Steven: Don’t forget MS Office. I think the last time the Office UI actually looked like native widgets upon release was Office 95.
To all those who don’t get the idea of why Native UI is good… I feel sorry for you. The point of a consistent presentation is so that familiarity is easier to come by. Yes, the single buttons and drop-downs are small examples, and do not affect usability. But, the point is that when it is done right, no one notices. Period. You don’t have to learn each application; they are all the same and have the same behaviours.
And most people, myself included, don’t want to go through a configuration workout to make it seem almost right. I have better things to do that try and make firefox look like Safari. Besides, there is a better alternative for OS X in the form of Shiira. Check it out.
Axel: If you click some obscure checkbox in the settings, Media Monkey can actually use native Windows UI. That’s how I run it and it works a lot better with UltraMon and, I think, looks a lot better than the default skin.
No one has mentioned Lotus Notes, so I will. Talk about a non-native UI…
I am a Mac user who prefers Firefox. Safari is nice but it doesnt support keyword searches, so that is a showstopper for me.
This is one of the reasons I refuse to use Quicktime on Windows. The brushed metal and odd widgets bug me. That, and the fact the the player would always force itself into the tray on startup, even when I deleted the registry key, made me hate the Windows developers at Apple. I’ll use Quicktime Alternative to view .MOV under Media Player.
Don’t get me started on iTunes.
Now, why is it that Coders will crow that Most Coders have no business writing UIs because they’re incompetent at it. Yet Coders will, themselves, go off and specify RDBMS that look just like VSAM flat files from the 1970s; processible silo-like only by their code?
Data design is at least as impactful (neat word, huh?) as UI in the large, yet Most Coders are content to wallow in the Olde Times. They have not a clue. I just chuckle. Folks worry so much about the Lipstick, but let the Pig rot.
IE7 renders animated GIFs so slowly that a pageful of them grinds it to a halt, whereas any other browser seems to cope just fine (including IE6).
My main issue with Firefox is the incredible amounts of CPU and RAM usage. Such a huge resource hog. I have tried everything to speed it up, from FlashBlock to FireTune, but it just sits there in the background making everything else sluggish. Every 2-3 seconds, its CPU usage spikes to around 100% which causes anything you’re doing to stop dead for half a second. Totally unacceptible.
I only use FF on the Mac when Safari (first choice) and Camino (second choice) occasionally fail to read a page (it’s happened to me twice in recent memory). And the only reason I don’t use FireFox is because of the non-native widgets. Yes, iTunes, Mai.app, Finder UI’s are not consistant, and I deplore that, but at least, they look reasonably good and “modern”. FF widgets seem to be there only as a nostalgic reminder of the old Netscape 1.0 days or something ;).
But I’ll take it a step further: I prefer Safari over Camino because Safari renders native widgets better than Camino does ! Ex: WordPress QuickTag buttons. Camino renders them with a serif font instead of the system font, and the button labels are off-center. Yuck !
You should define “native” a little more…
Jeff,
I’m surprised you would prefer IE7 to FF. Like Jon, I find FF (with extensions) to be WAY more powerful and productive than IE7. Given how much time I spend on the web, that hugely improves my overall productivity.
IE7’s favorites isn’t a menu, so it doesn’t suffer from the same
problems as a fidgety, full-screen drop-down favorites menu with (n)
cascading levels.
I’m confused - as far as I can tell, FF and IE7 have almost identical functionality here. Both have favorites/bookmarks available as a menu and as a sidebar. The history info is also available in a side bar in FF (not a tab on the favorites bar, but one hotkey away). And the favorites sidebar in FF has a search feature, which is very useful (or would be if I still used local bookmarks). Am I missing something?
More generally, main menus and toolbars are obsolete
But they are still used by IE7. The only difference is that the main menu is hidden by default in IE7 (something easily accomplished in FF by the way). I’m with you on the ribbon though.
“you’ll probably find the deciding factor was that Safari feels like a native Mac app.”
Well, that’s because it is.
I think the “feels like a native Mac app” statement is a red herring. The real reason people prefer it over any other browser ,including Omniweb, is because it’s the default. Why fix what ain’t broken? If they don’t know how to set their default browser (in the Safari preferences you can set your system default web browser and the system actually respects your choice unlike Windows XP) then they will stick with the default.
The irony is that IE7 and Office 2007 no-longer feel like native Windows apps. Which is a good thing, but confusing.
OK, IE7 feels like a native Windows app when it chokes on pages with complex javascript and lots of images then crashes and burns. But other than that…
I’m going to have to go ahead and call you on this one, Jeff. I have sitting to my immediate right an iMac computer that runs Tiger. I have Safari on the computer, but my dock has only FireFox. I don’t notice the differences at all and, in fact, because it DOES look like a Windows computer, I’m more content to use it because I visually process the data it presents me faster since I work with a Windows GUI all day anyway.
The native GUI doesn’t always win out in browsing, but in every other application it sure does. I’ll stick with FireFox on my Mac, thanks.
