Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#1

Post by jedliu » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 6:59 AM UTC

Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3
pcpro.co.uk

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#2

Post by michael_dorfman » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 7:43 AM UTC

There's a nice object lesson here about fully understanding the impact of a system change on your users. Making things "better" for them often isn't.

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#3

Post by kingsley_20 » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 7:49 AM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #2

There's a nice object lesson here about fully understanding the impact of a system change on your users. Making things "better" for them often isn't.

Actually, I think that the lesson is more of balancing existing, niche user needs against prospective mass user needs. Almost nobody gets this right, but it's a wonderfully challenging game.

For one, I would have made the awesome-bar return some search results as well, and made it impossible to distinguish between those and the bookmark results. They could also have compared auto-completes against whitelists/blacklists.

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#4

Post by FooBarWidget » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 7:52 AM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #2

There's a nice object lesson here about fully understanding the impact of a system change on your users. Making things "better" for them often isn't.

With that kind of attitude, user interfaces should never, ever change. I don't think a conservative attitude like this is the path to success.

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#5

Post by growt » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 8:21 AM UTC

firefox 3's location bar is a mess, not just because of this issue. It will suggest me a gmail authentication string for almost all of my inputs. There are lots of ways to do this better. I like chromes way of doing it, but it has some privacy issues.

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#6

Post by kqr2 » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 8:26 AM UTC

Firefox private browsing aka porn mode:

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AK...

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#7

Post by philh » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 9:26 AM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #4

michael_dorfman wrote: post #2

There's a nice object lesson here about fully understanding the impact of a system change on your users. Making things "better" for them often isn't.

With that kind of attitude, user interfaces should never, ever change. I don't think a conservative attitude like this is the path to success.

With that kind of attitude, user interface changes get carefully considered and tested before being rolled out.

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#8

Post by ilyak » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 10:33 AM UTC

make it turnoffable!

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#9

Post by vetinari » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 11:17 AM UTC

ilyak wrote: post #8

make it turnoffable!

It is.

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#10

Post by scotth » Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 11:27 AM UTC

kqr2 wrote: post #6

Firefox private browsing aka porn mode: http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AK...

This article is about the awesomebar exposing bookmarks that previously were only accessible through navigating deep folder hierarchies. Porn mode has nothing to do with this. Read the article.