djst's nest

Ben talks about Firefox' geek factor

In the Inside Firefox weblog, Ben talks about some people perceiving Firefox as a browser for geeks. My personal opinion is that Firefox is not geeky at all. However, it has some features that can be hard for new users to understand.

The first thing that comes to mind is the new RSS icon in the status bar. I consider myself as a geek, but I don't even know what RSS stands for. (Yeah, a quick Google search will give me the answer, but you get my point.) I can assure you that my mother would never click on a button that says RSS, which makes me wonder who we are targetting with that feature (hardly the general user) and why it isn't an extension? Hovering the button gives you this description: "Add Live Bookmark for this page's feed". "What feed?", I can hear my mom wondering. :)

As for the main menu, there is one potentially confusing item there too, but it's less important than the RSS icon since a menu item is never in your face. I'm talking about the Web Search item in the Tools menu. Try hiding the search bar and see what the menu item does: Nothing. Of course, the search bar is visible by default so it's not an issue for newbies anyway, but still.

Other than those two minor issues, I'd say Firefox is as geeky as Internet Explorer, only a couple of hundred times better. If you want to see real geek-browsers in action, try Mozilla 1.7.2 or Opera. ;)