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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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It doesn't come packaged with XP
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
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.
Best Windows Freeware
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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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...
http://mirrordot.org/stories/5f281d8294a2f11becb28 7b476c6bb6b/index.html
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.
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.
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
This story has been on DIGG.COM for the past day and a half. The link is here. You gotta try Digg.com out. Seriously, I love my Slashdot, but the stories on digg are fresher, faster, and the users pick what gets on the site.
~Hergio
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?
I like it better.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
So in your opinion, this behavior should be Windows only or appliable to all OSes?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Issue 3 "Tabs and new window" can be resolved by the Clone Window extension.
Issue 5 "The return of the go menu" can be resolved customizing the Navigation Toolbar (just a few clicks).
Don't exactly know about issue 2 "Download UI", but I imagine that some extension would do something similar.
Overall, the author doesn't seem to be familiar with the extension/customization possibilities of Firefox.
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 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.
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.
- 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?
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.
If your browsing multiple tabs a white x appears in a red block close to the top right hand corner.. That closes the current tab. I didn't see it right away either and I just switched to firefox a couple of weeks ago.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
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!!!
This doesn't imply that there's such a vast bulk of Slashdotters that they overwhelmed him - I'd bet a dozen users simultaneously going to his site crashed it. It appears that he's running a database driven instance of Wordpress, so of course it's all being generated from the db for every request (I don't use or know much about Wordpress - does it even do caching?). I chose a blog package specifically because it allowed me to generate entirely static content, avoiding endlessly, and redundantly, rebuilding the same page.
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?
Middle click on the tab you want to close. Done.
Ex
He's got a point about the Go menu. It is pretty pointless. Does anybody actually use it? I would like to see it disappear for the next version of Firefox Beta Deer Park.
I read his article yesterday when interiot quoted part of him in a post in relation to the article with the interview with Bill Gates.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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"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!
I have a problem, both at home and at work, where sometimes when I type in a form field, it pops up the "search" bar at the bottom, and starts putting my typing in there. Not good if I am entering a password with a co-worker sat next to me. Anyone else have this problem? Is it a known bug?
Get your own free personal location tracker
zooms everything (pictures...) and doesn't screw up the laytout.
That's ctrl + mousewheel
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
If I had to use IE v1-5, I'd switch too! IE was terrible at that time.
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
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.
Anyone else find that Google's Googlebar is not nearly as good as the mozdev one? Every time I change the otions it keeps forgetting them,
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Each tab has its own "X" to close it.
Sometimes the content of a tab get stale, perhaps simply because I've lost interest in it. Today Firefox closes the current tab. So if I've decided based on the title that a tab is stale, I've still got to make it current, and then I can close it. With individual "X"s I can close by-title and don't have to redraw first.
Of course this is a 2-edged sword, because by the time too many tabs are open, especially with a little "X" on each one, the titles are shortened to the point of useless. (Heck, sometimes that happens even without the "X".) Maybe in this case the UI could drop back to the one "X" of today, since you need to see windows before closing them.
Along that line, when it gets that cluttered, sometimes I'd like a "Close every tab except the current one." button.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"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.
No, you are just wrong to have that habit. That "X" is the one that closes the application and that should NOT change. Most people have that habit because they are trying to close the APPLICATION WINDOW and not the current TAB within the application. I have heard of no one having this issue.
There is an "x" on the bar that the tabs are on that closes the current tab. Use it. That is what it is there for.
My only real peeve w/Firefox is the download manager. You can choose where it goes but after download completes the only choice available is to launch it. I have a bad habit of wanting to go to the install folder.
Try using the All-In-One Gestures Extension. I have it set so that when I right-click and move my mouse Down, it would close the current tab. Similarly, with the right button held down and the mouse moved Up, it would create a new tab. Very fast and efficient.
