Internet Explorer UI designer switchs to Firefox

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/?p=115

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

More at link. Some nice suggestions there too, although with some things I don't agree: I like new tabs being born "virgin", and putting the rest of the interface inside the tabs would be too awkward.

[matcom]

1. tried firefox. went back to IE

thought it sucked. web pages didn't look right and online media wouldn't work.

and fuck all that 'patch' downloading and installation to get the thing to do what you want it to do

as a web developer, that fucker don't hunt with THIS dog :argh:

[billyskank]

4. As a web designer

how do your web pages look in Firefox?

(Honest question).

[matcom]

5. most look fine

had to tweak a couple (one was a real bitch)

[billyskank]

6. What was the issue with it?

[hunter]

11. As a web developer...

...any web page that doesn't work with Firefox isn't worth the hunt.

Firefox drinks out of the toilet, but IE licks the god-damned toilet seat and craps all over the walls.

I want to scream every time I see one of my client's computer infected with dozens of viruses because they ran Internet Explorer in some naive way.

[billyskank]

13. ActiveX is usually the problem.

x(

[hunter]

18. Sites that tell people exactly how to disable their own security...

:grr:

Yes, ActiveX is a tool of the devil.

[Kellanved]

16. that's strange

Firefox isn't perfect in the department, but in my experience it renders HTML far cleaner than IE. Of course we all became used to IE's way to render things over the years.

:shrug:

[Hugin]

2. "multiselect doesn’t work"

I've noticed... I thought it was a feature.

[no name no slogan]

20. With MS, today's "bug" is tomorrow's "feature"

nt

[bicentennial_baby]

3. firefox and i aren't speaking right now

it ate my 1000s of bookmarks x(

[Lilyhoney]

7. I just started using firefox.

I personally don't know enough to know what to think.

My network systems husband put IE on my new laptop. At the same time our programmer friend insisted on firefox. :shrug:

[no name no slogan]

8. I like Firefox, but I'm an Opera diehard

I've been using Opera since 3.x, and it's consistently outperformed both IE and Mozilla browsers in speed, usability and functionality.

However, because I build web applications for a living, I still use all three in my daily work. There are some features in IE and Moz that I wish Opera supported (like a built-in API for WYSIWYG on-line web page editing), but overall IMHO Opera is still the bee's knees.

[hunter]

17. I write for firefox and tweak to IE.

I also do what I can to make sites I design accesible to the text only browsers used by disabled readers. (How do your pages look in Lynx?)

Here's a good resource for web developers: http://www.nyise.org/access.htm

I'm using Opera today.

[no name no slogan]

19. My specialty is ADA/Section 508/accessibility

I work in the public sector and have done consulting on that kind of thing to public and private companies. My own personal pages are all WAI AAA/Level 3 compliant-- which is pretty easily done if you stick to W3C standard markup and style sheets.

I used to teach webdev at the college level, and used to spend a couple weeks on accessiblity and standards-based design. Unfortunately, many of my students didn't "get it" at the time (back in 1999-2000), although it's become much more important in the ensuing years.

As for my employers' pages, it's not as easy, but most of those are WAI AA/Level 2, while the rest are at least WAI A/Level 1 at a bare minimum. I'd like to get them more compliant, but it's very difficult when using 3rd party content management tools and other components.

I also run Lynx and have a copy of JAWS (a screenreader) installed on my workstation, too. Yeah, I'm a bit of an accessibilty wonk, but it pays the bills. :silly:

[Crazy Guggenheim]

9. I tried Firefox and went back to IE. Too many problems getting

into some websites.

[Hugin]

10. Yeah, those pop-up loaded Pr0n sites don't...

Um, never mind.

O8)

[Crazy Guggenheim]

12. Byte me!!

[Hugin]

14. What?

I was agreeing with you!

:evilgrin:

[Crazy Guggenheim]

15. LOL.

[Kellanved]

21. I found that surfing without JavaScript kept me out of even more pages

:shrug:

Especially as pretty much all pages aren't IE-exclusive any more.