Why I switched to Firefox
September 12th, 2005
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.)
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I have a question about FF. On my PC FF runs slower than the IE and I have the feeling some of the Windows updates or something in the OS is causing this. Is this possible and how do I find any evidence or am I way off?
Thanks
Download UI:…My first crack at this would be a one line toolbar…
You might be interested in the Download Statusbar extension for Firefox - it’s been doing this very thing for several years now.
http://downloadstatusbar.mozdev.org/
I have to disagree about new tab behaviour : the thing I absolutely hate the most about IE is the way it brings the previous context over. I *NEVER* want this to happen - I only open a new window/tab if I want to put something new in it. It is that simple.
Sorry Vlad - You’ll have to head over to mozilla.org for questions about FF perf issues.
dj: good tip. Ill check it out. Looks pretty close to what I was thinking of.
Xpm: I understand that’s what you expect or want, but that doesn’t mean that that’s what most or even some of the entire population would expect or want.
My recollection is that we knew it would be polarized: either choice would have a large % of people that wanted us to go the other way. Some decisions are like that.
The logic was: if we bring the history along, people who didn’t 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, it’s there. We felt it’s 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.
“inheretted” … ??
*ahem*
inherited
:)
Whoops. Nice catch - fixed now.
If you want anybody to do something about those ideas, you should head over to bugzilla.mozilla.org and file a bug report (make sure you search though to avoid duplicates). I like some of your ideas (and some I don’t, but they would be good options).
Nice article, thanks for being so honest and open, very interesting and educating Scott!
The Find UI is being worked on quite heavily I believe, Ive seen it in development plans! Personally, to me its logical its at the bottom, as when you click next and are working your way DOWN the page in terms of the words your finding, it makes more sense to have the bar at the bottom, then at the top.
There is an extension/s for this though, which certainly the one I’m about to link ALL IN ONE SEARCHBAR, adds the SEARCH on Page function to the top right search bar, and is very customizable. https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Search%20Tools&numpg=10&id=377
The download UI, again being worked on, it works best for best, and is basic. You can make the changed you speak of in the extension dj links to above which he seems to make.
On tabs, again improved in forthcoming Fx 1.5! You can clearly configure the behaviour you want with tab extensions such as Tab Browser Preferences, and Tab Mix, found in the Tab section of Mozilla Update > Firefox > Extensions - https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php?application=firefox&category=Tabbed%20Browsing&numpg=10&pageid=4
Also, I’d recommend looking into a lot of other extensions, utilities and add ons which will mimick any feature, setting, and behaviour you desire. I favourite of mine is ALL IN ONE SIDEBAR, found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Navigation&numpg=10&id=1027
Another is Firetune which will speed up performance and make other improvements and tweaks http://www.totalidea.com/freestuff4.htm
Also, Mozilla Update is also being worked on and improved by Rebron an admin at SpreadFirefox.com, btw I’m working on upgrades to that site with many others, so all together there’s a hell of a lot of improvements in spoken area’s.
I recomend you check out the TabBrowser Extensions at http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.html.en … They will allow you to set it so that when you open a new tab it will load either your home page, a blank page, or the same page as the current tab.
This is the beauty of Firefox, if theres a feature you want, most likely someone else has wanted it too and wrote an extension for it, and if not, you can always write your own extension :)
Be sure to check out Asa’s reply to your blog:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2005/09/berkun_switches_to_firefox.html
Ben Goodger is the self-proclaimed UI Czar for Firefox. He’s at the forefront of the people responsible for UI leadership and calming the early-adopter outcry for excessive browser bling. He now works for Google.
He also wrote the Download Manager for Firefox 1.0.
The Firefox Go menu is global, in that it tracks all pages visited in all windows and in all tabs. I remember reading somewhere that a developer said that it became useful because it is now global. I use it sometimes (yes yes, I understand your point on mainstream use) because I can’t remember which tab I viewed a page in. If I start browsing in a new window in IE, the go menu remembers where I came from, but after browsing around in window 2, the go menu doesn’t notify other windows where I went. In that respect, the IE go menu is kind of useless. I don’t know if that changes your opinion of the menu itself, though.
Thanks for the really great writeup!
curious: thx. I posted a response comment over there.