For me, one of the most annoying UI things on IE was the popup menu, (right click menu on links) having the option "Open" as your first choice. Why in the world someone wants to right click a link and then select "Open" as opposed to just only click the link to open it? That was one of the reasons I moved to FF, they got the right click right.
It's 100 times better than IE in almost every way, but when it comes to javascript, it's slow, esp. in comparison to Opera.
It would be great if they precompiled javascript or something.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
I use the Go menu for one very specific things: alt-G, H takes me to my Home page.
Yeah, I could do that with a bookmark. But it just so happens that my home page is My Yahoo. If you type alt-B, M, you don't get taken to a bookmark beginning with M. You get the Manage Bookmarks. It can be adapted, but only by fiddling with chrome (which gets in your way if you want to update releases.)
Yeah, I could simply call the bookmark something else, but basically I find it easy to have alt-G, H work; it's now a habit. Other than that I completely ignore the Go menu.
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 what this guy is trying to show with what he wrote! If he decided to switch, fine, welcome and hope to see him contributing to FireFox, but if he is going to write about his "switch" with out real subsistent, I don't want to know about it.
His first 3 points in "Why I switched", he compares IE 5.0 to a FireFox (don't know which version of FF, but we can assume latest) -- is this a good comparison that add value to his readers? IE 5.0 is history; why not compare IE 6/7. Point #4 is just a complement about FireFox so it's value less. Point #5 is about IE's security holes -- but which version of IE is he talking about? The latest IE (when confirmed correctly) is as secure as FireFox.
After this, I didn't bother to read his "Problems with FireFox."
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
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.
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Tab reordering(coming in 1.5)
Multiple Tab Selection...I'll explain....in Excel, one can select multiple tabs....I would like to etiher via a ctrl click or shift click to select multiple tabs and either bookmark via context menu, or close all of the selected tabs.
Also, to avoid the same kind of issue you get with any taskbar in any OS, I would like the option that once there are so many tabs open (user defineable) that the next new tab command opens another window. This May sound confusing at first, but I think it would help maintain meaningful tab titles.
A master tab list.....somewhere, have a complete list of all tabs....in every window. Also, via context menu, have it so you can move the tab from one window to another.
But honestly, if I never get any of these, I am completely satisfied. Firsfox has been so great. I remember trying Mozilla from time to time and always going back to IE, but firsfox has spoiled me of that habit. Also, it may be me, but I have noticed that I less and less have to switch to IE for a website. It seems, to me, people are GETTING that if you code to have it work for all browsers, your traffic goes up AND also will have a better website. Sometimes you can code just for Firefox and you don't have to make ANY changes for it to work elsewhere (depending on what you are doing). Hopefully, IE bringing improvements won't stop the Mozilla team....but will encourage them to make it even better.
Gorkman
right click on the item in question. you can then go to the folder.
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.
The interface is way better thought out than FF. The only thing I don't like about Opera is that Ctrl-Enter doesn't add the www...com.
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 agree with most of what he says, especially that the Find sticking around is a good thing (I love...err, hate how IE puts in a random old search term when I hit ctrl-F, no consistency I can see) and options for ctrl-N and ctrl-T being blank, homepage, or clone window are really sorely lacking...and not having shift-click clone the window history is dumb, dumb, dumb.
My other Firefox gripes are:
they broke having ctrl-F search textareas and seem to be in no hurry to fix it. bad news for anyone who edits big amounts of text online.
Tab to a link. Hit enter to follow. Hit alt-left arrow for back. In IE, the link I just followed still has the Tab selection...I can hit tab again and go to the next link. Firefox, it has NO idea what link I hit, and I'd have to tab tab tab to get back to where I was. (Netscape 4.7 was a follower not a leader in keyboard navigation, and it's irksome that Firefox still can't get this basic thing right.)
