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."

Mirrordot

[stevesliva]

http://mirrordot.org/stories/5f281d8294a2f11becb28 7b476c6bb6b/index.html [mirrordot.org]

Re:UI suggestion

[nharmon]

There is already an X in the tab bar (look at the right side) that will let you close the current tab.

Re:UI suggestion

[Thalagyrt]

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.

Also... the reply from Asa (from Mozilla).

[MTO_B.]

You should read Asa [wikipedia.org]'s reply to this article.
Read it here [mozillazine.org].

It's very interesting. :-)

Article

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:UI suggestion

[martoQ]

If your going to use your mouse to move it to the X box in the first place then you might as well add one of the Mouse Gesture extensions. I found that mouse gestures GREATLY enhance my browsing efficiency. http://tinyurl.com/74zdu [tinyurl.com] Shortcut to one such extension.

Ctrl+Mouse wheel scroll

[cyfer2000]

I like it better.

Re:My favorite reason

[antifoidulus]

Just FYI, it also works in Safari(and probably Konquerer as well), so it's not unique to Firefox...

Re:UI suggestion

[justforaday]

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).

Re:UI suggestion

[bbrack]

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 [mozdev.org]

Re:UI suggestion

[frooddude]

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...

http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic =161 [extensionsmirror.nl] MiniT+ that's the ticket.

Re:Firefox search box

[Anonymous Coward]

I always activate the search by hitting "/" and then typing the words I am searching for. When using it in this manner, I feel the unobtrusive box at the bottom is most appropriate for this operation.

You could argue that when you hit "Edit->Find on this page" should open a dialog box. But I feel the operation for the "/" shortcut is perfect...and it would certainly add confusion if you had search dialogs appear differently depending on how they are invoked.

Firefox flaws fixable

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [extensionsmirror.nl]
second flaw: Download Statusbar [extensionsmirror.nl]
third flaw: Clone Window [extensionsmirror.nl]
fifth flaw: Menu Editor [extensionsmirror.nl]

Re:UI suggestion

[xero314]

Please step away from the Mouse. Learn some of the key board commands, they will save you alot of time and effort. CTRL-W (or Command-W for us Mac Users) will close the current tab. Now if only the Firefox developers would implement CTRL-Q (I'm so used too Command-Q) to quit the application.

Re:Borked

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

One better: the Zoom feature in Opera

[obarthelemy]

zooms everything (pictures...) and doesn't screw up the laytout.

That's ctrl + mousewheel

Re:Firefox search box

[sixteenraisins]

I guess this is a case of "to each his own." I love the search box - and indeed, the whole dialog - at the bottom of the window. I never liked the "popup" dialog for finding text in IE, so a docked bar works better for me.

The issue of bottom versus top is a little more nitpicky for me. In my mind, if the search dialog were to spontaneously appear at the top of the window, then one of two things would happen: (1) the HTML text/image/whatever at the top of the window would suddenly become hidden, which I would find distracting, or (2) all the HTML text/images/whatever would suddenly bump down a few lines to accommodate the appearance of the search bar, which would also distract me.

Since I (and presumably most other users) typically read a web page from top to bottom, scrolling down as necessary, the search bar appearing at the bottom of the window only covers up things I haven't yet read, so it's not cumbersome.

I work on dual 18" screens, and I almost never maximize a browser window to fullscreen - I prefer to work in a window roughly 1024x768, so glancing down doesn't pose a problem for me.

But like I said, to each his own (:

Re:That is one damn good post

[Gogo Dodo]

Asa already addressed most of his critique. [mozillazine.org]

Re:Borked

[Turbo6715]

Well, maybe I am an idiot. But thank you for letting me know, in all honesty, I should've done the research first--I had wondered why that happened. I had always figured it was designer error but apparently not. (My entire knowledge of web formatting comes from when the -blink- tag was the hottest thing going.) Thanks!

Re:UI suggestion

[Skye16]

In Firefox, you could just middle mouse click on the link and open it in a new window. That's essential for me :]

Re:UI suggestion

[Ced_Ex]

It's under the tabbed browsing in options.

"Warn when closing multiple tabs"

Re:Why can't download manager take me to the folde

[Anonymous Coward]

right click on the item in question. you can then go to the folder.

Re:Maybe you'll like Retrofind?

[Matt Perry]

find-as-you-type itself should be a user-disablable option.

In FF beta: Tools->Options. Click on Advanced. Click on General tab. Uncheck "Begin finding when you begin typing"

If you prefer to use about:config then change accessibility.typeaheadfind to false.

2 other minor Firefox issues.

[Kaenneth]

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.

Re:Sweet error message in FF 1.5 beta

[DonJoe]

You can do this in FF 1.0x as well.
in about:config, set browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to True.

