Wow, why would anyone care what their computer UI looks like? That’s like caring what your dishwasher looks like. I don’t think most people care and they shouldn’t. Notice I said “looks like,” not “acts like.”
I’ve gotten plenty of practice making Windows XP look as much like W2K as it can. The time spent turning off all that gaudy crap is worthwhile, because I get more pixels for what I care about: my content. But if there was no way to make all those execrable gumdrops go away… I’d stop seeing them in a day or two. There is no business case for impressively fancy UIs. This is why only monopolies and fools invest in them.
I haven’t read all the comments, but I want to give a big AMEN to the article in general and the 6th comment by Mike. It’s nice to finally find somebody else who doesn’t have their vision occluded by fanboyism.
Firefox has some nice features (well, it has extensions that have nice features. Firefox itself is relatively mundane), but what keeps me using IE is the terrible interface. It clashes so hard with the rest of Windows. If I wanted an interface like this I’d still be using Win95.
It’s not just clashing themes either, everything in Firefox’s UI under Windows feels off. The insertion beam in text fields is flaky. Textareas (like this one) barely work, selecting things at random as I scroll up and down. Form controls are also straight from 1995 (for the curious: form controls are not classic Windows controls. They are custom windowless controls [Windows devs know what that means] in order to save on resources. When it comes right down to it, Firefox’s controls just aren’t as good as IE’s.)
Firefox’s UI on Linux isn’t so bad. Firefox’s UI on Windows sucks.
Oh, and Erik Nilsson, you are a moron.
“why would anyone care what their computer UI looks like?”
Holy crap, because it’s the frakking USER INTERFACE?!? Just maybe? You know, the thing I have to look at all day at work?
“I’ve gotten plenty of practice making Windows XP look as much like W2K as it can.”
Still scared of change after 6 years? That’s sad.
“There is no business case for impressively fancy UIs.”
Tell that to Apple.
“This is why only monopolies and fools invest in them.”
Ew, I can’t imagine choosing to use IE over Firefox. Yeah, I use Windows XP. I can’t say that the native UI thing bothers me. I think it has to do with my use of GNU/Linux on every other computer I own, so I’m used to those interfaces, and my use of non-Microsoft software for pretty much every other program besides the browser as well. Firefox starts to fit in pretty well when you’re using free software for everything else on Windows, too: Pidgin for IM, X-Chat for IRC, OpenOffice for word processing, Azureus for torrents, Tor for anonymization, GIMP for photo editing, etc. Frankly, IE looks a lot more out of place to me than Firefox does just because of everything else I use, even under Windows XP.
firefox degrades the text you read, and the graphics you view, to make for faster viewing, its hard to read a regular text page. You shouldn’t have to degrade something to make it better. This speeds up your viewing, but it reduce’s the appearance of a normally neat viewable page…
When I first read your article I thought you were just another whiney mac user. Then I started using the safari 3 beta for windows. While the rendering is really fast and its a lot lighter than FF (though FF is still the best for web development), the mac widgets and totally different look and feel are very hard to get past. I had the same issue with using GAIM/pidgin in windows until gtk started using native windows widgets by default.
I think you are very much right. Until an application visually fits into a system we, the users, just don’t like it. Regardless of any technical merits it may have.
Also the best thing that ever happened to java ui is the jgoodies windows look and feel.
I had the same issue with using GAIM/pidgin in windows until gtk started using native windows widgets by default.
Actually, GTK+ version 2 doesn’t use native Windows widgets (which are implemented in modules user32.dll and comctl32.dll), as Bill King already mentioned. Instead, GTK+ has theme engine called ‘MS-Windows Engine’ (aka GTK-Wimp, stands for ‘Windows impersonator’). This theme engine uses Windows Visual Styles API (aka UxTheme API, implemented in module uxtheme.dll), if it is available (it is available in Windows XP and later operating systems), to paint GTK+ widgets. This allows GTK+ widgets to look like native Windows widgets.
I’m sure that what is needed here are simply more standards. If someone came up with a set of XML standards or whatnot which defined the themes of buttons, fonts, and other such things, it seems to me the problem would be solved. The window itself matches the theme of the desktop, so why can’t programs simply specify that they want to use the “standard desktop’s theme” and subject themself to that theme that the user chooses? Here I’m also hinting that I believe the silly button graphics and such should also be a theme that is changable, but that part of it is for the OS developers to allow (which is one reason why I like sticking to Linux). Back on topic though, if someone did come out with a standard, it’d help to make writing apps that looked and felt native to any desktop environment non-trivial. I don’t know if the solution is WXWidgets, that may help for now, but the long term solution seems to me to be one of untangling any platform-specific code from the buttons and such, and have a standard to allow all of the graphics to be determined by the DE, the way it should have been a long, long time ago in the first place. The programmers who’ve decided to make their own GUI instead of putting the API in place to allow the user to have the GUI they wanted to go along with their DE need a good chastizing.