I guess tabbed browsing and the stateless search are the only things keeping me with Firefox. That and feeling less like an MSdrone...but not feeling like an MSdrone doesn't help in keyboard navigation...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
No, some of it is indeed thought out. IE is ghetto Yes, this can be a refrence to long forgotten, but still present, bugs or the lack of support of modern web starndards. Or both. It's a ghetto in the sense that it's old and not updated; definitely lacking modern features (even beyond tabs). Maybe the magic of IE7 will fix all this, but it's yet to appear for mass public consumption. Bookmarks Work. Bookmark organization in FF is just infinitely easier, and it's handy to have my "Live bookmarks," i.e. RSS feeds. Importing and exporting comes down to a simple HTML file. There are some things that do need to improved, but it's already better than IE. Again, this has to primarily to do with the UI. IE lacks quality and polish Most improvements, security or otherwise, has a very just-taped-on feel to it. FF is a mainstream product - and IE isn't I'll agree with you on this... IE's pretty mainstream. Security isn't annoying. Security on IE still sucks and it's annoying with all sorts of messages and warnings flying about everywhere that hinder the user experience.
Boycott Sony
What if when the search bar appeared the page would automatically be scrolled down so that the on screen position of most of the text would not move and instead it'd would be like the search is just covering the top two lines?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
When I was installing FF on this linux box (Slackware/KDE) the first installation dialog said something like "Click 'Next' to continue", but the button was labeled 'Proceed', might not have been those exact words, and not exactly confusing, but it didn't inspire confidence.
Also in a scrolling text box within a page (such as this new comment form) the vertical line of pixels to the left of the 'thumb' of the scrollbar appears to be semi-random colors, it looks like it's getting a blit from the wrong place in memory. FF does this on both Windows and Linux... dosn't crash, so I don't think its accessing random/null memory, but it's something in the 'not good' category.
That is a garbage injesting troll. Not the 'modern web standards.' That means one thing and only one thing - it renders pages nicely that web standards say should break the browser.
Or both. It's a ghetto in the sense that it's old and not updated; definitely lacking modern features (even beyond tabs).
Like what? No examples from you or him.
Bookmarks Work. Bookmark organization in FF is just infinitely easier, and it's handy to have my "Live bookmarks," i.e. RSS feeds. Importing and exporting comes down to a simple HTML file.
Importing and exporting in IE is also a simple html file. How is FF easier in this capacity?
There are some things that do need to improved, but it's already better than IE. Again, this has to primarily to do with the UI.
Yet mysteriously no one can explain this. I've looked at it - I'm unimpressed.
a very just-taped-on feel to it
'feel'? That doesn't translate at all - I have no idea what you are talking about.
Security on IE still sucks and it's annoying with all sorts of messages and warnings flying about everywhere that hinder the user experience.
How does it suck? Explain. One example. And FF has no securty flaws? BTW - you can turn those warnings off quiet easily.
FYI - in HTML (since you are an expert in the area) be advised of something known as a paragraph tag.
I don't see whats so silly about the go menu. I personally think that it is amazing. You have instant access to searches from google, amazon, wikipedia, etc., AND it's customizable, so if I don't want amazon on the list, I can take it off... or I could add new ones with a visit to the add engines option.
-=Zeus=And=Hades=-
Well, not everyone knows the shortcuts to the history, so this basically is the menu that leads to it.
:-P
..
I didn't know it was there either, I though he was meaning the menu that appears under the Go Back button
The Find UI is never in the right place - if it was on top, it would be in the way of viewing, if it is on the bottom, I forget about it and try to open it again
Download UI - can be switched off in settings
new Tabs cannot be used to go back - well, that is annoying sometimes, but the drawback of showing the previous page is that you end up with disorganized behaviour.
Zabs and modality - maybe that was a security fix?
The problems is modal windows would have to disappear when another tab gets focus.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Am I the only one that wonders why everybody thinks Tabs make the Firefox UI the seeming pinacle of modern GUI design and innovation?
.and MANY more
Is there anybody else who doesn't give a rip about tabs. I really don't give a flying crap about them.
