IE UI Designer On His Switch To FireFox 728
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."
UI suggestion (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
Firefox search box (Score:3, Insightful)
Zero comments, slashdotted (Score:3, Insightful)
But wait, that might require effort, or even a very small perl script...
May the best software win. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:UI suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
Blank tabs rule (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
Sweet error message in FF 1.5 beta (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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]Re:Wonder if... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
That is one damn good post (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything I type here won't add to it.
Re:UI suggestion (Score:2, Insightful)
Shouldn't be difficult to make the action of the main window X configurable to do one of the following:
1. Always close the current tab.
2. Always close the window (implies close all tabs).
3. Ask what to do - close current tab, close all, cancel.
I wonder if a plug-in can do that?
Yeah, I know it's open source and I can change it myself, but I'm not going to, because I'm lazy and it's not real high on my priority list.
Re:Digg.com (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Issue 3 and 5, and maybe 2, easily resolved (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
He makes some good points. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:UI suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Firefox flaws fixable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blank tabs rule (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:UI suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:UI suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)
Wanted: Easy way to change rule on cookie behavior (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Tabs (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wonder if... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Zero comments, slashdotted (Score:3, Insightful)
Coral cache as a supplement would work, but if all links were coralized, I'd be done for.
Re:UI suggestion (Score:2, Insightful)
And if I had 12 tabs open, I'd have to hit that damn button 12 times to close program. Stupid.
Re:Article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wonder if... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Firefox flaws fixable (Score:5, Insightful)
And most of them aren't shortcomings at all.
Find is at the bottom of the screen for a reason (and a good one). However, it should be positionable by the user.
Tabs opening blank is the *CORRECT WAY* to do it - as another poster pointed out. "I'm opening a new tab, I'm not cloning an existing one." New means *NEW*, not "clone of what I'm vewing now." When I open a *NEW* tab, it's because I want to go somewhere else, not see the exact same thing I'm already looking at. If you want to visit a link in the page, use middle-click, which will open a new tab, and load the link (which is more user-friendly than cloning the tab and forcing the user to click on the link - one action rather than two.)
I've never used the Go menu, but some of the responses are interesting - it holds a global list of sites visited, shared between tabs. In a non-tabbed browser it's pretty useless, but combined with tabs, it becomes pretty cool.
Re:Blank tabs rule (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, there's NO reason this couldn't be an esay to use configuration option:
New Window: (_)Blank (*)Homepage (_)Clone Current
New Tab: (*)Blank (_)Homepage (_)Clone Current
This is a religous issue for some people. Since a new browser window is always 2 or 3 keypresses away for me (windows key, f, return) I can't see why people are so adamant about blank windows...it's easier to get to a blank window from a cloned window than the other way around, that's for sure!
Re:UI suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)
As does firefox.
Re:My favorite reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely! It can screw up a site's visual presentation, but being able to actually read the content is more important than what some graphic artist thinks "looks cool".
I suppose the use of all Flash for sites is the graphic designers' revenge, but more often than not, sites that use Flash exclusively are just that - flashy eyecandy for people who can't/won't/don't want to read.
Re:UI suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:UI suggestion (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Firefox flaws fixable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Blank tabs rule (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Firefox flaws fixable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:UI suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:My favorite reason (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of legitimate cases where a designer builds to pixels. There is no reason that a feature in a browser which tells the user it can scale or zoom fonts shouldn't do that to all fonts.
Browsers determine what to do with web content, not the other way around.
- A
It's a feature, not a bug (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Wonder if... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Maybe you'll like Retrofind? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Also... the reply from Asa (from Mozilla). (Score:3, Insightful)
The tab thing seems to be the most contentious issue between them. Personally, I don't understand why anybody would want to see the same page in a newly created tab when they user ctrl-t. Scott is suggesting just that. I like a nice blank page that loads in milliseconds and doesn't steal the focus from the URL bar.
IE's "new window" behavior is just braindead to me. Why would I want a copy of the same window I was just on? I want to create a new window so I can do something new. It isn't called "same window" and shouldn't act like it. When something has to be loaded into the new window it often takes a lot of CPU and the page can then steal the focus from the url bar so I can't copy something into it.
UI is not why people use IE (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Out of what box? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:UI suggestion (Score:1, Insightful)
And he's not proposing that closing the tab should be the *default* action when the user clicks the "x," he'd just like it to be an option for advanced users.
It wouldn't be that hard to implement, it could improve the experience for some users, it seems like an ok idea. There are window manager / OS issues (among other issues) that may make it unfeasible, but your response to the suggestion is naive and limited at best.