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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
Isn't it about time that any link that is included in an article is coralized first? Makes the site admins happy, makes the readers happy.
But wait, that might require effort, or even a very small perl script...
Indeed, we are seeing the benefits of true competition in the browser market. People have a better product to choose from, and existing manufacturers are forced to innovate.
Just when people thought that the desktop computing environment had started to stagnate, we're seeing many new developments recently. Most of the developments have been the result of competition from Mac OS X, the Mozilla Project, Linux, and other open-source software.
It's good to know that open source software has the ability to affect a misbehaving economy in such a fashion. But then again, perhaps it's just the system working as it should: there's a demand for new software, and that demand is being met by the open source community.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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
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.
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?
Wonder if, secretly, Bill Gates runs Firefox
Maybe. There's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that he "secretly" runs a Mac, so why not FireFox?
and his "engineers" are buying copying, I mean, Innovating for the next version of Internet Explorer.
Doubtful. If you check out most of their work over at Channel 9, they're being quite arrogant about IE 7. They don't seem to want to be influenced by FireFox at all, and they seem to think that standards compliance should take a back seat to making IE "cooler".
That being said, there is one thing that everyone should keep in mind about IE 5.0. When it was released, IE 5 was the best browser in existance, bar none. It was light, it was fast, it was simple, it was straightforward, and it had real features that helped people. (Such as the ability to save passwords.) Microsoft never properly thanked SpyGlass for their browser technology, but Microsoft *did* take the browser experience to a whole new level.
It wasn't until Mozilla reached somewhere around the 0.8 version that any browser even tried to compete. Even Opera was kind of pathetic in comparison. By the time Mozilla hit 1.0 (and Opera finally got the lead out), IE had held the market for several years. It's only thanks to Microsoft's intentional attempts to sit still that Mozilla, Opera, and now Safari had a chance to play catch up.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
RTFA this time - it's worth it. And get Ben, Asa, and crew to give him a call - not because they need help, but because I think he's honestly on the same wavelength as they are and a fresh perspective can be a good thing. The issues he raises, while relatively minor, are worth addressing.
Anything I type here won't add to it.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
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?
The Download Statusbar extension resolves issue 2. I sue it and it works very well.
But we're falling into the classic Open-Source problem...sure that's easy you just have to install this, configure that and whisgoplify your thawasthwuts and it'll work the way it should have done in the first place.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
"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!
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.
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.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
This is wrong.
On so many levels it hurts.
While this was clearly the feeling one got when IE7 was announced, the IEblog posts have become much more humane (as if some upper exec had let the IEteam managed themselves instead of keeping them on a short leash), and there are quite a few posts on standards, the work the team does, asking for feedback and such.
They're proud of their work, of course they are, but I clearly don't see them as "arrogant", and while it looks like the standards were supposed to take the backseat, I guess that the community's backlash to the IEteam and the fact that other MS teams (the VS2005 one for example) started to work hand in hand with WASP made them fact-check and mend their copy.
I now say that I'm looking forward to IE7b2, because it may actually be a quite nice browser to web devs (won't make me get IE back as main browser, but well if I can stop wanting to claw my eyes out every time I check my pages in MSIE it's good enough for me).
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
"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.
I like that you can set FF to prompt you on whether or not to accept site cookies and then set your choice as a rule. However, every now and then you find a site where denying cookies won't allow you to browse properly.
But because you've already set a rule to deny all cookies for the site, you have to go to tools->options->privacy->cookies->options, scroll through the list, and change the rule. To my knowledge, there isn't anywhere on the browser or tab (e.g., an icon in a corner) where you can double-click to view and/or change cookie behavior for the currently viewed page. Too bad. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I don't know about the rest of you but I love having all my tabs in one place. It drives me nuts when I needed to open a link in IE in a new browser. It's just easier to organize when there's 1 button in the taskbar to click showing my website titles all lined up in browser tabs.
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.
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
"It's only thanks to Microsoft's intentional attempts to sit still that Mozilla, Opera, and now Safari had a chance to play catch up." Well, someone needs to tell me why MS stopped developing anything new for IE until Firfox came along? Huh, what was that? Oh, something about that is how monopolists act?
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.
It was quite obvious that that was a simple typo and I obviously meant 'use'. You're unjustly slandering me by suggesting that I'll randomly sue people for no good reason, and I have no choice but to take you to court to clear my name.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
If they produce a clone of Firefox then it's OMFG M$ IS TEH SUXX!!1! THEY NOTT INNOVATEING!! LOLOLOLOL!!!1!
If they don't then they're arrogant.
Uncanny.
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 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.
google cache: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:4toUblI0DaEJ: www.scottberkun.com/blog/+scottberkun+firefox&hl=e n&client=firefox-a
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.
You'd rather memorize a zillion dinky eye squinting icons?
Yeah, but you can make them bigger if you use the ctrl key and the scroll wheel.
Oh, wait a minute...
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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:
Firefox goes against IE behavior and starts each browser instance from scratch. IE intentionally brings the browser history into the new window: the bet being that users who want to continue from where they left off can, and those that want to go their home page can do that with one click.
That has to be my least favorite IE feature. Open a new window when you're on a poorly-designed dynamically-generated page, and all sorts of unanticipated behaviors can happen when Javascript re-executes and triggers server-side behaviors through GET arguments passed to dynamically-loaded graphics. At the very least, you get to wait for some slow-ass ad site -- cough cough atwola.com cough coughnew window, not a copy of an old one.
How about we do something completely old-fashioned and make this a configurable option with the status quo behavior as the default?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
"Wonder if, secretly, Bill Gates runs Firefox.....and his "engineers" are buying copying, I mean, Innovating for the next version of Internet Explorer."
a.) I seriously doubt Bill Gates is worrying about the minutia of IE's features.
b.) Duh. Somebody at Microsoft is using FireFox, looking at its strengths, and making sure Microsoft isn't behind. Just like the FireFox team did with IE. It looked at what IE does and duplicated it. This is typical of products in competition.
I wonder if anybody was ever modded interesting for complaining about Open Office stealing features from Office.
"Derp de derp."
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.
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.
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.