In fact there are several IE based browsers that have had the tab capability for a long time.
http://www.avantbrowser.com/
http://www.mybrowser.web4net.net/en/
http://www.maxthon.com/
. .
IE has been there for a long time people. Get off the tab fetish. If the IE people cared they would already be using one of the many IE tabbed browsers available since way before Firefox.
The funny thing is that Firefox zealots think tabs are innovation?!?!?!?!? Tabs have been around since the beginning of GUI-time.
--- BTW, I use Opera, Firefox and IE for my development testing. I really have no browser-bias. I just think tabs are quite mundane. Talk about browser security or something else worthwhile. Just please get off the tab thing.
While the download status window is adequate, I strongly agree with his suggestion to replace it with a status bar or toolbar. Fortunately, we can already obtain this functionality using an extension: Download Statusbar by Devon Jensen is truly wonderful, and while it may be a bit too configurable for the average user, those who are looking for a nice replacement to the built-in download manager.
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.
Sorry, but this guy is so wrong.
:]
I am the biggest UI ludite and the search at the bottom is extremely user friendly. Sure, it is a new way of doing things but I hope other apps follow suit.
Firefox could easily move this to the top of the screen for those who have a bad neck and cannot see the bottom of their screens
JsD
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.
window is the entire firefox instance, not a tab in that window. clicking on the x closes the entire window, as it should.
now, what you are really trying to say is that you are unable to adapt your behaviour to the new browsing paradigm [ie click the red tab-specific x, or use an extension giving you more tab functionality] and want to change an established ui paradigm to suit this fact.
this is exactly the wrong approach to ui design.
sum.zero
PLEASE. This is so stupid. It's about having a browser with a multidocument interface rather than a single document interface - and SDI is far better. Forget tabs - just open another browser.
I thought your way for a long time...I like the Windows taskbar, so having the tabs seemed redundant.
BUT--tabs let me do things I can't with just the taskbar, namely, semantic grouping. I'll go to a message board site, and then open up all the threads I find interesting in a single browser, thus stopping them from cluttering up my taskbar, and letting me close the whole group at once if I please.
That's one advantage to tabs...if you don't that way of operating, you can totally ignore it and not even notice the option is there.
Tabs and Ctrl-F are the two things keeping me with FF for now.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
google cache link: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:4toUblI0DaEJ: www.scottberkun.com/blog/+scottberkun+firefox&hl=e n&client=firefox-a
apparently he wasn't much of a UI designer, that's why he isn't working on IE7?
did you forget to take your meds?
google cache: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:4toUblI0DaEJ: www.scottberkun.com/blog/+scottberkun+firefox&hl=e n&client=firefox-a
Is such that the location of the find, and the look of a dialog or two is enough to switch to another app? Phht! A week from now hell have a blog entry about switching to FF 1.5 beta. Later this century hell write about switching gback to IE 7 based of course on the color selection for the window background, and so on...
I too despise IE bringing up the same page in a new window. The thing that I hate most about it is how little sense it really makes - I mean, you are ALREADY viewing that page and now you have another.
In a response to someone who posted the same thought as you (only want a blnak page on new), the author replied with:
The logic was: if we bring the history along, people who didnt want it can just do whatever they were going to do anyway - low impact (the perf profile was good). But for people that need it, its there. We felt its a bad idea generally speaking to leave people in most read/only software with blank screens. It should at least put you on the start page as it does when you launch FF.
Nw I agree it's good to have something there (more in a sec) but I think he is totally wrong when he says it has "low impact". I'm not sure which IE he was talking about but in ALL of the versions I've ever used (mostly 5-6) just about any page I'm on happens to have a degree of latency before the page is fully displayed and useful that is very annoying.
Here I think Safari has it exactly right - new pages display your bookmarks, so you can travel from there. Safari does not do this for new tabs (which I think it should) but it does for new windows (unless you specify a homepage).
