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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."
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.
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?
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The find bar is one of the features I like most about FireFox. It's small, out of the way, and does exactly what I expect it to do.
Now, if you were refering to the search box (next to the address bar) I do wish it were a little bigger, and I had the ability to easily add/remove search engines... Still one of the features I use the most.
One thing I do know -- I don't want my address bar to do *anything* except change and display a site address. It's the address bar -- it should have one function and one function only. One thing I absolutly hate about IE is its address bar search 'feature'. Not only is it often inconvenient (Mistyped URL? MSN search results page loads! [yuck]) it poisions the minds unskilled web users by allowing them to not only avoid learning what a web address is, but discourage them from learning as well!
<end rant>
Required reading for internet skeptics