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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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..
- Download UI. Here’s a case where modeless makes sense (it’s never my primary user task), but here we get a dialog box. My first crack at this would be a one line toolbar, much like the find bar, at the bottom of the screen telling me about downloads. That’s where all the other dl status info goes. Again, despite my nits, it’s an improvement on the ancient IE implementation (which we all hated forever too).
- Tabs and new windows. 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. Everytime I hit Cntr-T and see a blank screen I think I’m in Word. I use tabs less often than I expected: opening new windows is often more comfortable – easier to track which window lives where. With multiple tabs (I find) the back/forward behavior becomes complex and hard to predict. Strict UI logic would put the tab UI above the toolbars, not below, but that creates other problems.
- Tabs and modality. The desired illusion of tabs should be to make each tab a virtual browser. Well this breaks when you bring up a modal dialog within a tab: you can’t switch to another tab. It’s an annoyance, not a sin, but when it happens it reinforces my new window habit, and slaps my wrist on my growing New tab habit.
- The return of the go menu. It was with great pride that we killed the go menu in IE 5.0. It was the stupidest menu I’d ever seen, since it was never used and no one knew what it did. For accessibility it was necessary, but had no rights to be a top level menu (IE has View.Go). The Go menu was probably inherited from NSCP/mozilla, but it really should be put out to pasture. And if it stays, someone needs to explain why it shows a different history list than the one in the back button drop down.
For reference: I wrote about principles of browser design here: How to build a better browser.
(Update: I’ve responded to many of the comments in a second post.)
IE’s ‘new window contains old page’ behaviour is potentially dangerous, in situations where a GET performs an action (I know that to do so is incorrect, but a lot of webapps do so regardless). It’s also… just odd.
Rob
The new-tabs-should-inherit-history debate has been raging for 6 years on Bugzilla. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18808
It’s the one thing I missed when I switched from IE, but years ago I gave up hope of having it implemented in Mozilla (and then Firefox).
Michael
One of the things with the Tabbed viewing that I have to disagree with you on, is its ease of use. The ability to open and close tabs by using the center mouse button on a link has been one of the most efficient tools I have found in FF.
I hadn’t really thought about it before, but you have a point about the download manager. It would be better as some sort of line at the top where you could get more detail as required.
I don’t agree about Find, though. I took to Find like a duck to water. I liked it a lot.
As for security, it’s the little things. That an exe requires two stages (download, then click), that javascript can’t spoof the address in the status bar.
Scott — I’d disagree with your complaint about the Find functionality in Firefox. I think it is a brilliant solution. I’ve always hated Find dialog boxes. When you want to Find something, you’re usually looking to be more efficient. All the Find dialog boxes I’ve ever tried are cumbersome, and most don’t let you manipulate the page while it is open. So having a toolbar associated with a particular that doesn’t get in your way, and interacts dynamically with the page, suddenly makes finding an *enjoyable* task.
Regarding your specific complaint that the Find toolbar should be positioned at the top of the page, I don’t know the UI designer’s specific reasoning for that, but I find it a good solution because putting it at the top would obtrusively push page content down further. Searching a document is a complimentary task, and not a primary task, so it shouldn’t commandeer the overall experience. Generally I agree that top is better for UI, but the search bar doesn’t require much mouse-clicking, so you can pretty much operate it with the keyboard.
I hate that find feature in Firefox but the one that really irks me is the inability to dynamically rearrange your bookmarks in an open dialog box. Every time you try to move one in Firefox the windows closes and you’re back to square one. IE isn’t much better because it routinely fails to update deleted in the same window. Overall Firefox trounces IE. It took me a while to get used to it but everyone should switch just to piss of Microsoft if not for the security.
Ari Finkelman Said: “My 2 cents. Tabbed browsing is great. But, if you are going to use tabs, do it right. GAIM (http://gaim.sourceforge.net) gets it right. The ability to reorder tabs is a must. ”
Just check out the Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Release Notes at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/1.5beta1.html and you will see that one of the new feature in FF 1.5 will be “Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs”. I have been expecting this for a long time too ;)
Thanks for the feedback :)
For the Find UI in particular, the decision to put it at the bottom was made because putting the bar at the top would cause the entire page to jump down when it opened. It would also have been possible to open the bar and scroll the page slightly, keeping everything else rooted in the page but hiding the top part of the page. Putting it at the bottom seemed to be a good solution.
The Go menu is a little weird; a few of us wanted to kill it, but it turns out that the reason it’s there (and this was news to me when I found out!), also the reason for the different history lists, is that the Go menu’s list persists between shutdown/restart and also between tab switch. This may be useful, or it may be confusing, jury’s still out I guess..
And I agree, the download window/system sucks. There are some ideas on how to make it better floating around..
