Non-Native UI Sucks

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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. :wink:

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? :stuck_out_tongue:

Actually, this is all somewhat orthogonal to your original point about non-native UIs, which I happen to agree with. :slight_smile: 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?

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Blech, too much editing in a small comment window. Sorry for the typos.

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You should look at SWT and eclipse. Most people refuse to belive that its a Java app. This is how Java should be

In addition eclipse has RCP, a totally awesome framework for building pluggable GUIs

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Ignoring the non-native GUI widgets, a much more significant lack of Firefox on OS X is that it doesn’t integrate with Keychain Access (the central password manager) like other OS X browsers do.

This means that for multi-browser usage, all passwords need to be entered and stored twice: once in Keychain, and once in Firefox’s password manager. When you have hundreds of passwords, this rules out using Firefox for anything but a web development platform.

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No speed difference for me…both scroll very quickly

There’s a huge difference. Try it this way. Open this page in both browsers, on the same monitor. Start at the bottom, then mousewheel up five times.

In IE7, I end up at Feb 12, 12:20am. In Firefox, I end up at Feb 12, 5:33 am (about 20% less scrolling). I just did this 3 times and its very consistent.

Also, I am typing this in Firefox and my arrow keys arent working, and every time I type a single quote, the quick search is launched. This happens to me constantly in Firefox-- the keyboard goes haywire.

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Ah, OK, I was unclear what you meant by “fast”. You mean the length of each scroll with the wheel. Easily changeable:
http://adamplatti.net/blog/2006/10/12/how-to-set-mousewheel-scroll-length-in-firefox/

Changing the numlines setting to 6 matches up IE and Firefox fairly well on my machine (it’s not clear what a “line” is in either browser, though - they seem to interpret the system scoll wheel length setting differently, with neither matching a “line” on this site).

That’s pretty wonky with your keyboard - I don’t have that problem at all (single quote only activates quick search if I’m not inside of a text field, and my arrow keys work fine). If that happened to me regularly, I’d probably bail on Firefox too.

My only complaint with the keyboard handling in Firefox is that sometimes the browser window loses focus (clicking on some toolbar element, for example), and it’s neither obvious that it happened nor is there a keyboard shortcut to restore focus to the browsing window. It requires a mouse click, which I cannot abide.

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There are a lot of comments here, but I just wanted to add my thoughts as well. I couldn’t agree more that non-native UIs suck. Both as a user and developer I so must prefer using native widgets.

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I totally agree with this blog entry Jeff, as a Java Swing developer I can honestly say non-native UI’s suck to get to play right. However:

And you never open new instances?

I am guessing most developers have firefox with ~10 tabs open constantly and a bunch of dev plugins, but in the same process. So what makes for a new instance is subject to debate. Personally I always put my PC to hibernate so I create a new instance perhaps once a month (session cleanup time).

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.

Hmm… no ill effects on my system. IE probably does perform a bit better in specific micro-benchmarks, but its benefits by far outweighs its drawbacks.

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“Function over form. The benefits that the Firefox extensions give you far outweigh the “nice to have” native windows buttons.”

Major distinction between 2 types of people. Some are all about aesthetics, but I could care less. I just use whatever works best for my personal process. I use a hodge podge of utilities and apps that have nothing in common when it comes to UI.

And I cannot live w/o FF’s “find as you type” feature and the quick searches (actually IE7 may have those, haven’t checked - I just ruled it out for daily use when I could find no find as you type feature).

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I use firefox on the mac (instead of safari) for one reason:
Google browser sync

Safari does not make it easy for me to maintain a single set of bookmarks from any machine that I use.

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I really don’t know what you are talking about with Firefox on Vista…

I’m a test engineer, and i’ve been working with Vista since the first test version, as the apps developed here must work with Vista too.
As a test engineer working with desktop apps, i must have clean systems - just the OS installed and not much else, so as not to have any interference.

Still, after a few days of constant annoyance at IE7, i had to install Firefox on my test system (i’m using Firefox at home since version 1.4 appeared).
Why ? Because IE7 is riddled with so many bugs, it’s crazy… just try switching tabs (IE stops responding for somewhere around ~50 seconds, and no, it’s not the hardware specs, my test box here is pretty high end), and so on.
Ironically - the most critical IE7 bugs can be recognised from early editions of Firefox… the difference being that you never know when IE7 bugs are ironed out.