Alan/Kris/BobBB: cheers for the pointers.
Simplex: You’re pointing out another conceptual problem with tabs. They fracture the glory of the single back/forward track. I get why they wanted a global history, but introducing it means there are two flavors of history: something that is bound to confuse people. My own response was to ignore the one in the go menu because I couldn’t begin to guess what it was.
I use the go menu all the time. It is really nice for when the browser crashes or you accidentilly close the window. I can quickly load something from the histry without opening the bloated and slow history winodow. And when I want the history window, its right there in the go menu, and not on some silly toolbar icon.
You raise some good points with your list of FF annoyances, but I’ve come to learn that there is nearly *nothing* that I don’t like about Firefox that can’t be fixed by looking for an appropriate extension. The Download Statusbar extension, for example, which dj mentioned. Various tab-related extensions will probably fix your issues with tabbed browsing (though possibly not the one related to modal dialogs).
I disagree with your issue with the find bar; I’m very happy with it at the bottom and indeed it feels more intuitive to me to have it at the bottom. However I will agree that for the sake of users it should be a movable bar.
I also agree with you regarding browser history in new tabs: however when I do want to preserve browser history I simply Duplicate Tab (using Tab Mix, in my case) and then continue browsing. Middle-clicking a link does not preserve history, but then neither does “Open link in new window” in IE. When I do open a new tab via Ctrl-T, it’s because I want to do something new from scratch, and don’t need the current history. So “Duplicate Tab” might be what you’re looking for.
“We felt it’s a bad idea generally speaking to leave people in most read/only software with blank screens.”
Browsers aren’t quite read-only software. In fact, by entering this comment, I am using it to write. Reloading the same page again can be problematic for some web apps. Though I think the best would be to give the user an option in preferences, and don’t load current page in new window by default.
i do not agree with your point on the find bat at the bottom. i love it there. perfect spot. about the download window: there are extensions that put downloads in a sidebar, a toolbar, or in a tiny statusbar item (as mentioned by dj). especially for a gui guy firefox has a lot to offer. just look what the community has done! (and a community is something microsoft/ie will never have, only customers.)
reprinted from Asa’s blog
Berkun wrote:
Openusability.org; I believe it was inspired by Eric S. Raymond’s essay “The Luxury of Ignorance” (which begat part two, which begat The Art of Unix Usability)
Maybe you’ll also find talking to ESR to be rewarding. Maybe….
After reading the praises & faults of FF from a MS exec’s mind, I feel inundated with comprehension of why MS has so many problems with customer relations….MS panders down to what they feel the customer should have (based on some kind of research I guess); whereas other companies (to include open source projects) design from the perspective of pushing the user to an even higher level of production. That is the one message that I get from this.
From the article, I can almost see the author’s condescension of the user. Am I the only one that feels this way?
-JJ
I’m sure they’d appreciate you making it friendlier on irc.mozilla.org
Welcome to the better side.
Microsoft Program Manager Switches to FireFox
Need I say more…
…
JJ, I know it’s difficult for people like us (you and I) to understand how most people use their computers. If you’d sit in on a few dozen usability studies with “regular people” (we’re quite irregular,) you’d realize that it’s not condescension, it’s care. It’s because we care about regular people that we work so hard to make our software work for them. People like you and me can always figure it out, or get an extension, or tweak a pref.
Most regular people just want things to work. We didn’t do this by dumbing down the application. We did it by making the application even smarter and by making some hard decisions rather than dumping the complexity in the users’ laps.
With Firefox, we worked really hard so that hopefully the user doesn’t have to. It’s not condescension at all. It’s a passion for users that motivates our drive toward simplicity and making things “just work”.
- A
Just wondering if you evaluted Opera before you switched to Firefox.
It is my opinion that it is a much better browser than both firefox and IE.
I actually hate that IE uses my history when creating a new window. I think it’s the most ridiculous UI decision in the whole app. So now I have to click on the IE icon in my Quick Launch to open a new blank window when ones already open.
I usually only use IE for web apps that take some time to load, and when I need to open a new window quick waiting for that app to load sucks.
Firefox doesn’t need to change anything related to this. This is what users are used to and want. Using history makes no sense.
great story. you’re running mucho open source stuff, wordpress too :) smart thinking. Microsoft needs to follow one day…
Hi Scott,
Good points about tabs/windows and the unreliability of the back button. It seems these days with complex web apps that all too often the back button isn’t there when you want it, and when it is there it doesn’t work like you’d expect. This is something we’ve been thinking about for the past month or so as we take a fresh look at how people navigate the web. Despite what Asa said in his blog post this issue was never actually completely resolved to my satisfaction at least, and I think it’d be worthwhile developing some heuristics for inheriting session history in certain cases and doing some testing on that.
-Ben
You can make a tab go to your homepage (first homepage if you have multiple) if you download the Tabbrowser preferences extension. Also you can get the tab bar at the bottom.
“Strict UI logic would put the tab UI above the toolbars, not below, but that creates other problems.”
I have to totally disagree on this one. This is the one thing in the IE7 beta that annoys me to no end. Menus have always been on top and that’s where I like them. And for those who don’t, let us at least change it. Those tabs at the top annoy me, but not being able to move the menus up top is even worse. I want the tabs close to where I am working for a quick click.
xpm @ post #3
I agree, I don’t even want it to come over. If IE7 has that, then they had better have an option to turn it off, or that just re-enforces my use of FF. :)
Of course, I will probably never go back to IE no matter how many features they add. I just love the idea of ActiveX not even being supported, I really don’t need it at all. :D
Hey just wanted to comment on the “i don’t use the tabs as much as i should” I had that exact problem moving from IE into this famed world of tabbed browsing until I discovere All in one gestures. Now when i want a new tab i just right click and drag a quick up motion and ‘wala’ there is my new tab. There are tons of them to use but really that is the only one. Also a great feature is to click on links with your clickable scroll button which makes the link open in a new tab. Trust me once you get used to those tabs you will never go back.
I seem to remember that the Find bar was at the top of the page area when it was first checked in but was soon moved to the bottom. When it was at the top, it used to shift the page content down when it appeared, which was annoying.
There is a reason for the placement of the search bar:
If it was on top the page content would move up and down as the bar is shown and hidden — this is extremely annoying.
Corey and others are right.
The current (Sept. 14th, 2005) implementation of Tabs in IE 7 is beyond rediculous.
Every app I’ve played with, that features Tabs, does it like Firefox… the Tab is the “handle” for the content directly below it…
If the tab placement, is at all editable by API/ActiveX (cough) extentions, then I would expect that someone releases the “moveTabBar” extention for IE7 within a week of it shipping.
“Strict UI logic”… is obviously in need of an overhaul… UI’s have changed significantly over the last decade…
As for the other comment, about each new tab, not opening the last window/tabs location, I fear you have suffered with the IE design for too long.
I too, am one of the thousands, that swear at my PC, every time I use IE, and open a new window… only to discover that the last window is re-opening (Like Duh! I already had that window open, that’s why I’m opening a new one!)
If the last site (IE only of course) spawned popups, they all re-spawn…
If the last site was a transaction… e.g. my bank transfer to XYZ… OUCH! say goodbye to a bunch of cash…
I understand, that this was your (or your teams) original design, thus you want to stand behind it… but hey, take the flack… it seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hind sight… not a smooth move…
(although I do see one advantage… a “Feature” as MS calls it… sites tracking hits, get falsly higher ratings… as it appears that user ‘x’ hit the site twice, rather than user hit it once, then wanted to comparison shop, or check out a reference link)
A final note on tabs…
If you do not already have it set up, ensure that middle-clicking (e.g. clicking the wheel), opens the link under the cursor, in a new tab (in the background)…. and middle-clicking on a tab, closes that tab. (this will shave countless seconds off your surfing time)
ta.
The key to me about new tabs is the History Trail rather than the Current Page. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’m on a slow non-cacheing website where I don’t want to go “back” because it takes 30 seconds, do 3-4 “Open in New Tab” clicks to see where I want to go next (looking at related products, whatever), then close off the other tabs and keep going. Great, fantastic, nifty use of tabs. Then I change my mind, or want to go back to the previous store, hit “Back,” and realize that I’ve closed off all of my history.
Why not use the current model for new tabs (blank page) but, on all new tabs (with or without content) bring the “Back” history along? No additional network load, no webapp page reloads, if the user doesn’t hit Back it works exactly the same as it does today, but if they do want to go Back then everything still works as expected. I personally can’t see much of a problem there.
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. And onther feature is the ability to tear a tab out and create a new instance of the app.
Another beef with FF is the close tab button. I have an extension that puts the X on each tab. A must. You cant cntrl-click tabs to select for multiple closures.
And yes the All-In-One-Sidebar is great. As are a lot of extensions I put in FF, but if I, as well as others, think they are so great… shouldnt they be feautures?
Regarding tabs and carrying over the browser history: My most-often way of opening a new tab is by right-clicking on a link and selecting “open link in new tab”. That way, I can continue to read the page I’m on and then hit all the tabs I’ve opened and carry on from there. Using tabs this way gives you much more flexibility than a simple back-next button. It gives you more of a tree structure instead of a single page history.
The tab preferences problem could be easily solved…even on a per user basis if needed. Most OS’s have a specific user login. The first time a new tab is asked for bring up a dialogue box asking how you want the new tab to be handled….bring the history from the linking location or start fresh.
I’d be willing to support your complaint that browser history is not copied over to new tabs if and only if you renounced forever IE/Win’s habit of loading your *current* document into a *new* window.
When you start a new word-processing document, do you get the previous document you worked on?
When you write your friend a letter, do you include the letter he or she sent you first?
When you borrow a new book from the library, do you get all your old books too?
“New” means “new blank document,” not “clone.”
“The Favorites menu and Favorites bar show links in different orders…”
I noticed this one some years ago and was going to submit a bug report to Microsoft. I gave up when the only suggested way to submit a bug report was to send an email to ms-wish@microsoft.com. Was this by design? If so why? It certainly was rather strange.
“I want the system to take of it and stay out my face”
should probably be “take _care_ of”, right?
(Another gripe: IE ate my form data when i had to go back to fix this form. Firefox never does this.)
Ari, I agree and had the same problem till i learnt about middle clicking a tab - it closes it. Also, you could try this little extension; https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=785
Thanks to Jake, I’m going to go and play (and hopefully learn) Mouse gestures :D
The only two problems I’ve had with Firefox are that alerts & password dialogs are window-modal, and a very annoying one that Ctrl+W closes a tab when it does ‘Find’ in pico (nano) in linux, annoys the hell out of me! I’m just glad I have UndoCloseTab. :)
Don’t suppose anyone knows how to change KeyBindings in FF without resorting to editing jar files? I’ll get round to it at some point!
Certaintly some good ideas on here, I especially liked Ari’s points about being able to drag tabs and how Gaim works.
As a shameless plug (it is my site!) I’ve got a little list of some of my favourite Extensions (like most people seem to!) at derp.co.uk - its just a simple wiki of various tips and tricks for Windows, FF and Linux really, stuff that I keep forgetting really I guess!
Personally, I’ve tried IE7 at work and I’ve absolutely hated it. I don’t like the allow and deny sites dialog, and putting the tabs at the top of the page is just a nightmare for my wrist!
Still, some fantastic work coming from the Firefox team and I’m sure like most people I want to thank Scott, and everyone’s who’s replied for giving some valuable insight and a lot to think about, especially in UI design.
eek ook ook OOOK OOOK! Thanks!
Dug (a random visitor… how did I get here actually! Damn FF history!… ;D)
I just read an interesting blog about Vista UI here:
http://applexnet.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1591
Why does Microsoft allow the user experience to stagnate? Microsoft does have a lot of money. They should be able to invest in the research and development of great and innovative products. How can Mozilla outdo Microsoft? What is Microsoft doing wrong?
I agree about the download dialog. It’s friggin retarded. I hate it. It’s the one of the biggest reasons I don’t use FF.
I like Firefox a lot, but it’s just times slower downloading and rendering images. This is my only thing I can’t ignore.
I think the find is at the bottom as a throwback to vi and similar. Just like ctrl-f you can press / to type. Another reason not to put it at the top is, i dont care about the find window. Usually, you know what you’re typing (it’s usually short for a find), and I’m more concerned with what I’m searching for (in the document), not the find dialogue.
It may be personal, I also really like the way tabs open behind. Links often come up in the middle of a document, and pages take time to load. So I usually have it load in the background while I find a stopping point in my current document. Or, if there’s a list of links I want to visit, I can open all of those at the same time and jump along the tabs.
Thanks for the post, it was quite interesting to hear a critique from someone who knows about designing web browsers and can properly contrast ff and ie.
Download dialog Ok have not seen it in ok 2 years. Reason Download Manager. Kinda fixs that problem.
History not being carried from tab to tab is a secuirty thing so you have to live with it.
Go menu Its history but is is also Handy when some one hides the tool bars and leave you with just the menu. Yes it needs a better name but Go has kinda stuck.
I hope you know that you can completely reskin Firefox. I do mean completely. So you can make a them with the Find bar up the top the Go menu gone. Reason I know is restricted computer setups Browser only loaded to one site and you don’t want to let them anywhere else. Yep I removed the menus completely striped out the location bar and left them with tabs and forwards and backward and a home button. Its nice.
Since you are a developer It would be nice to see a theme skin of what you think firefox should look like. Dont worry Firefox has a backup plan firefox –profile Can fix the most evil stuff ups ever included my first attempt home page load no mouse no keys yep no browser. Still backup first.
The Dilog box problem sticks to stop user conusing over windows and stoping windows form geting losts. Close ie to fine 60 windows in back ground. not nice.
I totally agree with you on the go menu thing. I have always hated that drop down menu and likewise never understood what determined what sites were listed there. The thing the pissed me off the most was I could never find how to remove sites from there (I’m not going to deny it, I used to visit so sites I’m not particularly proud of).
Nice to see another conversion from IE to FF :)
Truth be told, however, I remember when IE 5 was the best browser around. I was one of the Netscape 4 hold-outs who just wouldn’t leave Netscape but finally had to because it was beoming unsable. (Plus it was slow as hell).
Honestly, though, my biggest complaint with FireFox isn’t anything you mentioned… It’s the fact that on our corporate LAN (yes, we have FireFox on our machines at work (somewhat thanks to my talking the IT guy into it)) I still have to use IE to check my e-mail because Outlook Web Access is not very FF friendly. (I can’t just set up Outlook since I don’t have my own desk and float between computers in the control room / master control)
As for the tab issue… I have Tab Browser preferences set to put it at the bottom. It works out nicely that way (and of course on my computers at work confuses the hell out of me ’cause it’s at the top)
One reccomendation (I apologize if it’s been suggested already… I was kind of at work when this got Dugg), check out the Mozilla.org extentions gallery. Lot’s of extentions you’ll probably never need but there are some real gems in the bunch.
-A
For those of you who want to move tabs around and don’t have the new Firefox 1.5B1 (it’s built in now from this extension), look for the extension called “miniT” that will allow you to move your tabs to where you want.
Also, I find the Tab Clicking Options to be handy for me. I can double-click on a tab to close it. I tried the extension that put an X on the tabs but I found it annoying, especially when I misclick.
Sessionsaver .2 is nice also, especially when it reloads tabs from a crash. Doesn’t seem to work too well in FF 1.5B1 too well, but it’s better than nothing since I always have quite a few tabs open.
Yes MiniT does allow you to reorder tabs. Good that’s in FF 1.5.
Do not use Tab Browser Extensions, it just slow down FF too much. Tab Browser Preference is faster, but with a lot more functions. The one i miss is making links open just after the active tab. Maybe it can be done in core FF ?
I think the thing with back/forward and tabs is a false problem.
I like the new search bar. I would love to see all occurences highlighted in the page. Of course with a different color than the “active” occurence.
Oh yeah, i HATED IE so much when it loaded the current page on a “new page” ! Never do that again :)
I’ve just discovered the “go menu”. I never noticed and openes it before !
FF is great, can’t wait to see it better :)
Going back to the issue of the “Go” menu… I had never used it before, and I was only vaguely aware of its existence until reading this very page - but it has just come in unexpectedly handy when I accidentally closed the tab I was reading this blog on. I’m converted now.
Changed over to FireFox as primary browser a couple months back, and, except that I find it’s DL manager crude, I’m favorably impressed.
Find UI - strange at first, but find I like it where it is (and not tempted to move it elsewhere).
New tab as blank - Major draw (for me) to use FF. I can understand why cloning the current URL into a new window might have been seen as advantageous when net access was a novel thing to most users, but is, in my opinion, an example of “welding the training wheels on”, and often causes more problems than it solves. Drove me nuts in IE, especially if the current window’s URL was some bloated thing that took a year to load.
Options go to the user - in FF, if you don’t like what it’s doing you can (usually) find a way to make it work the way you want. IE - not so much.
My take on the situation may be wrong, but I’ve long had the impression several changes made in IE4 and higher had more to do with melding the browser into the OS, and often to the detriment of simplicity.
For example, I maintain a simple web site for our maintenance department that is mostly a storehouse of links to vendor documentation, and in-house generated DOC, XLS, and other files containing troubleshooting field reports and the like.
In up to IE3 clicking on, for instance, an XLS link loaded a copy of Excel, and the user had full printing capability. In IE4 and later the file is rendered in such a way so printing capability downgrades to what IE can do, and completely hoses the functionality I was trying to provide.
While I can see where this might be a good thing (if the user didn’t already have a program capable of handling XLS files installed) it didn’t do me any favors. BTW - if someone knows of a good way to revert to the pre-IE4 behavior I’m all ears … I troubleshoot and fix machines, and am not a web author per se.
#3 on your list of complaints about Firefox was my major frustration with IE, and one of the things I like *best* about Firefox.
You wrote “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.”
Well, you lost that bet! :-) At least with this user.
I generate a new tab (or window) precisely because I do NOT want to continue from where they left off. Most frequently, I’m using tabs as a process queue — as a list of Things To Do or Read. For example, as I browse my RSS subscriptions in Bloglines, I open interesting links in new tabs in the background to review later. That way I can read through all of my feeds, then come back and review those interesting links. If I’m opening a new tab, 99% of the time it’s because I’m beginning a new thought process or line of investigation, not because I’m continuing an old one.
Anyway, the great thing about Firefox is with a simple extension you can have it both ways. Just install the Duplicate Tab extension. With that extension, adding a shift to the shortcut duplicates IE behavior. So SHIFT-CTRL-T gets you a new tab w/ all the previously focused tab’s history, etc. SHIFT-CTRL-N does the same thing in a new window (just like IE!).
Of course, if you like that, you might still complain that the keyboard shortcuts are different than what you’re accustomed to. So what? Don’t fret the difference; install the Keconfig extension. If you don’t like ‘em, you can use the Keyconfig to remap keyboard shortcuts. :-)
finally…fireofox is the choice
Great article, well done.
Hi,
I was wondering if you’ve ever tried Opera! I agree with Hugo Del Castillo, above, completely. Opera has the search button at the top; the tabs are located above the toolbar; and there’s a startup dialog that lets you choose if you want to start with no pages or continue from the previous browsing session. I noticed those were the points you mentioned that were lacking in Firefox but present in Opera.
מנהל הפיתוח של IE לשעבר, מסביר מדוע הוא עבר ל…פיירפוקס
אכן, זו כותרת קצת מטופשת (צהובה אפילו) לידיעה, אבל לא בכל יום מכריז מנהל הפיתוח של IE (החל בגירסה 1.0 ועד לגירסה 5.0) על חיבתו לפיירפוקס דווקא.
1,2,3 can be handled with extensions. 5, it’s easy to remove the go button.
Numer 4 though. YES!! YES!! YES!! I *despise* this aspect of Firefox.
I’d have to agree with XPM- when I hit the ctrl+t, it’s because I want to start at a new place. Put a tab after that and I’m over to the google search box. If I wanted to see the same page (or a variant) I would be scroll wheel clicking instead of left mouse clicking.
Going to the current page or my startup page is one thing that PISSES me off about Konquerer (in Linspire & Kubuntu). Because instead of typing my next web location, I have to go back to the mouse and highlight the address to change it. This is very annoying, and one reason why I’ve stuck with firefox.
Good article though- it’s nice to hear insider/rival opinions.
If FF ever changes the tab history behavior as described in the article I will no longer use it. As described it seems quite backwards to me. I should see the history for my current tab not all my tabs. If I need my entire history that’s why the history side bar is there.
“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.”
Then IE/Firefox need a preference to control this behavior like Safari has. Safari allows you to set new windows/tabs to open with: Home Page, Empty Page, Same Page, or Bookmarks.
I’m also a UI guy,and I don’t have Firefox installed because the simply haven’t put forth the effort to refine the UI for OS X.
Super Freak
My main issue with the ‘extensions fix all’ argument is that I use 5 different computers in my day to day life. Two at home and three at work. Now I know it seems a little crazy but thats the environment I’m in. I guess I’m getting tired of having to setup every computer with the right extensions with the right settings. I would love to see a system where I can save off my settings to a file that I could email to myself and import into any firefox browser anywhere. It doesnt seem like it would be that hard to do. Simply save the location needed to download the extension, and have the settings in XML files. That would make Firefox sprantastic.
FF is just great! The default install of FF had nothing I wanted to change at all and I hope it will continue to do so!
I have to completely disagree with you about the location of the search bar. Perhaps the _Windows_ version should put the search bar at the top, but if you’re running something like Linux, and are used to using vi, emacs, and more/less, you expect the search text to be at the bottom of the window. It’s a completely different argument as to whether they (vi/emacs/etc.) got it right, but being as many people have their use ingrained in them, arrogantly throwing out this mode is less than smart.
My opinions..
1) I hate tabbed browsing, I want each window to open separately, not as a child within a parent window.
2) I hate enormous toolbars. The toolbar I use for IE has File, Edit, Favorites, Tools, Help, Back, Forward, Stop and the URL location, that’s it. It’s no bigger than the status bar at the bottom of the page.
3) Pages just don’t look right in FF. The same page looks much prettier in IE.
It’s not to say that I don’t have gripes about IE, because I have plenty, but none of them are mentioned here. I never use Favorites so I don’t have anything to add there. I like when I hit new window and it opens the existing page. If I remember correcntly, back in the day, Netscape would open with a blank page that wasn’t good for anything. One of my bigger gripes I believe may lie inherently in the Windows code.. Even though I’m on a broadband connection, some pages still load slower than molasses.. so when opening links, I nearly always right click every link of interest and say “open in a new window”.. so many times, the new window that pops open steals the focus from the window I’m still browsing on. (I even have PowerToys installed and have focus-stealing disabled, but it doesn’t matter)
Lastly, another thing I hate with IE is when you fill out a bunch of fields, hit submit, and let’s say you got “page cannot be displayed”.. when I hit back, I want to see all the fields filled out with what I put, I don’t want to have to enter it all again. I realize this may be JavaScript at work but it’s so fckin annoying.
Oh and one more. I abbbbbsoluteeeeely hate (it’s again a Javascript thing) when you open a page, say Google for instance, and you do a search, then when the second page loads you realize that you need to modify your search, so you go into the search box, start typing, then all of a sudden the textbox reverts to what you originally had. Being a web developer I LOVE JavaScript, but not for these annoying, inane uses. I can understand setting the focus to a particular text box (which at times can be quite annoying in itself) but resetting the value via javascript, instead of using the text boxes VALUE attribute seems stupid!
This is so cool! People having progressive discussion about the software they use. Changes are now dictated from the bottom up and all software (even proprietary like IE) becomes more innovative.
BTW, does anybody find the similarity of IE’s path to old Netscape ironic?
Overall FireFox is great.
I wish FireFox would save web pages with the usually meaningful web page as the default filename rather than the often meaningless serverfilename.htm name as the default save filename.
A control to quickly switch between the two as the initial save filename would be nice since different sites have different naming conventions.
Hi, I only agree with #5(Go menu) of your criticisms of Firefox, and strongly disagree with #3 (new windows).
I absolutely HATE having the old website show up in IE. I always want to start a new stream of thought or searching with a new window. With IE, you’ve got to wait until IE is finished re-downloading and re-rendering before you can type in a new website. If you start typing in the middle of page load, the address bar reverts to the original if you don’t finish before the render.
Conceptually, I am opening a new window for a new thought.
Tabbed browsing is awesome…I think you’ll love it after you use it for a while, especially in Windows! It’s nice not having a bunch of half-inch tabs at the bottom of your screen just for the browser.
Plus, each window with it’s tabs can function as a “project” or container for similar web pages. E.g. Tabs in window 1 might be research on best flight fares, Tabs in window 2 might be research on best hotel fares, tabs in window 3 might be reviews of mp3 players, etc.
Bhavesh
Enlightening post, especially from a former IE developer. Certainly the clean and simpler IE user interface in 1998/1999 (IE4 and 5) was what made me switch from Netscape 4 to Internet Explorer. Then, IE6 came along, and the pretty Windows XP skin was good - though during Mozilla’s development it was obvious IE was far behind, and Firefox cemented that fact by producing a usable UI. I suppose yes, in a way IE7 addresses some of the flaws with Mozilla Firefox’s UI (particularly placing the tabs towards the top of the screen) - hopefully Mozilla’s team sees and understands them too - but somehow tabs look awful at the top and it’s a pain having to move the pointer to the top of the screen to switch (assuming not using ctrl/command-tab)
I completely agree with Greg R. (5 posts ago)
New tab should not contain irrelevant history.
I’m with Hugo and asddsa. Extension this, extension that, clone, duplicate, don’t duplicate, download manager, blah, blah, blah, check for updates, download, restart, this, that…
Try Opera. Honestly.
In response to:
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.
Firefox has a (hidden) option to enable old-style error pages instead of error dialogs. Since 99% of the time (from my experience) dialogs come up in tabs, they’re error dialogs, I always enable this immediately after sitting down at a Firefox install. I think it should be the default. The error page is better because:
1) It doesn’t block switching to other tabs.
2) It has a “reload” button to allow you to attempt to reload the site. This is important because frequently when an error dialog comes up, the URL field is empty and you can’t remember what link you clicked that had the error. (I usually open a site, click 20 links in different tabs… if one of those doesn’t load, which one? The dialog doesn’t say.)
Safari does dialogs also, but it puts a little marker in the tab that has the error and the dialog doesn’t appear until you click on that tab. It’s a little nicer than Firefox’s method, but still not as good as error pages.
“I have to totally disagree on this one. This is the one thing in the IE7 beta that annoys me to no end. Menus have always been on top and that’s where I like them. And for those who don’t, let us at least change it. Those tabs at the top annoy me, but not being able to move the menus up top is even worse. I want the tabs close to where I am working for a quick click.”
The logic is this: Tabs should be self-contained. The “back” button should be *inside* the tab because it only impacts the current tab, not the entire set of tabs. Likewise with the URL field, the search field, Home, Stop, Reload, etc.
If you see a preferences dialog with a set of tabs, and a “add” button inside the tab and a “add” button outside the tab, you know that the button outside will add a new tab, and the button inside will add a new item in the current tab. Browsing should be the same way.
In short, I agree: The tab bar should be at the top of the window. Actually, ideally, every OS would be like BeOS, and tabbing windows would be handled by the window manager, so you could tab an email window onto a web browser window, or whatever combination you want.
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.
Everyone else is doing it…
Well, if the guy that designed the User Interface for Internet Explorer decided to switch to Firefox, why haven’t you?
Read what he has to say.
Looking over my referer logs, it appears that almost 50% of the people that view my blog use IER…
IE UI Designer Switches
Scott Berkun was the UI designer for Internet Explorer (versions 1.0 through 5.0). Hes decided to make the switch to Firefox, for various reasons.
Scott Berkun on Firefox
For those of you in the right circles, you may or may not know that Scott Berkun is the guy who designed the interface for Internet Explorer. Well, recently, he’s switched to Firefox as his browser of choice. In this article, he addresses why …
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.
Gratulacje.
Dobry wybór. Nic więcej dodawać chyba nie trzeba :)…
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 ;).
IE UI author about Firefox UI
All the features and implementation subtleties that we have been taking for granted turn out to be improvable. For me, Firefox lacks 2 things: changeable tab order and rebindable shortkeys. The rest is tailored to my habits.
…
Why I switched to Firefox
Unless you lived under a rock you probably saw this already as it was on /. this evening. Scott Burken who worked on IE5 as a designer has switched to Firefox. He offers a short critique of Firefox, praising it and being critical too. I have to agree,…
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 ins