Category: <span>Web</span>

Published July 19, 2012 by

Evil Brain Jono: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

I’m super-late to this but wanted to shoot the link out there since I’ve also written about this before. Over on evilbrainjono.net, acknowledgment that Firefox updates are driving users away from the browser.

In particular, I love this paragraph:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the fundamental disconnect between the developers and the users. I think it comes down to: Software developers have a perverse habit of thinking of updates/new releases as a good thing.”

[Edit] Jono also has a follow-up post with some juicy bits. My favorite:

“… Let me revise my statement: Rarely is a UI change such a big improvement that the efficiency gain from adopting it outweighs the efficiency loss from relearning. Designers tend to overestimate the benefit of a change and underestimate the importance of habituation. That’s what I was trying to say.

“Look down at your hands. Are you using a DVORAK keyboard? Why not? It’s theoretically more efficient, right?”

Development Open Source Web

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Published March 19, 2012 by

Still using Chrome over Firefox

Back in August, I switched to Chrome, when a Firefox update broke some of the extensions I was using. I was reluctant to switch at the time, but the breakage was annoying enough that I turned off Firefox (i.e. stopped launching it), and switched to Chrome for my personal browsing when on mine or my wife’s Mac at home, or when I need access to a personal bookmark while at work. (I keep IE’s bookmarks segmented to work-related links.)

The Firefox update glitches were most likely transient, and may have been peculiar to my installation, but even so I haven’t switched back…

The main reason: Startup performance.

I haven’t done any real measurements, so what I’m writing here is purely from the standpoint of my own personal perception but the feeling I get when launching Chrome is that it’s somewhat satisfyingly fast. The feeling I get when launching Firefox is that it’s slow to very slow to start.

While both browsers take longer to load the first time you start them after rebooting, and neither is enough faster than the other to win me over on that first-launch experience, Chrome feels significantly faster to launch the second time, while Firefox still feels like it’s pulling its feet out of the mud.

The fact of the matter may be that they’re equally fast to get me to the point where I can type onto the address bar. But feel is important too. The perception of good performance is a super-important part of the user experience.

What does this feel like if it’s a person, not a web browser?

Here’s a real-world example that everyone can identify with: If I say “Hello” to you, I expect that you’ll look at me pretty much right away, and then respond. If you look right away, and then take a second (one second) to say hi back, I probably won’t notice. But if you take that same one second to look at me in the first place, it doesn’t matter if you say hi right away or not – the feeling I get is that you’re either distracted, or you don’t care about our interaction.

In both cases, it takes roughly one second plus the time it takes to say the word hi, but the initial responsiveness makes a huge difference in how I feel about the interaction.

Development Web

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Published August 18, 2011 by

Hey, Firefox: Thanks for forcing me to switch to Chrome!

Well, thanks to the Firefox 6 update I was just asked (nagged) to install, none of my plug-ins work. So much for not breaking users.

At the same time, the Firefox team completely failed to give me any compelling reason to stick with Firefox 6 until plug-in developers get around to fixing their code to work with the new browser. The tagline for the release is, “a new look, super speed, even more awesomeness.” Pheh! Seriously?? “awesomeness”? Who are they trying to market to, skate-punks?

So – I made a decision, nearly immediately, to switch to Chrome, where all my plug-ins work, where I can roam my plug-ins and settings between installations, and where the browser is seemingly as fast as any other at the moment.

I might switch back someday, but getting burned like this leaves a super-bad taste in my mouth, especially since I came of age in the software industry working for Dave Winer. At UserLand, Rule 1 was “No breakage”. Sadly, “no breakage” seems to be a lost religion these days. But at least some users will have this reaction whenever something that used to work, stops after an “upgrade”. It’s as if I took my car in to get a tune-up, and now my aftermarket in-dash GPS doesn’t work anymore.

It’s not rocket-science, guys. The software industry, especially the Web, needs to understand that users justifiably and rightly expect things that work right now to keep on working. And if you must break your users, you’d better give them a good damn reason.

Mozilla could easily have fixed this. They just did their 5.0 release, so it’s not as if users are chomping at the bit for the next big release. If they’d taken some time to do some testing on the most popular plug-ins, and then work with plug-in developers to fix breakage and get compatible before releasing 6.0, I would likely still be a Firefox user. It’s probably even the case that most plug-ins which are “incompatible” are just not verified to work on the latest version, so it’s probably not even a code issue for most developers.

But since they didn’t do this work ahead of time, the work that they did, and whatever value it added to the product is now lost on me, and likely many others. This is not the way to keep, much less gain market-share. This is the way to cede a market to a cadre of powerful competitors by being shortsighted and careless — even perhaps reckless.

Web

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