Firefox 3 stutter-step
Monday, June 23rd, 2008Today turned out to be an interesting study in usability, the power of Habit, and backwards compatibility. A colleague - she’s an über-geek - casually asked if I was running Firefox 3, the latest (beta) version of the popular open source browser put out by the Mozilla Project and released into the wild last Tuesday. Nope, I said, but I can fix that soon enough (it sounded like something worth doing). I downloaded it.
Alas! My productivity took a detour.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to knock FF3, and it’s got lots of worthy improvements, especially in the area of security. It easily updated my bookmarks and reconfigured my plug-ins. New plug-ins were easier to install and pop ups were easier to deal with. But, as they say, it is the little things that count.
For me, that was things like the browser chrome. Whoever designed FF3 must have loved Netscape 6+ and Safari, because the chrome looks very similar to those browsers. Not a big deal, but it was a “little” detail. It took a split-second longer for me to find my bookmarks and links in the chrome (which were not _quite_ where they used to be), and all those microseconds added up to a usability issue. It reminded me of a basic tenet of usability - Don’t Make Me Think!.
In other words, the more a person has to think about how to complete a task, the less they are thinking about the task itself - and that makes it tough to concentrate. Apps that make you think will ultimately be less successful than those that don’t.
I could have lived w/that. But the clincher for me was the download error I got when I tried to install Firebug 1.1 (the version that is supposed to run on FF3). That did it - I need my Firebug! Back to Firefox 2 - at least for now.
Editor’s Note: Eureka! I found Firebug 1.2, which does in fact work on FF3. So… with that, I can bounce back up to version 3.