Basically I think that a new window can have absolutley no delay before you are able to use it, and copying the existing content in the real world always introduces notable delay.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Not just the text, scale the whole page accurately. With modern LCD pixels getting smaller, and with differing personal preference on font and image size, this should be available.
And apply a different scale factor to printed pages.
is a simple little clear button next to the search field. Often I select text to paste into it, and then get there and find out I cannot paste because it's already got text in it; so I have to select the last search text, delete it, and then re-select what I wanted (elsewhere in another window sometimes) and finally paste it in. (I'm talking about on X Window where the middle-mouse-paste works with what you selected, and is not persistent if you select something else.) What a huge pain, and I'm doing it several times a day. Galeon had a clear button next to this search field. Surely there is a way to add this by editing some XML somewhere?
The URL field could have a similar clear button, but that annoys me less, because I can middle-click anywhere in the browser window to go to a selected URL, so I don't paste into the URL field very often.
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.
I don't agree with a find box on the bottom, but I too have never ever used - or seen someone use - the "go" menu. What a waste.
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'm of two minds on tabs - sometimes I want a fresh tab - faster - sometimes I want a moldy tab - remembers history. Wish there was a checkbox to turn on History Tab option, so I could do both as a right-click choice.
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.
I always book my sites, and have bookmark folders for things like Media, UW, my job - and then use the links there. But sometimes I type them. Proper folder org is critical if you bookmark and use it.
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....
I too frequently mess up the copy/paste of bookmarks, especially when I'm emailing in webpine, since I want to send the real URL or a URL link, but not all twenty-five URL links cause only one or two are important. This is a major problem of mine, and sometimes I mess up the ctrl-c / ctrl-v paste and nuke my link in the bar, which is a royal pain for secure sites as sometimes that expires me.
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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.
I don't agree with a find box on the bottom, but I too have never ever used - or seen someone use - the "go" menu. What a waste.
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'm of two minds on tabs - sometimes I want a fresh tab - faster - sometimes I want a moldy tab - remembers history. Wish there was a checkbox to turn on History Tab option, so I could do both as a right-click choice.
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.
I always book my sites, and have bookmark folders for things like Media, UW, my job - and then use the links there. But sometimes I type them. Proper folder org is critical if you bookmark and use it.
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....
I too frequently mess up the copy/paste of bookmarks, especially when I'm emailing in webpine, since I want to send the real URL or a URL link, but not all twenty-five URL links cause only one or two are important. This is a major problem of mine, and sometimes I mess up the ctrl-c / ctrl-v paste and nuke my link in the bar, which is a royal pain for secure sites as sometimes that expires me.
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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 also wish IE didn't ALWAYS remember the last URL, as it has a bad habit of autocompleting the WRONG frickin URL. But it would be nice if this was an option, if it ever is implemented in Firefox, selected via the checkbox and/or a right-click option. But not normally a default option.
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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.
It would be nice to have an OPTIONAL site list of approved sites that will keep cookies when you flush all the other cruft - for example, I tend to keep yahoo cookies but some sub-site cookies at like poll.seattlepi.com should be flushed as they just gum things up after a while.
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
Or right-click (if you checked an option) and select Open With Cookies Allowed For Site.
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>new Tabs cannot be used to go back - well, that is annoying sometimes, but the drawback of showing the previous page is that you end up with disorganized behaviour.
"Duplicate Tab allows you to clone a tab with its history and place the duplicate tab in a new window or in the current window. And it allows you to merge all tabs from different windows in one window. "
Here is something that has always been broke in IE, but Firefox has right....
In the auto-complete field in IE is not accessible with the TAB key. The list drops down, but you can only access items in the list by using an arrow key which means lifting one's hand up while typing and pressing the DOWN key.
Firefox, on the other hand, allows me to TAB through the autocompletes which is considerably easier.
