, so that they can benefit from their ads, etc. So linking unconditionally to a cached version would not make everybody happy, even if it would certainly help many smaller sites that can be badly hurt by slashdot..
What would be great is to include both links (original and coralized) for every link included in an article. Just like logged in users can choose in their preferences to display the domain name next to each link posted in a comment, it could be possible to hide the "(cache)" links that would appear by default next to each link on the home page. With this solution, it would be trivial for readers to switch to the cache if a site gets slashdotted.
-Raphaël
Add to that the standard shortcuts to open browser, file manager, terminal, I'm using the mouse much less often, and it'also much faster with the keyboard. Tab switching? ditto.
I'm using the mouse only to arange windows anymore, and I don't need to think about which button to press, much less find it.
This is a pet peeve of mine...
When bookmarking a web page with frames, only the top frame is bookmarked, and the location of the sub-frames won't be remembered. IE does this correctly.
I don't like sites which use frames, but it's still used on a lot of sites. Example: Google groups. And I would like to be able to bookmark these pages too.
The bug in Bugzilla: Frame State Bookmarking (frameset bookmarks) (copy link and paste in new browser window, they don't allow linking from Slashdot). This bug exists since 2000... Please vote for it.
I think a much better example of a great UI in an open source application is Inkscape. It's got one tool bar on top, one on the side, and one status bar below, so you have almost the entire screen for the actual drawing. There's no floating windows. Strangely enough, everything I wanted to do was easy to find and use without the 5 levels of toolbar something like visio has. Basically, instead of having 100 controls for stroke, fill, pattern, etc these are on a dialog that is one-click away. It doesn't sound good, but it really works well in practice. Also, when you are dragging or hovering the mouse it gives useful tips like "Ctrl to scale uniformly Shift to scale around center of rotation" or "Enter completes the path" that also look slick.
Inkscape is a much better example than firefox imo, because a browser only has like a dozen common actions whereas the svg drawing program has hundreds. You just have to see it. The windows version has a few GTK related bugs, but the unix one is absolutely amazing.
I totally agree - consistency is more important than convenience. Since firefox tabs are really just a customized approach to the traditional MDI-style approach, it only makes sense that the inner-X would be to close tab and outer X would close window. The problem is caused by the fact that most MDI programs didn't have tabs, just a crappy "Window" menu, so the close window X was on the menu bar - right below the main X. Firefox broke this tradition because it had an explicit tab bar (imho, a massive improvement).
My problems with firefox are as follows:
1) ctrl+tab behaves different from alt+tab - alt+tab in windows orders by history, while ctrl+tab orders by left-right order. So, there's no "last tab I used" command in FF. It's hard to get a balance here tho - windows accomplishes the odering visibly by showing a pop-up of the program-tabbing history so you can see the order you cycle through.
2) not good keyboard access of the search bar. No useful history, up+down don't do anything.
3) creating a new tab doesn't copy the history like it does in IE. In IE, when you spawn a new window you get the history of the old window. This is really, really handy.
I've asked around and can't seem to find an answer. I'm willing to pay in Karma...
Is there a way to have firefox automatically open with 6 tabs open all to different pages? Cause there's about 6 pages I'd like to have automatically load every time, slashdot, fark, cnn, drudge, stock prices, blog, blog, etc
???
Safari on OS X has the little X on each tabs. Makes it easier to understand that you are just closing that tab. The only bad thing is, if you have to many tabs open, it makes a drop down list on the right for the ones that ran out of window space. But if you choose one, you don't get an X and there is no way to close that tab without killing others to get it to show up in the tool bar area. Other than that, I love the tabs in Safari.
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12345
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The biggest problem is that the Find Bar is practially invisible down there.
I used to download the Firefox nightly builds quite often. I remember when the find bar was first introduced I used the browser for a week thinking that Find was broken, because Ctrl+F didn't appear to do anything.
Even months later I still sometimes hit Ctrl+F multiple times in Firefox because of the lack of visual feedback. It's not that I don't know how to use Firefox, it's just that it's so unlike from every other application.
