Susan Kitchens, of Susan's 2020 Hindsight points to a great article by Carolyn Snyder called "Seven tricks that Web users don't know. After reading this article I'm reminded that most browser users aren't like us. They don't think about the tools the way we do. They don't think about the medium the way we do. They don't trim URLs :-)
As content creators and client developers, it's critical that we understand that they are different from us. In the open source world, we don't always have the resources to conduct solid usability studies and relying on bug reports and newsgroup postings (from people who are like us) for usability feedback will, in many cases, make the web page or the application less usable for most users.
I'm not knocking feedback from users like us. I've no doubt that the Mozilla layout engine's capabilities, stability, performance, and many other areas and features are much better because of the feedback from users savvy enough to participate in Bugzilla and the newsgroups or web forums. But I think it's that same participation that gave us features like Mozilla's entire "Privacy & Security" tree of preferences (heck, our entire Preferences window) and the six or so "Managers" available from the top level Tools menu. There's nothing inherently wrong with good privacy and security controls or UI for managing various bits of stored data or application policies but it's pretty clear to me that these hunks of Mozilla's interface are so esoteric as to be not only completely impenetrable to most users but in the way and very likely to lead to real confusion for many users.
Just read the article linked above and you'll hear of the blank stares of mystified users who can't figure out a second browser window. Imagine that poor fellow when he goes looking for the "turn on the pop-up blocker" preference in Mozilla's Preferences window, or when he accidentally clicks on the View -> Page Info menu item.
Now I don't believe that a browser should be completely stripped down to the most basic features of a scrollbar, an address field and a back button, and this is why I believe that Firefox has made such a positive impression; it's not stripped down in features. It blocks pop-ups just as well as it's older sibling, Mozilla, but Firefox presents this to the user in a way that doesn't blow her mind. Firefox gives the user tabbed browsing, but doesn't bury the best configuration deep in a preferences application.
Firefox takes Mozilla's powerful feature set and streamlines it so that more users can cope with it, while users like us will still have a powerful and extensible tool. Firefox's simplified UI should not be confused with a minimal feature set and Firefox's customizability and extensibility, through the use of extensions, certainly makes it the tool of choice for plenty of power users. But I believe it's the simplicity, not the extensibility, that will make Firefox a success because while thousands, or even tens, or hundreds of thousands of users like us may want to add features to Firefox through extensions, tens to hundreds of millions of users that will eventually adopt Firefox will find everything but the scrollbar, the address field and the back button to be in the way.
