I don’t really know if Opera has native UI or not when using the “native” skin (though I’m sure there’s a skin for any OS anyways), I do know that it is the best browser in existance. After FF2 came out, I used it for a while, but quickly grew tired of both FF and IE. Opera is faster and has more features than both of them. Since then, I’ve never even looked back.
AdBlock Plus is not a productivity addin
Pages load faster. Your eye isn’t distracted when the text you’re reading is no longer surrounded by five animated flash advertisements, so you can read faster, too.
If that isn’t productivity booster, I don’t know what is.
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?
You’re falling into the myth of infinite configurability (also applies to your “you can hide the main menu” comment). IE7’s favorites is not a sidebar. The behavior is not the same. What is a single click in IE7 becomes a menu traversal, plus a click on a close button when I’m done in Firefox. Try it yourself and see. You shouldn’t have to touch the drop-down menus to perform a common task in a browser.
Also, the slow wheel scrolling in Firefox is extremely painful. IE7 starts up faster, and I’d swear it loads pages faster, too.
I do use Firefox when coding web pages. I just don’t use it for day-to-day browsing.
For the Tk bashers there, Tk looks like Motif mostly (in older Versions). But if you don’t use a Tk binding that sucks, you can arrive in the present time and use theming, looks nice on OS X, Windows with Theming, Unix with Qt Themes, or build your own look and feel.
Look at the screenshots at:
http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/screenshots/macosx.html
Or for some more apps using Tile (which will be part of the upcoming Tcl/Tk 8.5):
http://wiki.tcl.tk/13636
So if your apps look like crap when using Tk, you just don’t invest the time to polish the UI a bit, like you are forced to with some other toolkits to even get it working ok.
Just gotta say that I run XP with the Windows classic theme, so the app’s look really has no bearing on whether I use it or not. I’m all for Firefox and some of the user made themes do pretty accurately recreate the native XP/OSX themes.
After spending years with Windows, and using Firefox as my default browser, I bought a MacBook for personal use recently.
I have used Safari a lot. I have also installed Camino (the OSX tailored version of Firefox), and Flock, but not Firefox itself - precisely for the reasons outlined in your article.
“AdBlock Plus. Which is far and away the #1 productivity booster for Firefox web browsing.”
I’d disagree a little here. I’ve used the AdBlock Plus plugin and didn’t find it speeding up my experience much. I blame the rise of javascript widgets. Too many requests to remote domains. That an un=optimized queries on the back end of the websites I’m visiting.
The Fasterfox plugin helps out a great deal. The biggest productivity boost I get, in either browser, is through my bookmarklets.
Camino is a great idea, but it doesn’t support firefox extensions!? Talk about neutering a browser.
Dear God, this is probably the worst reason I’ve EVER heard someone give to not use Firefox.
You flat-out stated that you’d choose “native look and feel over the ability to install a dozen user extensions.” Are you freaking serious? You’re willing to trade nearly infinite customization and personalization potential for something that “looks pretty?”
Someone please shoot me…
You’re willing to trade nearly infinite customization and personalization potential for something that “looks pretty?”
This is something I’ve tried to keep from my wife for YEARS. Thanks for blowing my cover.
IE7’s favorites is not a sidebar. The behavior is not the same.
Ah, I see. I hadn’t noticed the auto-hide-on-select behavior. Thanks for the tip - that is a nice feature. For me, if bookmarks are important enough that I need them so easily accesible, I put them on my bookmark toolbar (MS botched the links toolbar from the beginning, and has never fixed it). Otherwise, I’d rather have the bookmarks in a central place like Del.icio.us, not tied to one computer. But that’s a matter of preference.
I haven’t had the scrolling performance problems you’ve had. Startup time is irrelevant - I always have a web browser open. Always.
As for the main menu, IE7 is the worst of both worlds. The point of the ribbon was to make the rich functionality of Office apps contextual and discoverable. The main menu in IE7 does neither. In order to “move beyond the menu” it’s not good enough to just hide it unless you know the magic incantation to bring it back - you actually need to replace it with something better.
You’re falling into the myth of infinite configurability
There’s a difference between configurability as a form of personal expression and as a means to improve productivity. I don’t the former, but I’m glad to have the ability to do the latter. I will take every opportunity to be more effective with the tools that I use, whether it be defining a hotkey for a commonly used function, memorizing keyboard shortcuts, or installing an extension that makes the browser a more capable tool. If you’re worried about an extra click to navigate bookmarks, productivity seems like it must be important to you, yes?
I’d rather have the bookmarks in a central place like Del.icio.us
My blog is my del.icio.us; it it’s important enough to remember, it’s important enough to write about.
I always have a web browser open
And you never open new instances? That’s what I mean by startup time.
There’s a difference between configurability as a form of personal expression and as a means to improve productivity
Yes, but browsers aren’t Visual Studio for 99.9% of the audience. There’s a difference between expressing productivity in terms of the tool (eg, the browser) versus the content (eg, the websites you visit and the information you consume).
We don’t need a ribbon (or a main menu) in web browsers because they’re windows for content browsing, not content creation. The day that a web browser is as complex as Word 2007, we’re in big trouble.
