Firefox 3: First Impressions

Today is Firefox 3 download day. Although FF3 beta 3's been available a few weeks, I religiously download and install Firefox 3 today to do my bit towards setting the record. Download Firefox 3 from here, if you haven't already.

Before I give you my comments on its usability, a little aside on the browsers I use, just to set context.

Firefox has been my default browser since version 1.2 (or thereabouts). Over 90% of my desktop browsing is via Firefox. I also use Opera at times - I think it is a pretty nifty browser and really the forerunner for feature introductions. They came up with tabbed browsing, for example. I use Internet Explorer (now IE 8 Beta) as well - Sharepoint sites render better on IE. I like Flock too, but it plays second fiddle to Firefox only because I use so many plug-ins/add-ons on Firefox.

Enough digression.

Here are my first impressions, usability wise. For an application that gets used so much, usability is also a function of time - a novelty today may become an irritant tomorrow.

1. "What was that site again?". How many of us have tried rummaging browser history to find that great blog post we read, or event we heard about? Address (URL) matching is passe. Firefox 3 matches words within the page title and tags on that page. Also sorts itself by time (how recently you viewed that page) and frequency. Neat. This is a type of feature that gets refined over time.

This feature could have been made a little smarter, though. Try typing 'com' and you'll see what I mean. I get google.com as the first choice. It also looks inside ID fields that form part of the URL - that makes it more confusing. The transition (appearance) of this drop down could be more subtle - it is a bit of a distraction when it appears, so I can see some users getting put off by this (they have the option to turn it off, btw).

2. Enough has been said about Firefox performance woes on Vista - and I have been at the receiving end of it more than I'd like to. Performance and Security have been a focus area this time round, with over 15,000 fixes made. Although it is difficult to tell right away, I hope this means less trouble with Firefox on Vista for me.

3. I usually have dozens of tabs open as I browse, so I'm pleased with the simple animated transition on the tabs - a little carousel like. I really wish they'd made an improvement on where the a "new tab" shows up. I always think that clicking on "Open in New Tab" should create a tab to the immediate right of the current tab - so you know it is right there. Firefox opens new tabs at the rightmost end of the list of tabs (not a 3.0 feature, its always been so) - painful when you have 10+ tabs already open. You either a) have to scroll scroll till you get there or b) forget that you opened the new tab or c) lose context of what you were reading earlier.

4. They've visually integrated the browser well with Vista (and Linux and Mac, apparently - I've only seen screenshots of those). Here's a couple of examples where the icons have more Vista-ish look and feel.

Why does this matter?

When you are trying to eat into Internet Explorer's market share, and move beyond techno-savvy users, you'd like to get the users "comfortable" with your application, and the more it fits in to the OS the faster you get comfortable with it. Take iTunes for example. The look and feel is (and has always been) Mac OS-like. Takes a while for users to figure their way out and get used to.

Here's a quote from Alex Faaborg's blog about firefox 3, describing its usability goals

Why do We Believe Visual Integration is Important?

We decided to focus heavily on visual integration with the platform for the following reasons:

-Cross platform applications that use a consistent appearance across different operating systems (like RealPlayer, or applications developed using Java Swing) feel foreign and strange
-The Web browser is a central part of the user’s computing experience
-We want the user’s first impression to be feeling comfortable with the UI
-If the transition in and out of Firefox is jarring, the user won’t achieve flow when completing tasks (like when you are driving a car and you realize you haven’t been thinking about driving for quite awhile, or when you are reading an interesting book and you turn pages without conscious thought).
-We want Firefox to feel like the browser your computer should have shipped with

Those of you who have worked with cross platform consistency will appreciate the ambition and rigor required to achieve this.

The sorry part about Firefox 3 is not all the Add-ons I use have been upgraded to be compatible yet, I guess they wwill be, soon enough.

What are your impressions of Firefox 3? What's your favorite Firefox feature, regardless of the version? Time to spread some Firefox love.

Mix ups

Continuing on from my previous post about the non apparent UX improvements in Vista...

 

Noticed a little hyperlink called Mixer at the bottom of the volume control (..access it with a single click on the volume icon in systray)

Gives you access to this fabulous dialog box.