I assume the IE problem has something to do with accessibility (tabbing through fields, etc), but it's very annoying.
BTW, I use Avant Browser over Firefox because I like it's tab management better....and I can visit those pesky IE-only sites.
ÕÕ
keep your dirty hands in your own pants Scott Berkun. lol
Obviously he has not reached the super-user point of having 40-50 tabs open in several windows! I can flip through so much information so fast it is insane, especially since there is only one process started per window... can you imagine surfing 50 sites at the same time w/IE!? **CRASH**!
In fact, since I have not installed M$Office on this machine, and use FF 99% of the time, I only reboot about once a week, out of courtesy to my machine (it is still windoz after all). Whenever I have IE/MSO on a machine, it needs to reboot at least daily!
I have always entertained the theory that if you open office and ie, walk away for a week or so, you will come back and find your machine rebooted, bsod'd, or seized. ;>
I prefer how Opera does it... or, actually I mean the default configuration, because it is configurable. ... and in those cases Duplicate becomes very handy.
A "New" window or tab is blank, but there is a "Duplicate" option on the context menu. Duplicate windows even come with a duplicate history.
Most of the time I want a blank page with an empty address field. Sometimes I am replying in a forum and I need to go back and then forward
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Yes, the discussion linked to is far better than most /. discussions these days. It reminds me of a more idyllic /. time, when the hapy dinosaurs danced about the net.
While I disagree with Scott on most of the tab issues, I thought it was a great article. And it was really cool to se ethat he, Asa and the others are already discussing these thins (at the above-ref'd link) in a way that should engender improvements.
Yes, this might look like a dumb reason, but DEAR LORD, clearing a month of cache in IE may take several minutes. I just couldn't use that stupid software, go figure what other hidden flaws it's filled with.
Great that he switched. Not just for his own sake - the F/OSS movement definitely needs more, and better UI designers. Getting more people like him into the Project should really be our top priority.
Most have to do with the scroll wheel:
- When in a multi-line edit box (exactly like the one I'm typing into right now), the scroll wheel doesn't work at all. In IE6, the scroll wheel will scroll the cursor up and down, and when it reaches the beginning or end of the text in the box, will then proceed to scroll the page. In FireFox I have to click outside the box (to change focus) and THEN use the scroll wheel to scroll the page. I find this to be such a pain in the ass that I acutally dumped FireFox and went back to IE *just* because of this.
- The scroll wheel scrolls a LOT more slowly, making it laborious to scroll down long pages (which I frequently have to do).
- The drop down list in the Address Bar is badly organized. I want "Most Recently Used" up top. I never EVER was able to figure out how those items were ordered, but I almost always had to scroll down to go to the pages I go to all the time. They'd build up with a lot of pages I visted exactly once, and then suddenly disappear several weeks later. This was frustrating, annoying, unintuitive, and just plain amateurish.
- Clicking on a movie file doesn't launch the media player, but plays it "in place" on a page. I actually dislike that. In addition, it would frequently not play the entire media file. I use VIOP and can listen to my messages via the web. In FireFox, I'd only ever hear the first 7 seconds of the message. It was always truncated at that point. Under IE, I always heard the full message, every time, no problems.
- I was never able to see or experience any advantage to "Tabbed" browsing, and nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain to me why it's a good thing. I foudn it to be a nusance, so I ended up not using it. In other words, this wasn't something that would make me switch or ignore other flaws.
- I really hated the download manager. Maybe I'm just USED to the way IE works, but I found the FireFox way to be quite annoying and intrusive, while the IE way just seems simple and logical. When grabbing files from web-pages (which I also do a lot), I prefer the IE way.