It took my some time to get used to FireFox _not_ opening new tabs/windows with the current page, but now that I’m used to it, I prefer it.
And it’s not just a preference thing. There’s a very good reason why IE’s model is bad: pages that have side effects.
It’s usually a sign of bad web design, but it happens. Some pages do something (submit an order, etc) when you access it in a browser. If I create a new window in IE when I happen to be on one of these pages, bad things happen.
When I used IE exclusively, I had a little “mental warning bell” about opening a new browser window when this might happen (or even when the current page is dynamic enough to load very slowly). I wasn’t even aware of it until I started using Firefox, but now it’s quite apparent.
I agree with you that IE has that nice feature that lets you carry over the back history when you open a new window/tab and I would really like to see that in Firefox.
I don’t agree with you on the Go menu deal. The reason the go menu has a different history than the drop down menu from the back button, is that the go menu carries the previous pages from all tabs, while the back button only carries history from the current tab. Realistically its only taking up maybe a dozen pixels or so on your toolbar and I’d rather have in there cuz I use it quite often.
I also agree that the find bar should be at the top or at least allow you to choose where to put it.
Now, if only most companies made their applets work with firefox too I wouldn’t need IE anymore (ie launch.yahoo.com)
Your crazy, tabs are awesome!
Well, I’ve got to say I agree with most of what you said. The only things that surprised me were:
1) The Go Menu… Sad, i know, but i have NEVER noticed this before on any browser. How it’s been under my nose for all these years and i never saw it, i don’t know. Weird…
2) The “new window” being blank… I think the general rule as far as that sort of thing goes is that if you want a new window it’s usually because you want to open a link on that page in it… So why not just right click on that link and go to “open in new window?”
Also, any heavy browser user who has not used mouse gestures needs to be slapped. I use one called “All-in-one-gestures” that is on the firefox extensions site. It very closely mimicks the opera implementation and it’s very configureable to pretty much do whatever you want. What i like about it is that i have it set up this way:
1) New Tab on top of current tab -> Right click + move mouse down.
2) New Tab in new tab in background of current tab -> right click + move mouse up
3) Open link in new tab on top of current tab -> right click on link + move mouse up
4) Open link in new tab in background of current tab -> right click on link + move mouse down.
See? simple. You get whatever you want, wherever you want it, how ever you want it..
Let me be added to the new-document-loads-same-page mob. FF has the easy solution: If I want to continue with what I am doing in a new tab, I just press the middle button on the link of interest. Presto, continued with the same stuff in a new tab. IE method is very painful.
you missed one of my favorite improvements of FF over IE: the shortcut keys.
On IE when you have a short cut set on say your home page, to go there you must press alt-shortcutkey-return which may require some finger gymanastics or two hands whereas on FF you only need press alt-shortcutkey and it just works.
For my FF I have alt-home set up for my home page so if you bring up a new blank tab you can go home using alt-home and surf from there.
As for browser history in new window or tab, make everyone happy by making those options a user choice.
The search bar thing might have something to do with the way search works in the Open Source world. VI, less, more, they all open a search at the bottom of the window after you press “/”, which also works in FF. To do a quick search press “/” then type the word you’re looking for.
I would like to comment in your criticisms of Firefox’s find dialogue.
I think the reason it ended up at the bottom is because Linux & UNIX developers were doing most of the work and the find dialogue at the bottom follows the same /search convention as vi, more, less, Et al. You can even bring it up by typing ‘/’.
I like it! I would, however, be all for giving users the option to place it wherever they wish.
-G
Congratulations on being Slashdotted, Scott… :|
I also hate the find bar on the bottom, for the simple reason that no one else does it that way, and I often hit CTRL-F a few times before realizing why the ubiquitous dialog box didn’t come up the first time. But my REAL annoyance with Firefox find is that I can’t search in just one frame, which is really handy with the standard JavaDoc layout. With older Mozilla builds you could click in a frame and finds would go there.
I liked the “bring the history” from IE because of this use case: I’m looking at a page, and I want to keep looking at it, but I also want to look at a few other pages from the same site. I know I should have opened it in a new tab, but that’s impossible to do retroactively. So I have to back up, open it again in a new tab, then go to my second page. The “bring the history” feature makes it a kind of “checkpoint and continue browsing” metaphor. Perhaps if it was a “power user” feature activated by a modifier key.
I use tabs all the time… I got hooked by Opera, which was the first mass-market browser I saw that used it. The others have almost caught up to where Opera was 3-4 years ago. The nicest thing about Opera is that the tabs are persistent… I could quit Opera, load it back up, and I still had Java SDK JavaDoc on the left, then local company docs, then bookmarks, then whatever, every time. I know there are extensions to Firefox, but it was so automatically useful in Opera it seems like it should have been universal.