Then what happens when WPF comes along and gets rid of the notion of a “native UI”? Will this send us backward dozens of years when it comes to application consistency? I think that WPF is really cool but this one aspect really bothers me. Heck, the default text box isn’t even usable out of the box. You have to resize it so that it doesn’t have 10 pixel borders all the way around the text.
Thoughts?
I used the first UIs on the Star many years ago. I’ve used lots more since. IMHO, the AMiga’s still stands out above most others. Along with the later OS/2 PMs.
The new Mac interface is an annoying candy triviality that breaks almost every “guideline” Apple used to preach. I value FF for its standardisation across platforms.
“Recently I noticed Firefox has been using too much memory CPU time so I gave Camino another try and I’m now using it instead. I still miss a lot of firefox extensions, though.”
You might find that some of the extensions themselves are at fault, not the browser per-se. Extensions with major memory leaks, stability problems, and excessive cpu usage have become a big issue in the firefox community, and FF3 is supposed to clamp down on them a lot more, and incorporate stricter memory management. (FF devs will routinely tell people to remove all extensions before reporting/asking for help, because that magically clears up so many problems.)
Of course, Camino looks nicer than FF on Mac anyway.
The bizarre part is that FF has had Aqua themes as long as it’s had themes, that can even effect buttons and textfields, yet no one wants to break the “purity” of the app or something and bundle them on the OSX install.
if ui look and feel is so important, why is myspace so popular?
i love cool looking ui’s, but im not convinced that having all my buttons look like gumdrops is what makes it ‘correct’. i think it has more to do with what the app is trying to do, and if things are in the right place when youre working fast.
i dont think uniformity is as important as everyone claims. we all know what a button is.
The one thing that i feel people are forgetting is that most of the actual users of browsers are not developers or even power software users. Someone like my younger sister would absolutely make a decision about what software she is going to use based on whether or not it looks and feels familiar to her.
if ui look and feel is so important, why is myspace so popular?
UI look and feel is always important, unless it isn’t. 
Consistency within a single app is critical. Whether consistency across apps is important depends on the application.
Every game has as unique an interface as the developers can afford. In the world of games novelty is critical.
People make myspaces pages to show creativity and uniqueness. They are not trying to show competence as ui designers. MySpace is popular because people don’t have a ui consistency requirement on friendship. People will put up with a lot to have and keep friends.
That said Jeff is 100% right, when he beats the drum for consistent competent ui. Most applications are rarely used. The user gains nothing but confusion from a novel ui.
In the examples of games and Myspace, a bit of cognitive dissonance is a benefit. Novelty and surprise is the whole point. In the realm of most applications cognitive dissonance is not a benefit. The next web shopping cart, or spreadsheet implementation is not so inherently cool that people will put up with the UI being visual distinct without a very good reason.
Indeed. That’s what I am doing. That’s what the Gimp/Gaim/Firefox retards should be doing as well.
- Qt4 is extremely recent, and is the first Qt with a GPL version for Windows, all of these projects predate Qt4 by many years.
- Qt4/GPL requires the code linked to it to be GPL’d, not all of them are GPL’d, and some are multi-licensed (Firefox is tri-licensed I think).
- I’ve heard pretty mixed reports from wxWidgets, had no problem with it myself but other people really seem to hate it.
Are the Web 2 applications you use every day (like Google Docs Spreadsheets or some other AJAX app) supported in Safari - NO.
Is your on-line bank supporting Safari - NO.
Is Safari in your language - NO.
Mac is something like 10 years behind Microsoft, Java and open source project like Firefox.
- Safari, even Safari 2, has one of the best CSS supports out there.
- Try Webkit/Safari 3 next time you have access to a mac, it’s a very impressive upgrade over Safari 2, while Safari 2 ranks second-to-last overall due to its awful JS support (1 is Firefox and 4 is MSIE, 2 is opera) Webkit currently stands at the second place, and pretty much only because Firefox as much better tools (Firebug…)
And of course Webkit’s CSS support blows everything out of the water…
Eclipse […] look and feel right…
Surely you’re joking right?
This is one of the reasons I refuse to use Quicktime on Windows.
Is the main reason the fact that Quicktime is a complete and utter piece of shit? Cause that sure is the reason why I refuse to use Quicktime on OSX.
I’m a new Mac convert and I won’t even consider using Safari until it has a Google toolbar.
Why do you need a google toolbar exactly?
Safari and OmniWeb’s text fields all pick up these features.
Camino does, too
Which is far and away the #1 productivity booster for Firefox web browsing.
Strong disagreement here, Firebug, Flashblock and NoScript are far beyond Adblock in productivity boosting, Adblock is merely an annoyance killer.
There are dozens of extensions I’d put before Adblock as far as productivity is concerned, seriously, including Firesomething.
The favorites button is the thing I use the most
The favorites button? As in “add as favorite” or as “I want to see a website that’s inside my favorites”?