More than 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 in a 24-hour period, setting a world record, and more than 28 million download have taken place since the browser was released June 17.
Today 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.
Firefox fans will be interested to know that version three of their favorite surfboard for the Web just went Beta yesterday. However, unless your inner geek can’t resist, you might want to hold of on downloading it for a bit. V3 lacks a number of important plug-ins, and it sometimes doesn’t render sites as it should (that’s why there’s a beta period, right?).
The word on the street is that Firefox 3 has solved most issues related to memory leaks and security - already very good - is new and improved.
Firefox is now used by roughly 20% of Internet users.
More from recent wanderings about the ‘Net:
Cheers!
If you’re a Web designer, 2007 is the year that Internet Explorer 6 became “the new Netscape 4″. Actually, no, things could never be that bad again, but when you’re designing Web sites using CSS and Web standards, IE6 is the one that now throws up the most humdingers.
A question I often hear from other designers is why, with IE7 and Firefox offering better support for Web standards, aren’t more people upgrading from IE6? (The latest browser statistics show IE6 use falling from about 42% to 36% during the past 8 months.)
The reason has to do with usability and cost-benefit analysis.
While most Web designers wouldn’t dream of using IE6 as their primary browser these days, especially with add-ons like the Web developer toolbar and Firebug available for Firefox, it works just fine for what most people want to do online. Checking email, reading up on sports scores and stock prices, buying shirts from LL Bean and using social network sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace all can be done just fine w/IE6. There’s no compelling reason to switch.
Kevin Hale of Particle Tree has written an interesting article on the subject.
The upshot for Web designers? Remember to focus on usability when working with Clients to design features for an interactive Web site. Think about how customers, employees and other groups will do on your site before investing a lot of development time in creating a cool Web site feature that won’t get used all that much.
And it looks like IE6 will be with us for some time to come.
Apple has launched Safari 3, the latest version of its Web browser. Probably the most interesting thing about it is that for the first time it is available for Windows.
In terms of Web design, one of the good things about this announcement is that Web designers will now - finally - be able to apply CSS to form elements like input and submit.
Downloading….
Fortified with wholesome nuggets of Web-ified information and 100% of the Recommended Daily Allowance of 10 essential Web Standards and Best Practices for Web Design in Maine.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Browsers category.