Tabs and new windows
Thank you for your interesting article.
On the “new tabs are blank” subject, I would like to add my vote to those who like it that way.
If I open a new window or tab, it’s to start from scratch: type an address or a search into the search box. My home is also set to blank.
There is no single site on the net to which I want to go every time I open a new Window/Tab, and obviously, the one I definitely do not want to go to in the new screen is the one right in front of me. Why on earth woud I want 2 pages with exactly the same content?
In IE, I have to reach for the Quick Launch bar to get my about:blank home page. It’s much easier in FF where I have the choice of Ctrl-T or Ctrl-N.
On all other points, I agree with you.
Hey Super Freak,
Give Camino a try: http://www.caminobrowser.org/
It’s basically Mozilla, with Apple UI widgets, etc.
-G
Here’s a crazy idea: do lazy history loading in new windows/tabs. Open a blank page but leave the back/forward buttons enabled. Then if one of the buttons is clicked before a new page is visited then the last page loaded in the previous window or tab will display and the remaining history will be loaded. Then from that point on the browser will act as usual. Am I crazy or does that give both types of people what they want?
Everytime I hit Cntr-T and see a blank screen I think I’m in Word.
IMO that’s as it should be, or make it user configurable. For power users (I run Unix and Windows side by side, one keyboard, and copy links between the two) its a pain in the but to have a window with an address in an address bar — less so on Windows, more so on Unix, where “copy” into a paste buffer happens with highlighted text.
You cant think UI from a Windows only perspective when looking at Firefox…
I understand both points about carrying context with you into a new tab. I actually want both depending on the situation.
Since I use All-In-One gestures, it has a default gesture of down-up-down (I think, my hand knows for sure) to duplicate a tab, and I use Ctrl-T to make a new one (there’s a gesture for it but I can’t recall it at the moment). Best of both worlds.
BTW, I personally find mouse gestures, appropriate radial context menus, and rocker navigation to be innovative and occasionally quite useful new paradigms that I can play with in Firefox (although I’ve only stuck with gestures because they are insanely effective).
I’m also one of those people who find it annoying that IE opens the same page in the new window. Most likely it comes down to _why_ certain users open the new window. If they open it to click on a link on the page they were viewing, then perhaps reoppening the same page makes sense. But in that case, why not just right click the link and use the context menu. I’m one of those people who open new windows/tabs to go somewhere _else_, and then an empty tab with focus in the adress bar is just what I need, and FF does that beautifully.
As with all things, it’s best to leave the choice to the user and have an option for it in the prefferences ;).
Go menu? Oooh I never noticed it before … might come in handy ;)
Nice article, but just I wonders why you took so long to switch FF?
Like many others, I disagree with opening the current page in the new browser window instance. It drives me nuts. Why would I want to see the same page in two windows? If I want to fork my browsing by lets say following two links from the same page, I’d just right click on one of the links of interest and say “open link in new tab”. Or even better, just click the link with the middle mouse button, for environments that support three button mice.
I agree that the find bar should at least be movable though. I like it at the bottom, but not everyone will…
Hi, that’s a good article!
I confess, I haven’t read through all the comments, so sorry if it’s a dupe, but to get rid of the Go menu just download the menu editor extension.
Just FYI’s, for those who don’t already know… type: about:config in the URL box and you get some really nifty, very handy things that fix things people think are just bugs. This is a must know or good to know and I just wanted to post it for those who don’t know about it. Regards.
For those who suggested Download Statusbar, I totally agree. It puts downloads in a very convenient place at the bottom of the browser and I can don’t need to flip back and forth between windows just to see progress.
As for getting the current page to load in a new tab, I’m half and half. I have my extension set so that when I double click the tab it opens a new tab with the current url. But when I ctrl-t it opens a blank tab. Best of both worlds. Since ctrl-t automatically puts the cursor in the url field that seemed most appropriate.
As for which extension I recommend for tabs, I suggest either Tabbrowser Extension, or Tab Mix. Usually I agree Tabbrowser extension is a powerful addition, but for those of us with lowly 500 Mhz machines, or those of us who just want something mostly as powerful with less bloat I suggest Tab mix.
I use both Tab mix at work and Tabbrowser extension at home. Both awesome.
After reading your article, I can’t say that I don’t agree with the 5 problems you highlight there are in Firefox. I have often cursed the Tabs&Modality (especially when using HTTP auth or bookmarking some page) and Download Window ones (and I think both problems aren’t present in Konqueror).
BTW, there’s also something missing in Firefox that Konqueror does: Quick URL access; p.e., typing ‘gg:hello’ uses Google to find ‘hello’. I know you can type ‘google hello’ in Firefox, but there doesn’t seem to be a way of defining new quick access words like you can in Konqueror.
