Sunday, August 26. 2007You can't stop at Good Enough
When I posted recently my 9 suggested improvements for Mozilla Firefox, I made the silly mistake of posting it to digg before I went to bed. I woke to 90 comments, a dead site, and 200+ comments on digg.com about 99% of which can fall into the following categories...
As a quick reply I’ll quickly say that I am a full time user of Mozilla Firefox, on Windows XP or Ubuntu. Calling me an Apple Fanboy is incorrect, and for future reference if someone makes a point you usually reply with a rebuttal supporting your argument. The very second you hear “Fanboy” during a technical debate, you should realise that what's really being is said is the following …
On the issue of “noticeably faster”, this one annoys the hell out of me. I could have said “It renders the average HTML component 27.32% faster than Mozilla Firefox”, but who the fuck cares? Users only care about improvements if they notice them. That’s why I said “noticeably faster”. Just like users only care about new features, if they notice them. So to the 200+ odd dickheads on digg who want benchmark performance details, and to Steve who emailed me saying... “Before saying one product is faster than another you must provide the details of your scientific experiment which I PRESUME you have conducted”, here are the details of my experiment… I installed Safari for Windows on 2 computers, and noticed it rendering HTML faster than Firefox. As a side note, it's worth pointing out that the most requested in Office 2007, were already available in previous versions of Office (some of them going back to 2000), but the users simply didn’t notice them. It's not about what’s in the source code, or what a plug in can do, it’s about what the user notices. You can’t use something if you don’t know it exists. To the use Opera crowd, fair enough, maybe I should use Opera. I have no argument against Opera, having never used it. That doesn’t disqualify my opinions about Firefox and Safari though. I should also thank these Opera guys for writing informative comments too.
To anyone who offered constructive criticism, or wrote nice things, Thank You. It reminds me why I leave comments on, at a time when all my favourite blogs are explaining whey they’re more trouble than their worth. To anyone who runs a blog and isn't looking to earn money off it, believe me when I say this… Aiming for the top spot on digg is the blogging equivalent of a girl trying to sleep with the college quarterback. It's not an exclusive club, anyone with half a brain can achieve it. When it's all done and dusted 10 minutes later you'll wish it had never happened. Jason Kottke was spot on When you write a blog post, you like the idea that you can head to bed and not wake up with a blog post covered in childish insults. I’d love to say I don’t really care what people write here on my site, but I do, and I hate that fact that my last post looks like 70 people took an intellectual dump on it. Joel certainly wasn’t talking about me when he wrote the following but I agree with the sentiment…
This last group of people, the "these are only minor improvements, already available through plug-ins" group are the ones that just don't understand that usability is a game of inches. I'll start a war by saying this, but these people are the reason why an awful lot of open source software is shit. They create a tolerance of things that are "good enough". The iPod Mini was good enough in August 2005. In fact it was the fastest selling music player that year, and probably would have remained in that position for another year. What did Apple do with it? They retired it and released something that was far better. If you stop at "Good enough", you're leaving a big fat "insert better product here" sign above your head. Someday that product will come along and you'll be wondering where it all went wrong. Every tiny improvement that you don't make forms a checklist for your competitors. Once that checklist is long enough, you better believe that your days are numbered. You will lose your market share, one user at a time. Every day I see little things in Safari that could and should be copied. In Safari if I type destraynor.cmo into my url bar, it realises that there is no .cmo, and looks at previous sites I've visited, and sends me to destraynor.com. Firefox doesn't do that. Not without installing extensions. The majority of internet users do not feel the need to install custom browser components surprisingly. When they see Safari do something clever like this they don't think "Hey, that's cool, I better check mozilla.org to see if anyone has written an extension to spell check urls", they just think "Hey that's cool", or maybe "Hey that's cool, I wish firefox could do that." That’s why you have to fight for every inch. If you can't take my advice, at least listen to Al Pacino Unrelated
iQ Content are looking for a Project Manager. If you can manager teams to make sure they deliver high quality software/websites on time, on budget, and on a regular basis, why not apply. It's an excellent place to work. And you get to tell me what to do Trackbacks
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Des, I wish I offered some support back when it mattered. For what it's worth now, I completely agree with you. Victory in any heavily-contested race (such as the ongoing race to be the best browser) can only be achieved by those willing to pull out all the stops, to not pat themselves on the back, to not rest on their laurels (and other cheesy phrases). First place is for the perfectionist, the passionate hero that stays up late to write blog posts about their favourite web browser. Take the venom you received as vindication; you hit a nerve and you were dead right! I'd love me some of those hateful comments.
So much agreement on this one. I personally love the way plugins can enhance Firefox, but I agree wholeheartedly that usability is a war of inches.
Kind of funny, my last two posts were very beginner how-tos on installing extensions and user scripts in Firefox because I've been writing more and more of them and I know that it's such a limited marketshare who will install them. http://internetducttape.com/2007/08/24/howto-use-firefox-greasemonkey-userscripts-screenshots/ http://internetducttape.com/2007/08/23/howto-install-firefox-extensions-screenshots/
Nicely written and spot-on. I think perhaps it's a sign programming and tech communities have gotten self-absorbed and inbred. Shouldn't we be working on apps and businesses and improving things rather than strange, psychotic debates about methodologies, languages, and minutia? What is it about the tech-obsessed person that causes such closed and narrow mindedness in the name of being supposedly superior?
Spot on! But I think the main issue here is the tension between itch-scratching programmers and simple usability. Not only do you need someone at the top dictating a strong vision, but the contributors have to be willing to follow along.