I haven’t had the scrolling performance problems you’ve had
Try this experiment: Take this page and open it in both IE7 and Firefox. Hit END to move to the bottom. Then mouse wheel up a bit. This is easy to see if you have two monitors, just do one in each.
Scrolling is an activity I perform constantly while I’m using the web, and for whatever reason, it’s terribly slow in Firefox, like wading through molasses. Maybe because it’s not using the native DirectX interfaces?
Ya, I’m surprised you didn’t talk more about Camino…most hard core Mac-folks say that’s the browser-of-choice.
“Firefox feels so dowdy in Vista. It just doesn’t fit in. It scrolls very slowly, the keyboard stops working at random, and the overall GUI is jarringly out of place, including the legacy main menu.”
Well, first of all, you’re using Vista. Secondly you’re making the incorrect assumption with that statement that everything should work and fit in with Vista. The reality is that there are a ton of incompatibilities with the OS with a lot of hardware and software. Firefox is not excluded from this list. It sounds like you’re shifting the fault from Microsoft to the Mozilla team and is overall an unfair comparison in this regard. I agree that non-native UI sucks. But in an exaggerated analogy, that’s like saying you’d rather be mugged and raped by a Fabio look-alike over trusting an ugly security guard with your safety.
normally I have between 40 and 60 [tabs] open, but I just cleared some tabs to Scrapbook
You don’t need more tabs-- you need more/larger monitors. The reason I open new windows is to throw screens from monitor to monitor, ala Minority Report, to display related information simultaneously.
Also, there’s quite a bit of cognitive dissonance between tabs and windows. CTRL+TAB… ALT+TAB… it gets confusing. I often close windows that had a tab I needed because the title of the tab was not visible in the taskbar.
My strategy is this: I keep related stuff in tabs, and when I switch topics, I open a new window containing only info related to that topic in tabs.
Seriously, you guys and gals with 15+ tabs open: GET MORE MONITORS. You’ll thank me later. Tabs have their place, but if you’re using that many, it’s a symptom of a deeper problem.
My girlfriend have a mac, and she told me the exact same thing about Safari yesterday; “It feels more ‘Mac’, and that I’m supposed to use it”.
Great article!
I’ll mention my pet peeve here: those two-tone menus in Visual Studio 2003 and later. With my preferred colour scheme, unselected options have a background colour of #f3f3f3 and the selected option has a background of #f2f2f2. What a contrast!
Oh, and the file chooser in Office 97. It looks and behaves just differently enough from the standard XP one to be very very annoying.
While I agree, for the reasons given above, that desktop applications should use native UI widgets in most cases, I wholeheartedly disagree that web pages should have to follow this convention.
Desktop applications have access to, and should conform to, a much larger set of UI elements than the half dozen or so that a browser might use to display a form on a web page. This larger set absolutely does contribute to a better sense of cohesiveness with the OS. However, those half-dozen native form widgets within a web page generally have the opposite effect. They stick out like a sore thumb when the design of the rest of the page does not mesh with them, and make my clients ask why their site doesn’t look the same in every browser.
If we start expecting web pages to conform to OS guidelines, we can throw out every web page in existence today, because they all have “non-standard” backgrounds, typography, and color schemes. If that’s what you really want, then just use a feed reader to look at RSS feeds and stop using web browsers completely.
Web page form elements should be governed by the same set of rules as everything else on the page: CSS. Don’t like how the Firefox widgets look on your page by default? Style them!
Wow it looks like someone has never done cross browser testing with Safari. Safari HTML rendering is worst of breed by far.
IE owns a landslide majority of the browser market. I don’t know but I think I can assume maybe Microsoft is doing something right? And if they aren’t least trying to mirror how IE is doing things I think as a browser company you are doing something majorly wrong otherwise.
Seriously, you guys and gals with 15+ tabs open: GET MORE MONITORS. You’ll thank me later. Tabs have their place, but if you’re using that many, it’s a symptom of a deeper problem.
I have 3 monitors including a 24" widescreen Dell (the others are older 19" Viewsonics).
And yet, I only ever have one firefox window open, with many many tabs, the only time when I have two or more browser instances is when I have to cross check websites in separate browsers.
And if I need a specific page and I can’t see the name in my tabs bar (because i went on a spree and have 40 or 50 tabs open) I just hit F2. Reveal, now THAT is what I call a productivity booster.
By the way Adblock doesn’t actually make pages faster to load, it makes them slower because it has many rules-related computations to do. While you’d also have to load ads-images, the initial loading of the page (the HTML part) would be faster if you didn’t have adblock.
You’re spot on. But until you pointed this out, I wasn’t consciously aware of WHY I preferred Safari (and Camino) to Firefox. The implication there being that sometimes we unconsciously gravitate toward the preferred look-and-feel.
I use FireFox on OS X and while this did not come standard with FF 2.0, unlike FF 1.x, I got the OSX theme installed and it looks like an OS X.
The only problem with FF on OS X is the font antialiasing quality. I have also downloaded a utility that transfers the bookmarks from Safari.
I use GrApple a href="http://www.takebacktheweb.org/"http://www.takebacktheweb.org//a
Early version of this theme didn’t work well but now the bookmark UI is the look as Safari