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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 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.
If that wouldn't confuse the user, nothing would. While that may work for you, it's not standard for other apps on any OS. I think the current option (the 1 close option on the far right), or installing an extension that puts a close tab button on each tab are the best options, as they follow most widely accepted paradigms.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
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 can re-order tabs in Firefox 1.5b1. It's really nice! I haven't experienced a single crash yet either, check it out.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
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 like it better.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I've personally found middle-clicking to be the way to go. Takes a day or two of getting used to, but it's a very handy feature. Middle-click a link to open in a new tab. Middle-click a tab to close it. Plus it works in Opera and half works in Safari (it only opens new tabs - thankfully each tab has a close button in Safari).
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
use mouse gestures - only closes the active tab...
The best extension I've used on mozilla/firefox/opera, and the main reason I switched
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures
I can reorder the tabs in Firefox 1.0.6... All it requires is an extension... Now to figure out which one does it for me...
c =161 MiniT+ that's the ticket.
http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopi
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.
- 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?
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?
Stop sounding like an idiot. The site worked fine last nite, he disabled CSS becasue of the increase in the amount of traffic he is now getting.
Uh no. That "X" is supposed to exit the program. You need to change you habit.
"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.
Shouldn't be difficult to make the action of the main window X configurable...
That's a horrible idea, IMO. Changing the default behaviour of what is traditionally a "close application" button would mean that I now have to contemplate what clicking the 'X' does in all future applications. Will it close all of my windows? One of them? Do I have to look for a configuration option in each application and standardize them all?
It's like those horrid web pages that redefine the behaviour of check boxes to act as radio buttons, or vice versa, just because they like the look better.
As others have pointed out, use the red X specifically designed for tabs.
It's under the tabbed browsing in options.
"Warn when closing multiple tabs"
Live forever, or die trying.
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.
I totally agree - consistency is more important than convenience. Since firefox tabs are really just a customized approach to the traditional MDI-style approach, it only makes sense that the inner-X would be to close tab and outer X would close window. The problem is caused by the fact that most MDI programs didn't have tabs, just a crappy "Window" menu, so the close window X was on the menu bar - right below the main X. Firefox broke this tradition because it had an explicit tab bar (imho, a massive improvement).
My problems with firefox are as follows:
1) ctrl+tab behaves different from alt+tab - alt+tab in windows orders by history, while ctrl+tab orders by left-right order. So, there's no "last tab I used" command in FF. It's hard to get a balance here tho - windows accomplishes the odering visibly by showing a pop-up of the program-tabbing history so you can see the order you cycle through.
2) not good keyboard access of the search bar. No useful history, up+down don't do anything.
3) creating a new tab doesn't copy the history like it does in IE. In IE, when you spawn a new window you get the history of the old window. This is really, really handy.
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.
Change your home page to a pipe-delimited list.
c om/|http://www.drudgereport.com/|http://finance.ya hoo.com/|http://blogorrhea.blog.blog/|etc.
http://slashdot.org/|http://fark.com/|http://cnn.
For more information, click here.
>> 2) not good keyboard access of the search bar. No useful history, up+down don't do anything.
CTRL+K Should take you there. CTRL+L will take you to the Address bar. CTRL+F will take you to the "Find in this Page" bar.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Wow. That's awful. Bad Slashdot. The general case should be:
URL1|URL2|URL3|...|URLN
For more information, click here.
sound like the guy doesn't know how to use the browser
Did you miss the part where they said he was the UI designer for previous versions? It was in the title. I think it's a safe bet that he knows how to use the browser. Probably, much better than anyone who's responding to the thread.
UI designers have the extremely difficult job of designing for the largest portion of the target audience. He's not saying that all of the features are horrible or that they don't have their place. He's merely suggesting that their focus is no longer capturing that majority and Firefox is.
There's another way too: open all the pages you want in tabs; go to Tools | Options | General, and click the "Use Current Pages" button for your home page. Easy peasy.
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
BUT it doesn't do what he wants - not to have to worry about where he has to click exactly if he wants to close the current tab or window.
Because expecting the user to click in certain places for certain things to happen, especially when using a mouse, is TOTALLY unreasonable.
The fact that the user isn't really owning up to is that he is using a behavior to close a window when he doesn't really want to close a window.
So... if you change the behavior to not close the window... now you need to come up with a way to deal with the people that actually want to close the window when clicking on the close window widget.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
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.
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!
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.
Yeah, they really should implement some kind of 'Preview' function and put a message on the posting page mentioning it. If they put the button right next to 'Submit' nobody could possibly miss it
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
So you support the less-consistent interface, then? The "x" in the top-right of a window closes the window. It is the same with every other program. That is what that button does. Making it close tabs would be counter-intuitive and inconsistent. Likewise, forcing people to navigate menus to perform an incredibly common task which can be done without them on every other program on the system seems a little harsh.
The find bar is one of the features I like most about FireFox. It's small, out of the way, and does exactly what I expect it to do.
Now, if you were refering to the search box (next to the address bar) I do wish it were a little bigger, and I had the ability to easily add/remove search engines... Still one of the features I use the most.
One thing I do know -- I don't want my address bar to do *anything* except change and display a site address. It's the address bar -- it should have one function and one function only. One thing I absolutly hate about IE is its address bar search 'feature'. Not only is it often inconvenient (Mistyped URL? MSN search results page loads! [yuck]) it poisions the minds unskilled web users by allowing them to not only avoid learning what a web address is, but discourage them from learning as well!
<end rant>
Required reading for internet skeptics