The iPod only meets the needs of 90% of potential buyers, but it does so elegantly enough that it dominates in market share. Firefox could never get away with sacrificing 10% of needs in the name of usability. Mainly because the contributors form a disproportionate amount of the people who use that last 10%. Now with the plugin mechanism and some really good leadership it's possible to balance those needs, but in practice I think it would piss too many people off. Even if Firefox does make big improvements to ease the life of the common user, it's questionable whether that would be enough to win market share. I'd say there's a sizable majority of users whose pain threshold for installing software is so high that usability differences in web browsers are negligible. Not to mention the people who don't identify the browser as an application at all.
"The very second you hear “Fanboy” during a technical debate, you should realise that what's really being is said is the following …"
I wanted to read your post. I give people a fair chance. But what you wrote afterwards, this GENERALIZATION YOU DO, is called trolling. Sorry, I could not continue. PS: There is LOTS of room to improve Firefox. I myself have a lot of gripes and I hope the firefox team starts to address not only "average joe" user complaining (which they do) but also power users (which they do but to a lesser extent. I know because I have follow the forum for a long time, and didnt notice many of these changes which "more tech savvy" user complained about...)
Sorry She!
Maybe you like using the word fanboy in technical arguments, I don't. This is my site, and I'm allowed state that here. Incidentally, I like how you admit that you didn't continue reading the article, but still felt qualified to comment on the article anyways. Did you come here via Digg by any chance?
It's funny how relelevant your post is, and the biggest example of your theory, Internet Explorer, is not mentionned, though it's not an argument only on one side. Microsoft left Internet Explorer stop at "good enough" for long. There was no urgent need to go farther, because they had nearly all the Windows web browser market. And that's where Firefox got its chance in the first place. Now IE is back to life, somehow, but it's pretty late now for it to compete with the much better browers that Firefox, Safari and Opera are. Perhaps in the future.
However, the grip that microsoft has on a large part of the market is also a proof that "good enough" (IE 6 is still widely used) is indeed "good enough" for many end users. Yes, they'd probably prefer a better browser, if you asked them, but I feel most of them are not ready to make a complete switch. They got their ease with IE, and switching can come at a big cost for the non-tech-savvy - switch bookmarks, saved passwords information, no common cookies, different keyboard shortcuts... The native browser will probably always have an unfair advantage over the others, IE on Windows, Safari on OSX. Konqueror is probably an exception, but I suppose it's got more to do with the level of computer knowledge that linux users have compared to users of the other two. I agree with your point on extensions/plug-ins vs built-in features. I'm a programmer, and I don't fear installing plug-ins, or tweaking things. But I don't WANT to do it. I want vanilla Firefox to come with everything I want, and I don't need much. It's not an argument against user-made plug-ins, but an argument for a stronger core. The same problem of customability happened to me with other software with great customizability/added content, games like Oblivion. You can add some great extensions, but this adds to the total time cost of managing the software, and time period that should be close to zero! Linux is just alike, you get thousands of flavours, but in the end, nobody really uses the same thing. In the end, plug-in customizability is NOT a "sale" argument for the common folks. It is for the specialists, but for a product as common as a web browser, instant (effortless) gratification should be the biggest weapon. That's why I love Opera (which I use at home. I use Firefox at work). It has mostly all of the important web features built into the core browser, of which there's only one (current) version. I could part with many of its built-in features (RSS reader, mail engine, bittorrent client), all of which I use different software to run. But I'm glad they're there, not for me, but for others. It's funny how ad-blocking was first developped as a firefox plug-in, and now such a feature is built-in in Opera, but still just an addition in Firefox.
Marc-O
Thanks for your comment, it was both insightful and well thought out. I believe that Internet Explorer did rest on its laurels for the best part of 5 years and MS only realised that late in the game. There are 2 reasons why Explorer still enjoys an 80-90% market share. 1. People don't know about it yet. 2. It's the default browser on new computers. Whilst Firefox + Opera have significantly raised bar on what it means to be a good browser, Microsoft is still painfully aware that whenever they decide to, they can reclaim a significant chunk of their share back just by improving their own product significantly. They don't have to worry about other issues such as "getting their name out there", "becoming the default browser", or marketing. Anyways, thanks for dropping by. Des
Can't agree more with you about (most of) the digg crowd. About a year or so I wrote a post about some of the worst things in Ubuntu, stating clearly that I am an Ubuntu user and that I really enjoyed using it. Man, what a mistake to submit it to Digg. Never doing that again. I would rather have one comment from someone who knows what he is talking about than a 100 from the Digg crowd.
The Digg crowd have proved themselves over and over again to be totally subjective and biased in their arguments. They also are defensive about,and insecure in their knowledge. This renders them unable to take anothers point of view and simply agree, disagree or look into it further. Des, The snide and neg comments here about your opinions say more about the people who write them than what you have written. there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with your opinion, but personalising it with words like 'fanboy' show a lack of intellect and a weak argument to follow. To generalise a bit...these kind of people will never learn anything as they are too busy proving themselves right to learn anything new. The best learning comes from mistakes.
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This website is the online diary of me, Des Traynor, a User Experience Researcher in Dublin, Ireland. I work with Contrast. I usually write on 5 topics: I update about 3-4 times per month. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss this good stuff. If this is your first time here, check out the archives.My official homepage provides more information about who I am, and what I research. You can contact me at destraynor [at] gmail [dot] com Quicksearch |
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