-cheers

Re:UI suggestion

[generic-man]

Change your home page to a pipe-delimited list.

http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]|http://fark.com/ [fark.com]|http://cnn.c om/ [cnn.com]|http://www.drudgereport.com/ [drudgereport.com]|http://finance.ya hoo.com/ [yahoo.com]|http://blogorrhea.blog.blog/ [blog.blog]|etc.

Re:UI suggestion

[dzfoo]

>> 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.

Re:UI suggestion

[generic-man]

Wow. That's awful. Bad Slashdot. The general case should be:

URL1|URL2|URL3|...|URLN

Re:UI suggestion

[Photon Ghoul]

Well, if you really want it implemented go to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org] and put in your feature request.

Re:UI suggestion

[TheJorge]

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!

Re:/.'ed before event a post

[kram.me]

google cache: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:4toUblI0DaEJ: www.scottberkun.com/blog/+scottberkun+firefox&hl=e n&client=firefox-a [64.233.167.104]

Re:My favorite reason

[Fred_A]

X renders the fonts at whatever resolution X thinks it runs at.

The xdpyinfo will tell you what X knows (or thinks it knows) about your display.
For example :

screen #0:
  print screen: no
  dimensions: 1600x1200 pixels (411x311 millimeters)
  resolution: 99x98 dots per inch

So my fonts here are rendered at a proper size (although I downsized them a bit afterwards through KDE's settings so I could cram more stuff on the screen).

The font problem has normally been solved between about 8 to 5 years ago in most systems w/ X11. It seems that yours is either very old or misconfigured.

Or that you're trolling :)

Agree, but not blank...

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Zero comments, slashdotted

[Tropaios]

There is already a solution like what you propose.

I use firefox [getfirefox.com] and greasemonkey [mozdev.org] with this script [userscripts.org] installed.

Problem solved.

Peace

Re:UI suggestion

[Dan Ost]

Tab Mix Plus allows you to reorder your tabs.

Re:My favorite reason

[superflippy]

Here's a nifty little trick I learned at SXSWi this past year: Set the font-size for the body at 76%, then size everything else in ems. This will make all font sizes uniform across all browsers.

I have a large monitor set to 1280x1024 resolution and I sit nearly 2' away from it, so I depend on ctrl+ to make a lot of pages legible.

Re:My favorite reason

[FireFury03]

I agree with your point about font sizes though; if you specify in px, that's what you should get. If you specify in pt, it should resize when the user changes font size.

I don't agree with that I'm afraid:

"pt", "cm", etc are _all_ absolute sizes which should render those _physical_ dimensions.

"px" is a bit of a funny one because depending on the display hardware it can be a bit arbitrary (think about printing - the size of a "px" is _not_ the size of your 1200dpi printer's individual dot - someone has picked an reasonably arbitrary value to use as the physical size of 1px).

Except in certain circumstances, text should really be specified in "em" since that is relative to a parent element. That way the browser just has to fiddle the physical dimensions in the top level style sheet and the changes cascade down through the document. (The top level element defaults to fint size "medium" although AFAICT the W3 don't recommend a default physical size for "medium" which seems a bit silly).

"px" should only really be used when you need the text to fit around/inside a fixed size bitmap. In which case resizing the text without the graphic would be very bad anyway. This is where SVG would be handy since then you just specify the images in "em" as well and let them resize automagically. :)

Of course the problem with all this is that a lot of web developers are stupid and just design a site which works in IE on it's default settings, which may indeed mean a random mixture of relative and absolute units which just become a complete mess when the relatively sized elements are rendered with anything other than the default initial size. I guess the more correct way to do it is to have separate "increase/decrease (relative) font size" and "magnify" (where magnify resizes absolutely everything including images), which I think is what Opera does - the problem here is that people get confused with having two separate options which do similar things.

The world will probably be a better place when we can buy 600dpi monitors, rendering the whole "px" unit rather meaningless. :)

I disagree

[Aewyn]

It's what you

should get, because that's what the designer specified.

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 [w3.org]:

Ensure that the user can select preferred styles (e.g., colors, size of rendered text, and synthesized speech characteristics) from choices offered by the user agent. Allow the user to override author-specified styles and user agent default styles.

Re:UI suggestion

[cabjoe]

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.

Try the Duplicate Tab [mozilla.org] extension.

This really should be default behaviour.

Re:UI suggestion - Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest version of the Tab Mix Plus [elixant.com] extension lets you do exactly this.

Re:What I want from Firefox

[Tidal Flame]

...Oh. Well, it's not available built in, but there is an extension called (I believe) Linkification, which will automatically make a regular hyperlink out of any plain-text links on the page. I'd link you to it, but I'm posting this from my PocketPC, so that would be a bit of a PITA. Google will lead you to it...