Conclusion: I’m looking forward to seeing Konqueror using Gecko’s engine :D
You may not use tabs so much. But ALL Opera users use them full time! Opera is the master of tabs. And Proper zoom. And gestures. And sessions. But I’m sure there are UI weakspots too.
on 1) I think the reason is that having it at the bottom means when it pops up the page doesn’t shift around, but stays in place.
on 2) May I recommend extensions? There is one that moves the download dialog into the sidebar. I like that one a lot.
on 5) I agree. Removing the Go menu is the very first thing I customize on a new Firefox installation. Since it’s so extremely easy (right click, customize, drag away, close window) I never noticed that it’s annoying.
Tabs, no tabs, history, no history. Back button, go button. What is really needed is new concept:
A flow-tree (or whatever you like to call it) like net showing how you have navigated the web, from what page you have gone to several different branches, which each branch further. Also I want to be able not only to bookmark one site, but a whole configuration of open sites, like when I am researchin e.g. gwbush and have all the info on gw bush up, 25+ windows, and i need to go. I want to come back the next day and open them. Or to switch to this other day when i was reading about .dlls and had 10 windows open about that. And when I switch, i want the flowtree of that day/view/whatever. Its like history, but better.
If you need an example to understand, take a look at
http://kgs.kiseido.com/en_US/applet.jsp (java-webpage). Its a game. Login, click on a random game and choose clone and review. You will get a “flowmap” in the corner to navigate with. Thats whats really really needed.
The reason the find it at the bottom is that’s where Unix heads look for it. Why?
Try less and vi.
when searching (you start the search with a ‘/’ (which also works in firefox!)) the text entered and results appear at the bottom of the window. All the unix heads already know to look there. Windows people have no expereince like that, so there was more reason to put it there than at the top.
HTH
I disagree with you in a couple places…
1. The main reason I hate opening a new window from within IE is because it brings up the same page. Now with your logic this isn’t a problem because I can just type in where I want to go, but the issue is that I always kept my browser preferences set to “always reload HTML” so it would redownload the whole thing, and when I was on dial-up that was a huuuuuge no-no. I believe many others have already put the rest of my feelings on this one.
2. The idea on tabs is NOT to open a new browser but to have multiple sites viewable from the same browser. The back button should only contain history for that tab. And this brings an answer to your other question about the Go menu. Go is a unified history, which may have been a dumb choice in old version of IE, but with Tabs…it finally has a purpose. I think if you’ll hold yourself back and force yourself to use tabs and never have more than one instance of Firefox open you’ll be used to it in just a couple days…
The rest of it is valid points, and I think I’d just rather have my download manager be another tab rather than a pop-up or a bar ;)
Try Avant Browser, its an IE mod with A LOT of added functionality, i swear by it. Plus, it deals with many of the complaints you have listed.
I view a website as a huge graph, and browsing it as graph iterators which in their progress draw a tree on top of the graph. If you then make the ‘open link in tab’ split the iterator you inherit the history. Open new tab should not inherit because its, well, new.
If only the UI could group tabs in trees to illustrate this relation.
just my 0.02 euro.
Just wanted to say, I personally prefer my browser to open in a new window with no site showing, IE has always annoyed me by opening the page I was viewing in the new window. Also when I start up Firefox, it’s to a blank window. I detest the idea of a start page because I do not use one, I may load Firefox to go anywhere at anytime, I do not want a start page in my way. I’m old school too, I prefer a new window over tabs. The Find at the bottom is slightly annoying as I’m more used to the popup dialog from other browsers but it’s ok, that I can easily live with. The Go menu tho has problems, on one pc if you are trying to open view and accidently click Go, it sometimes pauses for an intolerable amount of time (as much as 5 minutes) before opening so you can move to the correct menu. The URL bar history lags as well but not as badly as the Go menu.
Other than those items, I’ve found Firefox to be rather well rounded and easy to use for even a 5 year old. Thanks…
Have you tried the Avant extension for IE, by any chance? (http://www.avantbrowser.com/) I have never really gotten into FF. It feels odd to me, especially considering I used the Avant Browser for quite a while. You get the advantages of IE (works for most websites, even poorly coded ones) without most of the negatives… as long as you keep your security patches up to date.
