Month: September 2002

Find out all about the accessibility work going on for the Mozilla project through the groovy shortcut URL of the day: www.accessmozilla.org

Death is a painful reality of this world. Sometimes it sneaks up on us and catches us by surprise. Other times we see it coming in the slow darkness falling over loved ones as they struggle for each breath in their last months with us. Either way, death shocks us. It feels terribly wrong, like we were never meant for this.

A year ago, the horrible events of a morning brought a day where we desperately wished for the routine, the typical. But the routine was gone, obliterated by the ever-present images, voices, and commentary. We stared at the massive flames, the crashing planes, and the sight of people falling or jumping to their deaths. In my office, we tried to work, if only to distract ourselves. We spoke in hushed voices of stunned disbelief.

We learned that people had come to our country, lived in the midst of us and our freedoms, and abused them in order to hurt others. The questions came: What kind of person would think to do this kind of evil? Why would they want to hurt us? How can we help those in need?

It’s a paradox: in the midst of seeing this tragic hatred unleashed, we also saw beautiful sacrifice and love demonstrated. It seems to me that this is always the choice we face. Expressed the most simply, we can use our freedom to love or to hate. And our choices can greatly impact others.

In response to the death and destruction, we pray and mourn, and care for those that have lost their family and friends. In the funeral hymn of the Orthodox Church we sing “Memory Eternal” As James Ferrenberg explains, this is not just to remind us, but that Christ will remember those who have died. As they were being crucified together, the wise thief begged Christ to remember him when he came into his kingdom. Christ replied that he would be with him in Paradise. Memory Eternal!

An IBM developerWorks article discusses design and implementation considerations related to Progress Indicators. The article distinguishes between responsiveness and performance. Responsiveness is how quickly an app acknowledges and indicates acceptance of user input. Performance is how quickly it completes a task and displays the final results. A more responsive app contributes more to user satisfaction than quick performance by itself. A quick response can make the application feel faster, even if it takes longer on an overall task.

“Progress indication is needed because: (1) there are inevitable limitations in UI performance, that is, there are always cases where the user will have to wait for a final result, and (2) increased UI responsiveness, or improved communication with the user, can make the wait more acceptable to the user.”

I noticed the other day that the throbber makes Mozilla feel responsive. It activates immediately after clicking a link or entering a URL. The progress indicator in the status bar only seems to show up after a fairly lengthy period of time. For those that want to eliminate the throbber completely, this points out the need for better responsiveness in the rest of the UI.

The article is packed with practical and specific information. All designers and developers would do well to carefully consider the information in this article and how they could improve their application’s responsiveness.

Thanks Blake for responding to my earlier comments about Phoenix. It’s always nice to get the scoop direct from the developers. I’m delighted to hear that Phoenix will be for “normal users” and that you’ll be working on it for a 0.1 release soon. I’m looking forward to it.

Wayne Olson recently posted an article from The Onion Dome. If you’re Orthodox, this is fun.

Asa pleasantly surprised me by pointing out the following:

mpt omits something that has to be one of the most important usability flaws in IE, that the main browser scrollbar has a fat border to the right of it forcing the user to actually look where he puts his mouse pointer rather than just tossing it against the edge of the screen and knowing you’ve hit your target.

Since I rarely use Mozilla or IE maximized, I wouldn’t have noticed this. Mozilla happily eliminates the typical window border and takes advantage of Fitts’s Law. In brief testing, it seems almost every Windows application suffers from the border on the edge of the screen. Oddly, Lotus Notes was one of the few that also got this right. With the inconsistencies between Windows apps, I’m not surprised that mpt missed this one. I agree that it is a major flaw in IE.

<rant mode="pet peeve">Speaking of Fitts’s Law, it’d be nice if Back were returned to the image context menu of Mozilla. The context menu is by far the fastest way to go back and I’d say used far more than scrolling. This is especially annoying when you have images blocked or a large image with transparent edges that takes up most of the page.</rant>

Matthew Thomas is “In search of the perfectly designed browser” and gives a brief recounting of browser history up to now. After describing progress in browser UI over the years, Matthew responds to claims that he wants Mozilla to be just like Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE):

I’m not ashamed to say that Mozilla should look more like MSIE, because it would be pretty hard not to…. If Mozilla looked just like MSIE, however, it would be much less usable than it could be. For the record, here’s my rough list of the top ten usability problems in Internet Explorer.

Matthew then lists a number of places where Mozilla UI can and should be better than MSIE–places where MSIE has usability problems. In most of his examples, Mozilla already has better functionality than MSIE. It isn’t always usable, though. Let’s say you know Mozilla supports popup ad blocking. Many users won’t look for anything in advanced preferences and even fewer would think that this is script related and find the unrequested windows item. Don’t try searching for popup in the help. It won’t get you any closer.

Asa and Blake have gotten stuck on number 6 of his rough list: “It’s extremely difficult to uninstall. More strategy tax.” Certainly uninstall isn’t something you do while using an application, but it is definitely a part of a good product. (An uninstaller was a requirement for Windows product certification starting with Windows 95. This is yet another place that Microsoft exempts itself from following the rules they place on their competitors.) A product should demonstrate that the user is respected from start to finish. Although you hope that your product is never uninstalled, it is rude to try to make it difficult or impossible to remove. Microsoft wagers that most users of its products won’t get so annoyed that they’ll go elsewhere. Mozilla (and its derivatives) still needs to gain users. When Mozilla gets plug-in install right, then maybe it will be time to worry about uninstall.

As asked for in bug 72374, bookmarklets (javascript bookmarks) should have a different icon than normal bookmarks. I figured out a way to hack the userChrome.css to do just that. See my comments in the bug. This rocks!

Asa posted:

Bug reports are wanted. But only if the bug is specific to Phoenix. If it’s a core Mozilla bug that happens to affect Phoenix (like a layout or toolkit bug) then it probably belongs in the appropriate Mozilla component.

He also pointed to the Phoenix Project Page. The readme/FAQ seems to contradict Asa’s comments, so you might take everything with a grain of salt.

Asa announced that Phoenix nightly builds are available, so naturally I went and snagged one. Way back in May I had tested a build of Mozilla/Browser, the predecessor to Phoenix. Other than customizable toolbars and the ability to run it at the same time as Mozilla, I didn’t notice much progress. (Yes, I know the developers have had other things to do in the meantime.) The prefs dialog is much cleaner than in Mozilla; it doesn’t have the messy tree control and only has five panels. Menus are trimmed down and are virtually identical to the Mozilla/Browser build I looked at.

I’d hoped that Phoenix was going to be a browser that focused on users. Perhaps it will be. Based on the differences between it and the earlier Mozilla/Browser, I’m concerned that it’s going the wrong direction. The more usable separate address and navigation bars are joined again. Distinctive icons have been replaced with the round ones from the Orbit theme, which have fewer visual differences. Not only has the throbber been eliminated (not a bad idea by itself and you can add it back by customizing the toolbar), but all page loading progress indicators are gone. The search, history, and bookmarks sidebars are missing as well.

So that’s where it is now. Since nightly builds just started, I plan to wait and watch. (As I understand it, that’s about all we can do now… Last I heard the developers didn’t want feedback or patches, although there are a number of bugs for phoenix in bugzilla.) I’m looking forward to watching this develop. I’d love if some the improvements were applied to the mozilla trunk.