Scott's posted a post-slashdotting update over at his blog. More good stuff. I have to excerpt part of it here but you should definitely head over there and read the rest of whta he's got to say, as well as the comments there.
On ui design. The mistake we’re all making, myself included, is focusing on designing for ourselves. Designing for ourselves isn’t a sin, but if the game you want to win is market share, you have to work very hard to make sure your needs and wants jive with people who’s needs are less sophisticated than ours (Which is most of the planet’s web browsing poulation). Lots of folks said “my mom can do X” or “my friends can do Y” as justifications of how their experience matches everyone elses, but I think we’d all agree how fragile and anecdotal those claims are. Your mom might be a rocket scientist, and your friend might have watched you do whatever it is before they tried to do it themselves. I’m not saying I’m right, you’re wrong, or that your pants are on fire. Instead I’m saying that design arguments, ui design arguments in particular, can and should stand on firmer ground. There should be an essay somewhere called “how to have a meaningful UI design argument” (finger on nose).I couldn't agree more.
One of the biggest challenges we've faced over the last few years in designing and building Firefox was to make a browser, not that we as developers would personally love to use, but that "regular people" would love to use. In the very early days, that decision seemed to mean that we'd sacrifice a lot of the power and heavy user audience who would cringe (and more) every time we trimmed or removed a feature or a preference.
Our big compromise, and one that's not only helped us hold on to our power users but grow that audience, was the extension model. It has allowed us to design and build a browser that meets the needs of the largest possible audience and still satisfy our more advanced audiences.
A wonderful side-effect of this is that we now have the largest and most innovating feature development and testing community in the world. The extension architecture first enabled the community to restore old Mozilla features and preferences, but I think more importantly, this Firefox platform provides the community with the opportunity to react very quickly to a changing web and to design powerful and innovative new features that couldn't have been imagined when Firefox was being initially designed -- we see this with extensions that help users deal with new kinds of content (think of adblock and greasemonkey,) and hook up to new and exciting web services (think about all the del.icio.us extensions, Gmail addons, and scores of other website integration extensions,) and much more.
Posted by: Kroc Camen | September 17, 2005 3:24 PM
Extensions are great, but I have one problem with one of them. miniT(drag+indicator)has been discontinued as its functionality is fully available on Firefox 1.5, according to its author. But in Firefox Beta 1 I can't drag and drop not active tabs. Can someone recommend replacement? Although it can be fun finding which tab was active before I decided to arrange them.
Posted by: Iva | September 17, 2005 4:30 PM
@Iva
i can drag'n'drop all tabs, active and inactive ones...
Posted by: Sebastian | September 17, 2005 4:57 PM
Exactly... all I can say is nail - head - whack!@#!
Posted by: Robert Strong | September 17, 2005 5:02 PM
We shouldn't be dumbing down everything in the world, we should be smartening up the people. Then again, I'm the kind of person that would force an IQ test on everyone 18 and older, and if they failed they'd be shot. Stupid people don't deserve to live and breed. If the whole world was rid of dumb people phishing wouldn't be an issue, spam would disappear almost completely, nursing homes would dissappear (all people that can't take care of themselves will also be shot), and we (the USA) would need a new president, among many other things. I personally see nothing wrong with making sacrifices to better the human race as a whole.
Posted by: Smith will suffice | September 17, 2005 6:59 PM
"We shouldn't be dumbing down everything in the world"
You entirely missed the point.
Posted by: Ben Basson | September 17, 2005 7:24 PM
Too bad that extensions cannot stay up-to-date with core browser upgrades very well ... sorry Nightly Tester Tools extension doesn't help much here.
Additionally, I'd like to know the security implications of reliance on 3rd party extensions --- shouldn't there be some sort of way ensuring security when downloading these 3rd party extensions since Mozilla's plan forces many users to download 3rd party extensions?
That said, Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 looks pretty good. I'm impressed. Still doesn't pry me away from Opera, but it's getting better in terms of sheer speed.
Posted by: TreeGo | September 17, 2005 9:20 PM
@TreeGo
I gave up 1 out of 26 extensions when the branch split so the extensions stayed "up-to-date with core browser upgrade" much better than I expected. I had to modify the targetApplication maxVersion since this feature of the nightly tester tools wasn't available yet.
The security model for extensions seems to me to be similar in many ways to the general open source model and with the couple of incidents over the last year appears to be satisfactory though it can be improved. Also, native wrappers are now on by default which provides another layer of protection. Cenralized extension blacklisting is in the plan for the next release.
Posted by: Robert Strong | September 17, 2005 10:45 PM
You're 100% right, Asa. Like a lot of the long-time community people, I bitched and moaned about FF when it started, and continued to do so right up to FF 1.0. Then I decided to try it, now that at least the vision for 1.0 had been reached. At no time could the excuse "it's still beta" be used. After an amazingly short adjustment process, I saw that I was totally wrong. Firefox is an excellent tool. And with just a few extensions I found it more porweful than what I had been doing with the Suite.
The compromise was the best choice possible. I guess it wasn't really a compromise at all, in that case. :)
Posted by: Grey Hodge | September 17, 2005 11:46 PM
Yesterday I finally was able to move my grandparents off of Netscape 7.1 and onto Firefox 1.0.6 and Thunderbird. My grandparents got a new desktop computer and the first thing I did was put Firefox and Thunderbird on there.
To prepare Firefox for their use, I did the following:
1. I changed the name of the desktop shortcuts to say "Internet" and "E-Mail".
2. I put a print button and bookmarks button on the toolbar.
3. Import old bookmarks
To prepare Thunderbird for their use, I did the following:
1. Nothing outside of the normal e-mail setup, copying the old e-mails from the old computer, and importing their address book.
I was actually kinda scared at what they were going to say if they noticed the toolbar icons looked different then Netscape (which they used since the 3.x days). They don't take change too easily.
I pointed out the two icons on the desktop ("Internet" and "E-Mail") and they said "Wow, that is easy...different but I like it."
Within no time, they were surfing around the web and checking their e-mail. I did no training on using Firefox or Thunderbird. Everything seemed very logical to them.
If I can switch them to Firefox and Thunderbird, anyone can be switched. That is why Firefox and Thunderbird seriously rock.
Posted by: Chris G. | September 18, 2005 6:02 AM
Take a look at this
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=322418
and this
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=315698&postdays=0&postorder=asc&postsperpage=15&start=0
if you want to get an idea of what is going on. Pay particular attention to the miscellaneous problems and the advice given. I think I know what's wrong in most of those cases, but I don't offer support any more.
Posted by: AnotherGuest. | September 26, 2005 12:10 PM
I hope that this trend of putting Real People continues, and that Firefox is not bent by the tech-orientated crowd who voice the loudest hear at this blog and other mozilla staff hang outs. Firefox still has a long way to go in removing pointless complications in browsers today.