I agree with some of the comments further up, i hate opening a new window in explorer and having to wait while the same page i was just at loads.
i switch between firebox and opera all the time and i prefer the tabbing in opera, each tab has its own close cross. in firebox i have to select the tab and them press the X on the right hand side = 2 clicks, in opera i press X on the tab i want to close = 1 click, simple things like that add up over time.
the way i prefer to open tabs is to right click on the link and choose open link in new tab, then i don’t end up with a blank page
i also agree with your analysis of the find dialog, i love the fact it is not modal and it is not a popup, and i just type and it works, but i would like it to be up the top in a toolbar or something, it took me ages to find it the first time i used it, i thought i had done something wrong
[quote=”Linklog: Read My Antennæ”]”changeable tab order”
Already fixed in new FF 1.5 Deer Park![/quote]
Hey, Scot, maybe you can join Mozilla/Firefox to make it even better ?
Open community are really great ;)
Tabs at the top seems the worst place, of the two options under discussion, to put them. Putting them there would 1) make switching tabs require the longest mouse travel, 2) put a dynamic element above static controls, reversing the container hierarchy 3) create a shifting toolbar that would grow not down into the page space but by shifting controls away from their expected position. Tabs at the top of a preferences dialog makes sense because each tab is a subset, but the controls on a browser are not a subset of the page. They control the browser and the tabs are contained in a browser window. Controls under each tab is conceptually analogous, to me at least, of putting a pen and pencil inside each folder on your desk instead of having one utensil cup on the desk to share among tasks.
Do you like Firefox enough that you’d consider making a donation?
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html
Give ’til it hurts.
Undoubtedly you’ve explored some of the many cool extensions such as Adblock. If you haven’t already, check out SpellBound. It’s the forms spell checker we’ve all been waiting for.
http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/
i must add one to the list and remove one ;)
1: i personally love the find ui in firefox… im one to move the address bar next to the top level menu’s remove the bookmark toolbar, and standard toolbar. one thing i cant stand of must browsers (or lots of ui’s for that matter) is they insist on putting 500 toolbars on the top of your window giviing you even less realestate to do what your trying to do … (browse the internet …)
the find being on the bottom i find to be out of the way, as it should be. its not something you use every 3 seconds like your back/forward buttons or the address bar.. and when you are searching for stuff it generally is near the bottom when you search down.
my 1 firefox complaint:
platform menu incosistencies.
i run linux at home and windows at work. in linux you have
Edit -> Preferences
in Windows you have
Tools -> Options
first time i noticed this i did a double take going “WTF”
granted the preferences is the ONLY reason i ever touch the menu (im addicted to keyboard shortcuts) this is the biggest PITA for me.
Regarding tabs & browsing behavior:
I think basically you need some time playing with them to really discover the power of them. I first discovered tabbed browsing in Opera–the browser that introduced this feature (as well as introducing gestures, which I now cannot live without). What I’ve found is I only use Ctrl-T when I definitely want to type in a URL myself–therefore, populating with the previous active tab’s content would be both useless and annoying. The blank page serves to remind me of what I am doing and keep me on task. The majority of my “tabbed browsing” is right-clicking on links and saying “open in new tab.” Here again, FF does the right thing by keeping my focus on the tab I’m currently browsing. Many times, I’ll come upon a collection of links but want to continue reading what I was reading–so I’ll open each of the links up in a new tab so they can be loaded by the time I want to go check them out.
Personally, I think FF got tabbed browsing right. But I don’t know the keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture for switching active tabs. That would be nice to know and present to the user to train them, and would speed me up quite a bit.
My one nit would be that like you, I would prefer the tabs over the URL bar. Actually, I’d like the URL bar integrated into the tabbing pane. I’d also like to say where all these things appear (also something from Opera).
I also think mouse gestures should come with FF by default and not require an extension. I am as addicted to mouse gestures as I am to the mouse scroll wheel. It is SO much easier to hold down the right button and click the left button to go back, and vice-versa for forward, that to go through an annoying right-click context menu or use the keyboard or drive the mouse to a button.
Another improvement I would make would be to have a single-click way to copy a URL into the clipboard. Like it or not, I many times need to copy URLs, and sometimes highlighting and right-click->copy is cumbersome.
It takes a while to get used to tabbed browsing and figure out how to make the most of it, but it is clearly superior to a seperate window per browser (for me).
As someone else pointed out, the find bar at the bottom probably comes from vi…which is probably why I like its position. On the other hand, I have one huge problem with it: it goes away on me too much. I typically want to find something in several places….but if I want to read the first instance for more than 3 seconds the find bar goes away, meaning I have to type the whole phrase in again to get to the next instance. And heaven forbid I middle-click a matching link to open it in another tab…that kills the find window immediately. Perhaps the answer here is to introduce a preference for the find bar’s position and autohide characteristics. I could open/close the find window manually, others could let it autohide, and we could have it at the top or bottom as we chose.
I’d also like to weigh in on the new tab questions. I’m not sure I follow the people who advocate the blank-new-tab behavior…I can’t figure out what that’s giving us that we can’t get with a different, properly-implemented approach. By that I basically mean that the stop button should work to keep large pages from continuing to load if you were just going someplace else anyway.
