destraynor

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...

• OMG WTF? Dis got dugg? Bullshit! This is just Apple FanBoy BS
• You can’t just say “noticeably faster”!!!
• Use Opera
• Good post/Thanks for writing/ Please write one for what X should steal from Y
• Firefox is already good enough, these are only minor improvements, You can do all of this with Firefox extensions

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 …

“I can't find a worthwhile retort or counter argument. Unfortunately I don't have the grace to concede the point to you, so instead I will imply your opinion is insignificant because it is biased.

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…
You do not want to be on the digg.com frontpage.
You might think it will raise your profile in the blogosphere. It won't. You might think it will improve the reputation of your company. It won't. You might think that the people arriving from digg will do something other than nitpick, piss, or moan. 99% of them won't. In fact, even if you're just looking for people to click your adverts, digg.com users aren't the droids you’re looking for.

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…

“You don’t have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else’s thoughts. That’s not freedom of expression, that’s an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they’ll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you’ll move up in PageRank, and you’ll have influence and your ideas will have power.”

(Joel Spolsky, "Learn from Dave Winer")

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 If you know someone who is a good fit, please let them know about the opening. I'd really appreciate it if you'd mention this on your blog too.

Instant Alpha is one of many fantastic features in iWork 08. It automatically removes the background from pictures that you want to drop into your presentation. View a Demo of Instant Alpha here. Of course computer scientists will be quick to point out that there is nothing technically impressive about this, separation of background and foreground isn't a particularly tricky imaging problem. I fully expect the gentlemen at digg to tell me that this can already be done using the Lasso tool in Gimp, or how you can install a GTK plugin to do it, or maybe how you can write your own Python based plugin that solves this problem. Yeah! Take that iWork, you can't write custom python plugins for that!

Lets not fuck around here. There is nothing impressive about Instant Alpha except for the little fact that I can now grab an image from the web and remove it's background without even thinking, let alone touching a graphics program. The tiny effect of this "un-impressive" feature is that people using Keynote will now find it much easier to create presentations that look really professional. Meanwhile the rest of us are still dicking around with a lasso trying to separate the background from the foreground so that our Excel generated barchart doesn't look so ugly. Who the hell decided purple was a good colour anyways?

Yeah, I realise that you can make nice Excel charts using Office 2k7, but it takes a little bit of work. Just like you can make really ugly presentations in Keynote, but it takes a little bit of work

No one really gives a shit what the algorithm is doing "under the hood". No one cares how many lines of code it took, or how many variables it's processing. Unfortunately many programmers don't get that, and have tendency to expose the inner workings of the code to the user, via the interface. It's like using the interface, rather than comments, to show what your code is doing. You might impress the other programmers out there, but they're a very small minority, and they don't use presentation software all that often.