Outlook uses a search bar at the top of the window. Apple does as well in Finder, iTunes, and Mail. And more applications now are using a side-bar for the find dialog. These methods work very well because they give the user some decent visual feedback.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
sound like the guy doesn't know how to use the browser
Did you miss the part where they said he was the UI designer for previous versions? It was in the title. I think it's a safe bet that he knows how to use the browser. Probably, much better than anyone who's responding to the thread.
UI designers have the extremely difficult job of designing for the largest portion of the target audience. He's not saying that all of the features are horrible or that they don't have their place. He's merely suggesting that their focus is no longer capturing that majority and Firefox is.
I'm no expert, but it would seem that it would be possible to write a greasemonkey script that turns all slashdot links into coralized links. Is there a reason why this can't be done?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
There's another way too: open all the pages you want in tabs; go to Tools | Options | General, and click the "Use Current Pages" button for your home page. Easy peasy.
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
I must agree with the majority of the points there. I can suggest, however, Download Statusbar, to do what he asks of the status bar.
I don't have a problem with the find bar, it has a low profile (more screen visible) and has as much as you really need to search. I would like to see regular expression support (or a subset of), and to highlight all matches to the search word, rather than just the current found word.
I like the "Go Menu"
,it and my screen was too small for Opera adds) the new pages coming up where I was. I open a new window to do something new, usually check my mail or seach for something, not to have 2 of the exact thing. This is mostly a problem on old systems where it can add a delay of 5+ seconds to get home as your browser copes with opening random too much flash page when you hit CTR+N.
It is a unified history grabbing other tabs and maybe other windows (don't use them).
It is different from teh button because it captures all tabs and old sessions, it matches the history and the button matches the history for that tab.
And I hated, even when it was all I knew, (because Netscape had sucked for so long I had foratten
So I guess I am just saying, it is all preference stuff and not flaws, especially the go menu, 2 letters on the menu bar are hardly a problem.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
But wait, that might require effort, or even a very small perl script...
WANTED: Someone to write a nice Firefox extenstion that auto-coralizes all links (or outgoing http requests from page links) either going to a domain, or when the referrer is a certain domain (ie, slashdot).
Call it something like "atoll" or "barrier reef" :-)
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
3) creating a new tab doesn't copy the history like it does in IE. In IE, when you spawn a new window you get the history of the old window. This is really, really handy.
Assuming you mean that a second copy of the page is loaded in the new tab, that's one of the main reasons I hate IE. When I start a new tab, I expect a clean slate that loads instantly. I don't want some massive page to tie up the CPU for a few seconds (and possibly spawn a few popups or something) before I can type the URL in. Also, making a new tab can often be a good way to hide something you may not want other people to see.
Bugs in IE? Like what? I take it you've never done any CSS coding and haven't seen this list? Anyway, by ghetto he also means that it is missing many new features that other browsers have. Do you think the IE7 team looked at IE6 and could find nothing at all to improve?
Here he rags on the favorites in IE. The 'Organize Favorites' dialog doesn't have sorting, you can't view the URLs, you can't check if the sites still exist, it's very unaesthetic, and you can't create a folder in a particular spot just at the bottom (compared to right click on FireFox Bookmarks menu and clicking 'New Folder'). From the menu itself you can't create spacers or new folders. Plus you can't just right-click an item in the menu to get a properties dialog to rename a particular item.
FF is 'smooth, reliable, and clean?' The UI designer for IE is saying that he thinks Firefox is a cleaned up and reliable alternative to IE that's equivelently or slightly more polished. It's an opinion that many people agree with. Then you add to that all the features like search bar, RSS reader, tabs, spyware immunity, fewer security problems, text resizing not locked, and dev tools like source view/script css dom debugger-page info. Then on top of all that you add a few key extensions like the dev toolbar, Tab Mix Plus, Adblock & Flashblock and it's in a completely separate league.
mainstream product not a reason to switch I don't think he was saying IE was not mainstream, just that he was pleased Firefox was so polished and painless to switch to.
You realize that you can turn these security warnings off. IE nags continuously to enable ActiveX if you disable it. In pre-SP2 you get a "Page may not display correctly." popup that's impossible to remove. In XP SP2 you get the 'information bar' with "Page may not display correctly. Click here for options." Clicking it gives a help popup. The help says you can turn off the information bar for each possible messages but it doesn't tell how and says that it is not recommended. The only way I've managed to kill it is Maxthon's 'Remove Web Annoyances' add-in.