When two applications with rough feature parity compete, the application with the native UI will win. Every time. If you truly want to win the hearts and minds of your users, you go to the metal and take full advantage of the native UI.
I’m not even sure the native application has to be at parity with a competitor to win. I think the lack of tabs in Safari is a big detriment.
I also agree with Jeff’s comments about the Java UI. UGGG-LYYYYYY. And SLOW. Never met a Java app I didn’t hate.estetik estetik estetik
i dont agree with you, i mean yes sometimes/mostly non-native UI sucks but sometimes its very cool, take a look for example at Microsoft Max (http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=156065, its dead now but you can find some photos of it on the web)
It seems really silly (and, yes, shallow) to pick a browser based on the aesthetics of the the buttons. The plugins available for Firefox make my browsing at least twice as productive as my IE browsing - it’s like the switch from dialup to cable.
We should strive for aesthetic excellence in what we build, but pick the applications we use for more than style.
Would you really hire Marilyn Monroe to be your executive assistant? (get the chuckling out the the way here)
Really?
I just did your mousewheel test and Firefox was durn speedy in scrolling to the top. I only have 18 tabs open - normally I have between 40 and 60 open, but I just cleared some tabs to Scrapbook.
I’m going to try one more crack at this web productivity addon thing. Some game changer addons I’m using include Scrapbook, SessionSaver, SearchKeys, DownloadThemAll, ButMeNot, and Colorzilla. The reason I call these out (I’m using a lot more addons) is that they illustrate the idea of using a browser in a fundamentally different way. These things go beyond improving loading time and reducing annoyances to changing the way I work. Scrapbook (set up with FolderShare) allows me to save any page and have it available offline on any of my computers while keeping the original URL and allowing me to make notes at any level. That’s a huge difference from a Favorites menu - I don’t even bother with Favorites anymore, it’s like talking about better cassette sorting methods when you’ve got an MP3 player.
And that’s just one extension out of a dozen that I use.
So I’m going to pick IE7 over that because it seems to “fits in” better with Vista? Crazy talk.
I’m sorry to say it Jeff but I don’t think you’re in good company, I think you’re in a tiny minority of people who actually care. Safari, like IE, is the most popular because it’s the default. Nothing more, nothing less.
I for one do not and will not lament some apps’ lack of “native” look in Vista, which to me often looks like a cheesy photoshop job, as if some geek got a little trigger-happy on the shadows and glows. And as for the “legacy” main menu, Internet Explorer isn’t a complicated enough program to need ribbon-esque functionality (as compared with MS Office, which is considerably more confusing even to many experienced users).
I’m on the fence when it comes to the web itself; that FF-Mac screenshot does look butt-ugly, and yet something bothers me about the Safari shot too. It just doesn’t look like Google. Those buttons are not Google’s style… they don’t seem to fit. I don’t know, maybe I’m just not used to seeing it like that, since it looks the same in both IE6 and Firefox (Windows).
It’s crazy that it’s been 9 years since you posted this. So long ago and yet still so far away from being the clear and understood best practice for designers and developers.
FYI, some mac users (cough, cough) preferred Firefox over Safari even back then, and now prefer Chrome over either, but still hate it when native widget has been messed with on a specific site, breaking the general look-and-feel from other sites. My biggest pet peeve is the scroll bar. Dude, I don’t care if your new corporate branding is all red and black, please don’t make my scrollbar black-on-red, it looks like sh*t and makes it harder to scroll your actual content.
Heads up, sir. Someone on SO with good intentions name-dropped you and this post on why they wanted to nest a button inside a link (to ensure a “native button” look for the link). Maybe this would be a good jumping off point for an article on semantic document/data layer versus presentation or the like. (Also, I was pretty pleased with my pop culture reference to the old Easy Spirit shoe jingle).
This is spam, but I originally misinterpreted as just a wall-of-garbage style spam, but then it occurred to me to try changing #1076; to д , and so forth, and run it through an xml entity decoder. Sure enough, the above decoded as:
я думаю в 2012 году сборная россии по футболу всех порвет россии
which Google Translate detected as Russian for:
I think in 2012 the Russian national football team of Russia will tear
So again, spam. But a nice geeky puzzle, too, with the result being “this is drivel spam, not abusive spam”