It shows you all open applications that are capable of making a sound. It allows you to use the left most control (Speaker/head) phone to decide the over all volume. And then allows you to control the relative volume of the rest of the applications)

Watching a cricket match on an illegal site :) without commentary yet want to hear a speaker on live meeting without the new mail to ring a bell while allowing MSN messenger to ping you?

Beautifully done...

 

BTW. Post number 100. Many many thanks to everyone who has participated with bricks and bouquets, blogs and comments.

Thanks

Hilarious Windows (Vista) Error

via Gizmodo



So let me lay it out for you: Windows Problem Reporting has encountered a problem. Because of this problem, Windows needs to shutdown the service. Ok so far.

But it will also notify you if a solution is available. How can you do that when you are shutting down your notification service?

Reminds me of those movies where a dying man reveals only half the secret he's being killed for.

Left is not right, back is not wrong

Continuing on from my previous post about the non apparent UX improvements in Vista, here is one simple, curious little left pointing arrow...



All those years ago, a few days before I was to leave for US, I was teaching my mom how to send emails. I sat many a hour being as patient as she has been with me through all my idiosyncrasies. What I remember the most is her being a deer-in-headlight every time she came to a new screen. She was so afraid to do anything lest it disappeared and she did not know how to bring it back again.

Now it comes together to me.

Discovering is not enough without knowing predictably how to get there again. ("Your highness," said Vasco Da Gama, " Went to India I did, though I know not how to again").

This insanely simple button on the dialog box is a revolution. It sews together the structure of a wizard with the well understood browser back button allowing you the permutation-ally logical option to go one screen back without breaking the workflow!

Wow.

I for detail...

Beating down Microsoft products is fashionable. And products like Waste-ah makes it so much more simpler (and justifiable) to do so.

In the next few week, I am going to blog about usability improvements in Vista. While the overall operating system still has a lot of work on the implementation, I think the product and program managers have done a stellar job.

For example: Do you remember this age old dialog box?

You could hit F2 in the file explorer to in place edit the name of a file. The entire filename along with its file extension would be highlighted, and when you started typing, the file extension, more often than not, was lost. That was not the only problem though. If you selected No in the dialog box, file explorer would revert back to the old filename instead of allowing you to start where you left and rectify.

Very nicely taken care of in Vista. Hitting F2 automatically highlights only the name of the file, preventing an inadvertent change of extension.

These "sixes" are not thrilling...

On the day, Punjad da puttar hit six sixes in six balls, here are six screens you have to bear before finally connecting to a wireless.

Irritating, no?

What printer is that, again?

A label in the print dialog box of Outlook 2007 threw me off.

Does this mean, if I choose a printer other than my default, the attachments would not print? Or would they just not print on the printer I selected?

And without nitpicking - a good UX designer should- the spacing and allignement between the checkbox and the label does not conform to the Microsoft standard user interface guidelines.

un-Share Can't

Yesterday I pointed out a neat little usability improvement to the Fie Share dialog box in Vista.

Today I noticed two problems

1. If I want to stop sharing a folder with a user, I open the file share dialog box.


2. I select the user name and open the action combo box.
   
   
3. You click Remove to take the user out.

And therein lied the problem. Now I am left with with two action buttons, neither of which I want to take. Share and Cancel. All I want is a button which Applies or Commits the transaction that I just completed.

If I take the red pill and click share , I get a user access control dialog box followed by a dialog box which tells me that the folder has been shared (while in the background the users permissions have actually been revoked).

The blue pill of Cancel does what it is supposed to.

Damn!

The second problem is that I need to know the users alias to be able to share. There is no lookup. No way to resolve a name. No auto-complete. No suggested names.

Damn Damn!!

"Share" Can

Vista vastly improves the experience for sharing files and folders over XP.

The usual steps in sharing a folder are

1. Pick the folder

2. Add recipients, give permissions (reader, writer etc)

3. Send a mail to the recipient with the share name

The following dialog box makes the third (and the most boring) step a breeze.

A click on the email hyperlink in the dialog box presents you with an email with the following text

"I have given you permission to access some of my files from any computer on this network. You can access them by clicking the link(s) below.

Videos (file://UNLT089/Videos)"

Click send. Done. Great job.

Shows how important it is to extend the user experience from a point action to an entire workflow.