11–20 of 205 posts
Requesting permission to update throws a significant amount of users. They're typically not capable of determining if the request is legitimate or not, they're fearful of updating things they rely on, and god help them if it's not a one-click update.
When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted.
Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefox" had been in users' hands for seven years -- nine if you count pre-1.0 versions. Over that time, users' expectations of what a product branded "Firefox" was settled into a particular place.
Rapid release was painful because it broke those expectations. Suddenly Firefox didn't behave like people expected a product labeled "Firefox" to behave anymore. It's like opening a bottle labeled "Coke" and having orange juice pour out. "But orange juice is better for you!" Yeah, but that's still not what I expect to get when I open a Coke bottle.
There's a simple way Mozilla could have avoided this: just call the rapid-release product something else. Create a new brand, and put it on a version of the browser that receives updates every six weeks. Call it Fastfox or Frequentfox or really anything other than Firefox. Then encourage users to start moving from Firefox to the new hotness. Make the new product compatible with Firefox extensions, but don't do the version-number compatibility check that Firefox does, so users aren't constantly being prompted to update working addons.
(Yes, both products are the same code under the hood. That doesn't matter. The important thing is that you communicate to users that this is a thing that is something other than Firefox, which resets their expectations.)
Eventually you'd have most users on the new product, since that's where the cool new features that get users excited would be showing up. Curmudgeons and enterprises would stay with boring old Firefox, but that's OK, because you make "Firefox" just a periodic snapshot of Frequentfox development. "Firefox" becomes a legacy brand, maintained for those who care about it. But the new brand is clearly established as the new hotness.
This lets you move your users without violating their expectations. They expect the new product to behave differently, because it's a new product. It's got a different name and everything!
Violent changes in direction for an established product, on the other hand, always tick off users, because they do violence to those users' expectations of what that product is.
It's better to send your well-loved legacy brand gracefully off into the sunset, in other words, than to try and shock new life into it with electric paddles.
Yes, frequent updates, especially those that break plugins, suck massively. Each update is a huge leap of dread into the "well, what's going to break this time" sea.
The biggest single fault I've got with Firerfox (running FF13) isn't updates, it's memory usage. It still leaks massively, and pretty much requires a daily restart. State preservation is good enough that this doesn't matter a whole lot, but the change I'd like to see is one in which a small handful of tabs (I may easily run over 100) are considered "current and active" (foreground, pinned apps), and the rest function more as a stateful bookmark. Which, given that on crash recovery I tend to leave tabs unrefreshed until I actually open them, they largely are.
State-tracking in browsers really sucks. I've begun using the vimperator plugin, and it does a hugely awesome job of helping with this, mostly in the close/undo mode that handles history, and in being able to do partial matches and tab-completion (based on history and bookmarks) when opening new tabs / navigating to a page.
Chrome isn't all that hot. It's fast, it offers a different broken memory model (groups of tabs run in isolated processes, but consume much more memory on a per-tab basis), and it plays well with Google's own Web properties.
But it lacks the extension flexibility Firefox has (especially UI tweaks such as Vimperator, Tree-style Tabs / Tabkit (sadly incompatible with recent releases), and Remove it Permanently) which I find highly useful,
As for updates: call it old age, call it maturity, but I prefer things not change, especially UIs. Much of the greatest frustration and outcry on Linux has been over desktop UI metaphors (GNOME and KDE especially), and Microsoft is rapidly heading into the same fray. As much as I dislike actually using the Mac interface, I have to admit that Apple have kept it highly consistent for the 11 years of OS X. Yes, we can eventually get over it, but big changes should happen very infrequently, and then be left alone for a goodly while. If you need a sandpit to play in, fork a conceptual project, and realize that your userbase for this will be very different from the mainstream, though it may provide some valuable insights.
Frequently interrupting my workflow really, really, really sucks, more than you can possibly imagine. It's one of the joys of running on Debian GNU/Linux -- so long as you're on stable, big changes are infrequent and small changes are all but invisible. Best of both worlds.
IF you are going to rely on a plugin architecture, THEN get the damned baseline worked out and keep it stable. Screwing with APIs pains everyone. It screws your users and your developer community.
I'm becoming of the opinion that we want a bifurcation of the browser. There's an app platform, for Web 2.0 stuff, where it's really necessary. And there's something closer to ePub / Readability / Readability Redux / Instapaper, which presents deep textual content in a format that's both device-appropriate and highly nondistracting. When I find myself using Chrome with the Developer Tools window open, editing page and style elements as I go, something is very, very wrong with the Web.
I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…
Okay then.
I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…
So annoying your users with constant updates, reboots, and breaking functionality is okay as long as you do it from the start? And the way to get people to accept you adding such annoyance to your product is to rebrand it? Okay then.
I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…
Previously, when I went to a new browser experience, I generally went to a new browser.
There was Mosaic. Then Netscape. Then Galeon. Then Konqueror. Then Mozilla. Then Firefox.
Galeon was probably the most jarring of the bunch. It started as a highly power-user friendly advanced (for the time) browser. Then the GNOME project "adopted" it as its default browser ... and instilled it with "simple user" disease. Many features were ripped out, and much of the userbase left in disgust (there are a few postings by Jon Corbet and other at LWN.net I recall). Eventually it was replaced by Epiphany, a pale shadow of the original.
Life would have been better if the rebranding had happened first.
And we'll note that Mozilla has already gone this route several times: Netscape -> Mozilla -> Phoenix -> Firefox. They should have taken this as a new fork as well.
The takeaway quote: "After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization that the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often!" I wish I could ink this command onto the right hand of programmers (and program managers) everywhere.
In my experience, the designers of unchanged interfaces put a lot of thought into almost every interaction a user could have with their application/operating system. Armed with the use-cases, the designers invested time and effort in creating the core UI "right", and determined a seamless way to make incremental updates. Chrome and iOS are, again, perfect examples of this concept in action. Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much.
Firefox's UI changed radically in version 4. A good number of users revolted and there was uproar about the theme refresh, but most of the users that stuck around got used to the changes. That they are changing the UI again, only 24 months after the fact, does not reflect very well on the design philosophy behind the 4.0 refresh. Lots of questions come to mind - Did the designers not do adequate research during 4.0? Was the development time-frame too short? Was 4.0 just an interim solution to what they perceived a bigger problem? Are curved tabs really better than rectangular ones? Do I get back a lot of screen real estate? Is this a case of Not-Designed-By-Me syndrome?...
I continue to use Firefox today, partially because I know my way around the application so well but mostly because I trust that Mozilla values my privacy. I do think that they go half the distance sometimes with their privacy measures - "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default, and Firefox accepts and keeps "Third Party Cookies" until they expire. In these specific cases, I understand that these are measures taken to ensure they can keep the lights on at their headquarters. With the impending changes to the UI, I will be using the app only on the basis of my trust in Mozilla. And we all know that trust is a tenuous thing to hang by...
The takeaway quote: "After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization that the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often!" I wish I could ink this command onto the right hand of programmers (and program managers) everywhere.
Excellent article, with one quote in particular that seems to make a well-grounded, broader point: > I have another theory, too: When software companies get to a certain size, they start taking their users for granted. They start treating their users as pawns in a battle against some other company. Faceless millions. Gotta copy everything the other company does, or risk falling behind. So they end up doing everything…