On the other hand…those who want the existing URL in the new window can have it already. All you have to do is click in the address bar (containing the URL you want in the new tab) and hit ctrl-T. So, that’s not much of a complaint either. Thus I really feel that the debate over whether to carry the URL over is pretty pointless on both sides.
That said….I think the history carrying over issue is *not* pointless. Whoever called this a “false problem” without providing any explanation mystified me….are you trying to convince me that I really *haven’t* shaken my fist in anger that I couldn’t go back in my new tab? That I was just on some strange drug or something? Look, if users (e.g. me) get pissed about it, you can’t just wish it away saying it’s a “false problem.” But more importantly, this is easy to fix. And as a matter of fact, there was once upon a time a long discussion of the matter in bugzilla, which went nowhere because of this same kind of bickering. But I had then, and still maintain, what I think is a good answer for this that should take care of everybody’s concerns:
When a new tab is opened, start it with a page that simply says something like “You’ve just opened a new tab; use the address bar, go menu, etc. to go someplace, or hit back to go to the referring page.” Preserve the history in that tab, as a seperate copy from the history of the referring tab…in other words, don’t weld the two together, so if you go back three pages and then click on a link in the new tab, it doesn’t change the history of the first tab. And leave the “new tab” page in the history as well….that should ease the minds of the people who want to know where that tab started.
The “new tab” page is not 100% required upon tab opening…you could just as easily have the page just be blank, and have people figure it out. But then if you go someplace and hit the back button, I still think there should be a placeholder page there that says “ok this is where you opened the tab….going back from here will be going into the history of the referring tab.”
Anyway, I have heard a lot of people argue on all sides of this issue, but I haven’t heard any complaints yet that this model can’t quiet. Obviously, the wording I use above is very informal and wouldn’t be anything like one would really use for these messages. But it’s something to think about, and I think it would be a dramatic improvement over the current situation.
Sadly, this will probably get lost here, where it might actually get picked up on by enough people to make a change, anyway…
One of the things that ff lost (somewhere in the beta’s) from netscape was what *I* think is some common sense in context sensitive right clicking. I can only assume that this feature was removed to make ff feel more like ie so that swiping market share was easier since several other ie-like features crept in around the same time.
When a user right clicks on a page, depending on a number of variables: is something highlighted, am I clicking on a link, an image etc, the menu that pops up changes, brilliant. What is FAR less than brilliant is the choice of items and their order on this menu. I think the top three choices should ALLWAYS be: back, forward, reload. if I’m on a page with mostly images, I have to hunt for blank space to right click on to go back, many times, this space which appears blank will actually be a link which does not provide me with navigation options. If text is highlighted on the page (anywhere, not just he visible page), again, no navigation links. To get rid of that, you naturally left click, if the menu is still up when you do this, the highlighting doesn’t go away, just the menu, then begins the game of clicking, dbl clicking, highlighting a line, highlighting the page etc to try and get the navigation items. Or, I can move my mouse up to the left corner of the screen for every page I want to navigate back to or forward from. I run high resolutions and often multiple displays, tell me where the usability is there.
The worst part about this is that every time it’s been brought up, the response has been, “make an extension,” or “change the source yourself.” Again, please show me the usability… Telling a frustrated user (who doesn’t write code) to write it yourself seems pretty bad to me..
Download Manager
One of the worst part in firefox is its download manager. Look at Opera. Its sweet and easy.
Regarding history and tabbed browsing:
Back in ’97-’99 people surfed the web, You started at some page and clicked your way on. It made sense to have a linear history.
Today people search the web, You start a page, or maybe search on google, then open a number of posibly intersting matches in new tabs. Each new tab is a branchpoint in your history. A linear history doesn’t make sense. And if you bring over history, what should happen if you go back before the “birth” of the tab – this will affect history in other tabs?
Loading a page when opening a new tab? Well, it should be customizable ok, but I’d hate to see the same page again, I just saw that.I hate to wait for my start page to load. I want to go straight on to a new place. Spare the time.
The search bar? Really, ok, let’s allow the user to decide but I disagree that it should be at the top. As other post said, when you click next you go down the page. When the next-button is on the bottom then your eyes are where the next match will appear. What I’d much more like to see is that it will show more context, such that eg two lines following a match are also shown.
That go-thingy: Never used it. Back and forward buttons work fine, in particular because there is the drop down history arrow that match the history for the current tab. Neat, yet obvious.
What I’d really like is that the auto complete in the location bar also completes if it’s in my bookmarks – not just in history. Chance is that I have been there before, and bookmarked it if it was interesting – but just forgot about the bookmark. Also, since I’m a keyboard type user, typing the first few letters is often faster than clicking through the bookmarks.
