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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
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
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
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.
"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.
>> 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.
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!
There is already a solution like what you propose.
I use firefox and greasemonkey with this script installed.
Problem solved.
Peace
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
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