I really wanted to like FireFox. I really wanted to switch. But I'm damn near uninstalling it at this point. I still try to use it from time to time, but I usually end up frustrated and switching back to IE because sites don't work, or because of all the scroll wheel problems, etc.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
The Mozilla Foundation doesn't discuss software freedom when they discuss their software, and their silence encourages their users to remain quiet on the issue as well never learning what software freedom is or how it makes a difference in their lives. The Mozilla Foundation talks about how they support choice in the browser marketplace and they talk about how their browser is more secure than others. Neither of these are terribly compelling reasons to switch to Firefox because they're, respectively, not true and not a competitive advantage. Now that Microsoft Internet Explorer will gain some of the features Firefox touts (tabbed browsing, increased standards conformance, increased security, etc.) users will have little reason to stick with Firefox.
Before Firefox and the Mozilla suite were available, one could choose from a variety of browsers including Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera. Having a choice in the marketplace only requires two alternatives, but here were at least three. Thus choice was satisfied. Choice is a very weak and easily subverted criteria as well—none of these web browsers were free software. In practical terms, this means that none of the users of these browsers had any chance to learn what these programs were really doing on their computers, nor any chance to change what those programs were doing if they learned the program was not doing what they wanted the program to do. Finally, this means that if users figured out a way to change the program (extremely difficult to do because most users only have a binary), users had no legal way to share their improved version with their community. The users were kept unable to help themselves or their community.
Microsoft Internet Explorer will continue to come with Microsoft Windows and Firefox will continue to be a download away. Coupled with the lack of any discussion on software freedom, this means that as MSIE gains more features that make it more competitive with Firefox, there is less reason for any MSIE user to switch away from MSIE.
Digital Citizen
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.
You know if you right click on the explorer bar you can adjust properties so that like items group together. I often have 20+ browser windows open at a time when I am enjoying the refreshing taste of Fark - and they are all under a single tab item.
The only thing that really bugs me about this whole post is the fact that he calls them firefox "flaws" when all he is stating is what he would like more. If you want to talk about a "flaw" state how the app doesn't include the options for you to make it how you would like it. But the thing that bugs me twice as much is the fact that he can make firefox work the way he wants it with a few simple extensions. Maybe I just like firefox the way it is but this guy just came across to me as a total IE whore. Opening things up in new windows is the reason I switched to firefox in the first place. Tabbed browsing is awesome, and I would seriously have to smack someone if it opened the same page in the new tab when I hit ctrl+t. I always hated how IE did that.
Mouse Gesture Navigation?! I NEVER click that little X in the corner because 'drag down then right' works to close the current tab regardless of where the cursor is as long as it's on the webpage. If you haven't downloaded a mouse gesture extension for Firefox then you're NOT browsing as efficiently as you could be. How do you open multiple tabs? Contextual Menus?! You Barbarians! ;)
To download: Extensions Page > Navigation > And I suggest 'All-in-One Gestures'.
Happy Browsing
Yeah, I was wondering if that was going to come up, but I find taskbar-grouping to be inferior to tabs for two reasons:
1. Taskbar grouping is inconsistent, or at least difficult to model in my head. (which is crucial for my concept of usability.) Tasks get their own buttons til some uncertain critical mass is reached (dependent on how many other apps are going on), and then they leap together and apart, willy-nilly. If I use the start button to launch a new app, theres a chance its button will be subsumed into an existing group.
With tabs, I'm always in control of the grouping (which, 80%+ of the time, is "SDI"-ish), and I leave taskbar grouping off.
2. You can't see what windows are in taskbar group without clicking, or even how many windows there are without parsing a number. Tabs have high visibility, at a glance I know if I have "many" or "few", and often every site's window is a click away, (often with a visual-hook "favicon", unlike IE's [e] [e] [e] [e] where you have to read the site titles.)
Obviously different strokes for different folks, but I think this a pretty reasonable usage pattern, and given that tabs are utterly ignorable if you don't like 'em, they deserve their place.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I like Opera's x to close on every tab. Much more cooler
something in FF bugs me, and that is alert messages stealing window focus, MAN IS DAT UH NOY INGGG.