Cheers, Erik
I don’t really see the point of tabbed browsing. I find it almost as annoying as when XP stacks multiple instances of the same application on on the taskbar. If I need to view two (or more) websites at the same time, I want them in separate windows so I can put them side by side if necessary. As for spawning new windows, I like the IE approach. Here’s an example… An item is about to end on Ebay and I want to snipe it. I have the item page open in my browser. I want to be able to spawn another copy (CTRL-N) and put it side by side with the original page. Then I put my bid info into the copy, ready to bid, then I refresh the original window once every few seconds until the auction time clicks down to 5 or so seconds, then I quickly click the buy button in the other window to submit my bid info. Try that in FF with tabbed browsing.
Regarding a new tab or window creating a new browser/history context, I believe this should be a user-definable option.
I personally don’t mind starting with a clean slate every time I create a new tab because it helps to re-inforce the tree organization of browsing habbits (rather than multiple-parallel linear browsing paths).
Furthermore, I would be willing to bet that this is a shortcut that FF decided on because it uses fewer resources and can spawn new windows and tabs quicker.
When I open a new window/tab, why would I want to see the same page I was just looking at in the previous window/tab? I think it’s a matter of shedding the old browsing ideology and embracing the new. In my opinion, it’s more than enough for the greenstick user, and just what the doctor ordered for a technical user.
-@
Abosutely gorgeous article. You touch on alot of fine points.
I’ve switch to Firefox mainly for UI and security issues. And while I have hit a few snags here and there (the IE ‘internet options’ is more clearly laid out for average users than FF prefs) it’s still my favorite.
As for IE, I did like 5.0 and 5.5 back when it was the new hotness.
5. The return of the go menu
You can remove the go menu or any other with userChrome.css in the profile dir. Details @ http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#app_mainmenu
To “Linklog: Read My Antennæ”: In Firefox 1.5 you can change the tab order.
Another interface kudo goes to FF for ctrl-l behavior, I’m sorry IE, but I don’t need a modal window that isn’t smart enough to fill in http://www. .com for me, or doesn’t even recognize {ctrl,shift,ctrl+shift}+enter.
Go Menu? I didn’t even know there was a Go menu until Scott pointed it out. I consider myself a veteran user as well. I don’t know if I’ll use it. Maybe like my accumulated bookmarks, nice to have but rarely referenced.
I don’t agree with the download window. I LOVE IT! I can launch my browser start the download of several ISO files, track all of them in one click, and I can close the firefox window (since I no longer browse, just download) and let him finish its job. IE’s individual dialogs sucks, close IE, all downloads are gone (I apologize if it changed since), they take so much space in my taskbar, a side bar also sucks for me, I continue to browse, then want to check my download click so I must open the sidebar, but since it takes space, I reclose it, then work with Visual Studio, then want to check the progress of downloads, so I go back to firefox, REOPEN the side bar, well and the jump out of the window (the real one in the wall… you know?) because I’m so bored by all this.
Hmm… Scott .. Did you tried Maxthon before converting ..? When are you are giving try to new things prolly you should look at this too .. I am sure you will love it over FireFox ..
Scott,
BTW – IE 5 was an awesome browser for it’s day. You guys rocked it all over Netscape at the time. I used IE 5 on the PC and on the Mac. It was beautiful on the Mac.
It was so much faster than everything, and I LOVED the scrapbook feature (it was great for holding receipts of online purchases, etc.. The drawer tabs down the side were totaly user friendly.
I didn’t give up IE until Safari on Mac came out, and even then I still went back to it occasionally.
IE 6 is in a world of hurt, and while I haven’t beta-tested 7, it sounds like it’s not so hot either.
Bhavesh
The one thing I really don´t like about Firefox is the bookmarking system. It´s so old fashioned… I WOULD LOVE if it worked like del.icio.us, using tags for the classification of the bookmarks, that would be so much better… please implement it!
I like that the history doens’t carry over for the tabs, but like you mentioned, it will be a large percentage on both sides of the fence. I think this should be a set and forget option under the preferences/options. Then people can have it just the way they want it. For instance the default way to open a page when you click a link out side of FF is to open a new instance of FF, I hate that! But they allow you to open in a new tab in the current instance (much better IMO). Smart design on their part allowing the user to customize behavior!
Very interesting article. I think I don’t agree about Firefox problem #3, but I surely suggest you to try some tab browsing extension (like Tab Mix Plus, I started using it some days ago, after months of Tabbrowser extensions, and I really liked it). Apart from that I liked very much this post, I studied Human-Computer Interaction at University last year (I’m a Computer Science student in Bologna, Italy) and I liked it very much, so I found your UI-point-of-view very interesting.