Changing the default behaviour of what is traditionally a "close application" button would mean that I now have to contemplate what clicking the 'X' does in all future applications.
But it's MY computer. I want to use it the way I want to use it, and I should have that option. I don't have any problem figuring out all the non-standard features I've already put in, because I put them in because I wanted them. I don't want somebody else's idea of how to think about computing forced on me. That's why I switched to Linux in the first place.
Seriously, though, the default behavior should be as-is, but I don't see any harm in having it as an option. Then again, it isn't worth maintaining code for an unpopular option. Maybe do it in a module, so most people don't have to install it. I'd also like to see a way to quickly flip back to defaults (without any permanent changes), so that when fixing somebody's nonstandard computer I can use a standard interface.
It's like those horrid web pages that redefine the behaviour of check boxes to act as radio buttons, or vice versa, just because they like the look better.
I don't know that I've had a problem with this particular situation, but I do hate web pages that break standards because they think they have a better idea. Same deal, I'm the one browsing, I will browse how I damn well please. I hate web pages set up to open a new window every time you click on a link. Who the hell came up with that idea? It's non-standard, and while I can easily open a link in a new window if I want it (my choice), when clicking on a normal link and expecting a normal transition, getting confronted with a new window just imposes on me unduly, because it is not what I am expecting, and it takes more steps to undo.
3) creating a new tab doesn't copy the history like it does in IE. In IE, when you spawn a new window you get the history of the old window. This is really, really handy.
I actually prefer all my tabs to have a separate history. When I am doing research for a project, I tend to think in tangents, and I want all my tangents isolated from each other. Although I can understand why you would want the history to be included in a new tab.
Of course there is. Main one would be one of the reasons Firefox exists: If you include every possible configuration option in Preferences, you end up with Mozilla suite.
Taken to an extreme, you have a browser with ZERO configuration options.
But given how some people LOVE blank new windows and other people HATE them, and it's a pretty easy concept to express, I think it's a strong canidate for inclusion under "advanced"...I mean there's already a VERY similar 3 radio button "Open links from other applications in..." there.
I admit I dislike having to search through all the options even in IE's "advanced" options selection, but I think there they lack good grouping, lurping almost all options under Browsing and Security.
Supposedly you had some of this functionality from about:config, but people are saying it no longer works.
So I overspoke with "NO reason", but I think this would be a strong candidate for inclusion without too much risk of "configuration option hell".
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Right click context menu;
Open Selected Text in New Tab
Open Selected Text in New Window
So when I highlight a link I can open it easily.
For a GUI guy, he's complaining on some issues that are very apparent, while there are others that are at least as questionable.
- no customization (with key's/menu's including some saved defaults) - should be part of the widget toolkit really
- no site centered options (I like to trust my bank site for opening popups, images from other (media) sites, certificates etc)
- close tab is featured at the bottom of the drop down list (I don't like clicking the wheel, and most users would not find it anyway)
- the find bar is *totally* useless, it's on the spot where my mouse never is, it's small and just typing a search term on the URL bar and clicking "find" would be twenty times easier
- the close tab button is somewhere where it should not be
- it's pretty hard to take away mime types assigned to certain programs like quicktime (who's interface/plugin I hate with a vengance)
- a search feature for options would be nice
I also would like a (seperate) version of firefox for using my bank sites etc. No caching, no saving of history, no sharing of data, no XUL scripts etc. That would really be something to put your trust in.
All this said, I really prefer the GUI of firefox to IE (or most other browsers). It's pretty, you can change the looks and it's really uncluttered. I hate almost every new GUI feature that Microsoft has brought the last years (since windows 2k really).
Also, for those that like IE's behaviour, perhaps a "duplicate tab" as well as "new tab"? I only suggest this because "new tab" (or window) suggests a clean, new, empty interface, whereas "duplicate tab/window" should copy complete history, etc.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, however, there is.
One ability I would like to see is the management of multiple downloads. I would like to be able to queue downloads in any order I choose (even chnage them on the fly) and tell FF to only download x files at once. I want to pause any download and come back to it later, or as FF to start downloading this file at a certain time on a certain day.
I don't make predictions, and I never will.