My blog is my del.icio.us; it it’s important enough to remember, it’s
important enough to write about.
If only I had time to do that.
And you never open new instances? That’s what I mean by startup time.
Very rarely. I just tested it - the new instance startup time difference is negligible on my machine.
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.
Uh - we still have a main menu in IE7. The issue here is hidden or not, not present or not. If MS wants to replace it with something better, I think that would be grant. What they have now is a combination of a hidden menu and a pseudo-sort-of-ribbon-esque toolbar. How is that an improvement?
BTW, if you think the browser is “too simple” to warrant a ribbon, I think you’re buying into MS’s “we haven’t had time to redo it with a ribbon so we’ll just tell people it doesn’t need one” spin. An auto-hide ribbon would be a great UI for IE, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we see one in IE8. Hell, the IE7 toolbar functionality is half-way to a ribbon already.
Try this experiment:
Tried your scrolling experiement. No speed difference for me…both scroll very quickly. You sure you’re not running some Firefox extension that’s slowing things down?
Actually, this is all somewhat orthogonal to your original point about non-native UIs, which I happen to agree with. I certainly would use Safari if I was a Mac user (as my wife does), because an app running on a Mac should look like a Mac app. I hate running Java UIs for the same reason - the “almost Windows” UI irritates me.
But it’s hard for me to understand how you could consider Firefox’s UI “jarringly out of place”. The main menu? Windows Mail, Notepad, and many other included-in-Windows apps still have a main menu. The color scheme? IE7 uses a totally different color scheme than Media Player and Movie Maker, which are in turn different still than Mail. What is it that looks so out of place to you?