I strongly disagree with this statement. The user should always have the final say. A stylesheet (or FONT tag, $deity forbid) is just a suggestion as to how the page is to be rendered. Accessibility is more important than aesthetics.
From the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines:
Tabbed browsing imho is only good with Mouse Gesture navigation. And extension for Firefox called All-In-One Gestures under the navigation category will change your mind. One you get used to the speed and efficiency of Mouse Gestures coupled with Tabbed Browsing, you'll never go back.
Type in your search word and click on the Highlight button.
Unless you mean something different.
Mmmm.. Donuts
If he's a competent manager (and financial results suggest he may be), he most certainly uses, at least occasionally, Firefox, Opera, Macs, OpenOffice, Linux, etc.
And he certainly hires people to use the competition and report on it's strengths and weaknesses.
What we may never know, however, is which of the competing products he actually likes.
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.
modal dialogs - e.g alert boxes for the site not being found or the user/password for a secure site ...
... more space for help etc, no modality so can do a ctrl-l to get to the location bar etc. without dismissing a dialog then getting there ...
I reckon it would be better to 'render' the dialog into the main browser window
He's not working on IE7 for the same reason he didn't work on IE6: because he's no longer working for Microsoft. He left the company to persue writing full time.
His book, The Art of Project Management (published by O'Reilly, no less), is a good read. I read it a couple months ago and pulled it out again just last night to review.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
I think you're confusing the button with the menu... look up between View and Bookmarks, and you see the word Go... that's what people are talking about.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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).
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.
Opera didn't do that, although I never stuck with it long enough to find out if you could change it.
Oh well... I guess I'll never be a UI designer.
Damn.
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
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.
The latest version of the Tab Mix Plus extension lets you do exactly this.
Each window be optionally created as a new instance (w/out hacks like creating another version of the app), so I can logon to a website as 2 or more different users.
But I'd much rather have tabbed desktops. IE - I tab from one desktop to another and it throws the unused tabs into a page file or hybernation or something - with cut and paste clipboard sticking between tabs.
I don't know if Vista will have this, but I figure an apple program or OS2 or something like that had this.
Some people have hands large enough to hit Alt+G with one hand but too small to hit Alt+Home with one hand. Some laptop keyboards don't have an easily usable Home key.
'Cntr-T'? This guy talks about standards and good UI design, and he can't even use the standard convention of 'CTRL+T' in his own writings?
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.
Did anyone else just learn about the "Go" menu right now? I'm not kidding, I've used Firefox back when it was still called Firebird, and I've somehow never noticed it. I was looking at the "Go" button in puzzlement, wondering what menu they were talking about. I saw that right-clicking it produces the Views -> Toolbar menu, but I thought what's the big deal?
:P
If I'm not the only one, I guess they don't have to take it out as it doesn't make a difference.
Why is this a problem when you can "Bookmark this Frame"?
Right-click in frame. Move pointer to 'This Frame'. Choose 'Bookmark this Frame'. I know it's not as handy as ctrl-d/cmd-d. Maybe that's where the bug should posted -- "No default keyboard shortcut for Bookmark this Frame".
Additionally, don't vote for that bug as it's targetted against Mozilla and won't affect FireFox development at all. If you want FireFox to bookmark Framesets (not just frames) that's a whole other 'bug'.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Because the rest of us haven't slashdotted the article, you can actually get to read it!
Wikileaks, no DNS
Here's a problem with Firefox: the inability to save a web page as a single file! Who wants to deal with folders and loose files?
If there is one thing Firefox needs its a UI (instead of tons of shit hidden in obscure nerdish corners)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I don't like his idea of putting the tabs above the toolbar. His reason that the tabs function like 'separate browsing instances' doesn't wash with me. When you look at the the way tabs are implemented in FF, the current tab sort of melts into the open page, making it very clear which page the user is viewing. That kind of intuitiveness shouldn't be sacrificed.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack