Linux and fonts and Firefox and human-factors design
Ben Scott
dragonhawk at gmail.com
Mon Oct 30 21:29:01 EST 2006
On 10/30/06, Paul Lussier <p.lussier at comcast.net> wrote:
> I was also relaying most of these complaints from a
> colleague, they aren't actually my complaints (I'm perfectly happy
> with a standard 8x13 xterm with emacs and w3m :)
Fair enough, but I actually think this topic is interesting and
worth thinking about. It actually leads to some fundamentally hard
meta-issues.
(Of course, you are also free to just ignore all this. (As is
everyone else.))
> Most people, experienced or not, seem to forget
> about:config exists, should we expect someone completely new to
> Firefox (regardless of OS) to know about it?
Well, one potential problem here is that there are about 9 brazilian
options in about:config. Putting those in the "Preferences" dialog
box make it look like the under-street utility line map for New York
City. At which point, it becomes effectively unusable to the newbie
anyway, just like about:config (which is why about:config isn't on a
menu anywhere).
> Or expect them to understand what these settings, which seem to have no
> documentation, do?
Ah, even better. Do we put a knob in, and risk confusion and
clutter? Or do we leave it out, and piss off everyone who considers
that particular knob essential? If we put it in, do we spend
time/effort/money/manpower drawing up a fancy preferences UI and
documentation? Or do we leave it hidden under the hood, which makes
it hard to get to, hard to use, and hard to understand?
From experience, I can say that, for the vast majority of possible
knobs, no matter which way you go, you'll piss somebody off.
Examples:
Emacs. Famously customizable. Infamously steep learning curve.
GNOME 2.0.0. Here, the developers consciously took the path of
leaving out all but (what they considered) the most essential knobs,
and that pissed off all sorts of people, who found the software often
worked against them (since they were used to something that worked
just a bit differently, and they didn't have a knob to change things).
> Or, try figuring out how to change the order of existing tabs. As far
> as I can tell, it can't be done.
Without an extension, you are correct. This was not considered
"essential" when tabs were first added. (Compare this to the
task-list/window-list/task-bar/etc in most window managers/GUIs. You
generally cannot reorder things there. Firefox followed suit.) It
turns out that many (most?) people want *that* knob, so Firefox 2.0
includes that functionality by default. Doubtless that will piss
somebody off, who will suddenly be accidentally moving tabs around.
> [1] The user who ranted to me the other day was trying to exactly
> this. When inadvertantly clicking the mouse-wheel on his browser
> while scrolling down the page, he suddenly ended up at Google.
> Evidently, whatever was in the X paste buffer was not a URL, and
> Firefox is, by default, configured to use the input as a search query
> for Google.
Something like that.
Mozilla will take a middle-click in a non-text-input-area and treat
that as a URL you want to go to. (It has done this since just about
forever, possibly even when "Mozilla" was still "Mosiac".) This lets
you highlight a URL in some other program, then middle-click to
"paste" the URL into an existing window, which will then open the URL.
If you're used to Unix style middle-click-to-paste, it makes sense.
Personally, I use this *constantly*.
Now, conventional wisdom says that "most people" treat the Address
bar as a search field, too. They try to enter things like "nose hair
trimmers", where the software wants only "http://www.amazon.com" or
whatever.[1][2] So now web browsers all accept search keywords in the
Address bar, too. Google just happens to be the default search for
Firefox[3].
So, now, we face another interesting choice: Do we throw away ten
years of UI history for people familiar with Mozilla? Or do we
disable functionality that newbies seem to expect works?
Should we generally disable middle-click-to-paste by default, since
newbies generally don't understand *that*, either?
These questions are hard to answer well.
Footnotes
---------
[1] My own personal experience tells me this is absolutely true.
[2] This also works in reverse. I've seen countless people, with a
home page set to Google, carefully enter in "www.yahoo.com" or the
like into the Google search field.
[3] It's MSN for MSIE, no surprise.
-- Ben
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