The reason why I hate this is because frequently I’m ctrl-T’ing to a new tab because my current tab is inhabited by a form that I’m filling out. (blog comment, email, registration, etc.) and I want to do some research on what I’m typing, or merely want to come back to whatever it is later. Or worse- I want to leave the confirmation message for a submitted form up, until I finish printing it- but don’t want to wait for it to print. If Firefox were to open the current content in the new window, then I might be re-submitting the form, depending on its submit-method.
When I want to base my CTRL-T off of something that’s on the current page, I just CTRL-click the link that I want to base it off of, and open it up in a new tab or new window. There is no good reason that I can think of to re-open the SAME page that I’m on, in a new window.
And I really hope someone from the Firefox UI team reads this. They would learn very much.
Scott–
I believe you can hack the StyleSheets that FireFox uses and remove menus. I removed a menu item at home using this method.
I believe it is documented on Firefox’s site: GetFirefox.com or Mozilla’s site.
Huge thanks goes to Greg R. for pointing me in the direction of the KeyConfig extension for changing shortcut keys.
This stopped me from closing tabs using CTRL+W when I wanted to do ‘WhereIs’ a la Pico ;)
Hopefully this is useful to LinkLog too ;)
DugUK
Excellent summary. However, I would add that most of the complaints about Firefox have been dealt with by extensions. to name a few:
http://clav.mozdev.org/ (Fusion) download status shows in the addressbar
http://v2studio.com/k/moz/ (Stop/Reload) The GO! problem
http://dmextension.mozdev.org/ (download manager tweak)
Good obserations… but as a regular Firefox user and former Mozilla user who remembers Mosaic and Cello back in 1993, I have two disagreements with the base article.
The Go menu is crucial! I use it all the time. It is great when some bozo’s web site blocks the back-arrow from working. Since there’s no capital punishment yet for that crime, Go is easier than the silly little dropdown on the arrow. Silly little spots are a pain to hit anyway. However, I prefer Mozilla’s to FF’s. In Mozilla, the Go menu is local to the current tab. In FF, it’s global among all tabs, and only the arrow-key buttons are local. I never really want a global menu. Also, when I backspace away from something, it remains in the FF Go menu in recent versions. It’s a list of sites visited, not a proper tree like it used to be. This should be selectable, since I’m sure some folks like it this way. I was disabused of this the first time Mosaic didn’t preserve a site I had been to — I expected it to work the way FF now does, but got used to, and comfortable with, the way it did work.
Two — when I open a tab, I also want it BLANK. A new tab is virgin space. I don’t want my tabs, or windows, interfering with each other. Middle-click lets me fork off into a new tab, too, which is a good tool.
Oh, and another note, this time about the search box’s location and layout…
I’m pretty sure that the search box’s position and behavior was entirely inspired by the linux text editor “vi”. In vi, you can press / (slash) in navigation mode, and begin typing your search query, which appears at the very bottom of the editor due to its roots as a light weight terminal-based application. With each keystroke of the query that you enter, at least in “vim”, it will scroll to the next match and highlight it (and all the others.)
Upon pressing slash in FF (disabled when focus is on a form element), you will see the same behavior (except the highlighting feature is a toggle box that defaults to off.)
I think, additionally, the find box being located at the bottom avoids issues such as: when the toolbar pops up, do we move the page down (ew), or do we cover up whatever was there and recalculate the scrollbars. With it at the bottom, you can just do the latter and in most cases you won’t be hiding any important data since many pages tend to not even extend that far, and also the assumption that most users don’t read anything in the bottom margin of the page. Also, the results of your search query are displayed at the bottom, pretty much in the same style as the status bar.
None-the-less, as a totally unnecessary feature, it would be nice to be able to reposition it or even turn it into a dialog box. But any of the greenstick users that your UI concerns seem to be targed for probably don’t know about dragging toolbars.
I personally appreciate the position and background-ness of the search box because when I want to find text, I just hit / or CTRL+F and type what I’m looking for — I don’t even notice the search bar is there because I’m so accustomed to it. I think if it was anywhere else, it would be to present. If you put it in a toolbar, it probably shouldn’t popup and hide like it does… and if you just leave it in the toolbar all the time, you’re consuming prescious realestate.
Did you notice that when you switch tabs, it conveniently disappears?
On an overdue side note, cheers to you for your great work (for its day) on Internet Explorer. I was one of the first out of everybody I knew at the time to switch from the dominating Netscape to IE, and embraced its integration with the OS. Everything today has to face down obsolesence at some point though… IE’s failed to meet this effectively in recent years. On a related note, I was one of the first in my circle of friends to switch to FF also ;-) I don’t like being on the bleeding edge of technology, but I know a good thing when I see it.
-@