Now, if i need to connect to my company email (on Outlook Web Access, really poor choice), or to the company’s bug tracking system, i use IE7 - it’s still annoying as hell, when you have to do something in a hurry, but i have no choice. When i have to do anything else, from reading some news or checking my personal e-mail, or searching for something, i use Firefox.

Yes, maybe it’s not so “streamlined”, like IE7. But, have you ever tried to disable the useless “Aero” feature in Vista, and then use IE7 ?
Firefox looks the same, IE7 looks like a DOS application when Aero is disabled.

And, about the scrolling and the keyboard stop problems… i’ve never encountered them here. And i really mean never. Albeit, the keyboard bug seems valid, i would love to try to reproduce it here - could you give me some details ?

As a conslusion : i’m not a web developer, or a fanboy.
If IE gets better, it would be easier for me to use the OS’s native browser, rather than using Firefox.

I’m using Firefox just because it is way better right now - for example, when reading news articles - i open an index in Firefox, and just open every article that seems interesting in a new tab (without automatically switching to it). This usually means around 60 tabs opened, maybe less, maybe alot more, depending on the day.
On my test box here, Firefox behaves the same as with one or two tabs - well, it does take some additional resources, but nothing you can feel.
At home, where i have an incredibly obsolete AMD Duron at 750 MHz, Firefox gets sluggy while the new tab loads the article, 2-3 seconds on my broadband connection, and then it’s all ok.

With IE, my test box almost dies after reaching 35 opened tabs (with articles from many different websites, some with more flash adverts than others).
Also, if Firefox would die, from a 3rd party app for example, like Adobe reader malfunctioning when you opened a .pdf in Firefox, you just have to kill the process. It doesn’t hang, and you don’t lose your data, as the session is restored.

Try to kill IE7 if it hangs, when opening a .pdf, or a powerpoint, or a .doc, or excel, ot just because you switched too fast between tabs. You are lucky if you just cannot kill it (as it usually happens).
When you do, most of the time the system goes too (and that’s with the “autorestart” option in windows disabled).

So really, i don’t understand the basis for this article…

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Something that I think is possibly being missed here, what with scrolling speed: Scrolling is heavily dependent on the video card, and the quality of its 2D implementation.

I remember, some years ago, when I needed to upgrade to a video card with enough memory to support more than 256 colors on 1280x1024. I don’t use the 3D capabilities of my video cards much at all, so I figured I could go with a bargain-basement off-brand one without losing anything. I got it home, installed it, and watched ieverything/i have scrolling problems – not only was it scrolling at a speed slower than I can skim the headings, but it was jerky and uneven. I immediately went and got a better card, after looking at some online reviews of 2D performance (Matrox makes a fairly big deal of theirs, and I’ve had no problems with their cards), and I was much happier.

On AdBlock Pro – I can’t see a need for it. I’ve got Flash disabled (except when I specifically turn it on), and GIF-animation disabled, and … wait, your browser doesn’t offer that? How can you iuse/i it? tt:)/tt

(Every so often, I use someone else’s browser, and it’s always a jarring realization that, for the rest of the world, the web iblinks/i. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s an ad or an LJ usericon, so an ad-blocker is the wrong tool.)

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-Keyboard stops repondings

I have that same problem in FireFox 2 on my two Macs, since i upgraded from 1.5 to 2.0

I think it’s FF 2.0 bug

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I’m also another fan of IE7 on Vista instead of the alternatives (Opera/Firefox) which I used all the time in XP.

As mentioned… Opera/Firefox just seem… out of place in Vista…
i.e. Opera in XP would scroll very smoothly and just would feel smooth. But in Vista its jaggered and harsh. Then you compare IE7 against it and IE7 just seems right.

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Kinda biased (being a trolltech engineer), but using the right toolkit for the job helps too for x-platform applications. GTK? non-native controls. Java? Non-native controls. Qt? Native controls if you choose to, or non-native if you choose that theme. Having a toolkit that takes the pain out of creating native looking applications without any work on your behalf makes making proffesional looking applications so much easier, and as you stated, not just proffesional, but native looking and feeling apps help takeup by end users. Good article :slight_smile:

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"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."

Given that Adobe’s Apollo team chose WebKit over Gecko for the upcoming Flash 3/Apollo/Flex sledgehammer, I would assume these are temporary problems at worst.

But for now, you’re correct sort of. I’m a mac user that cares about the way interface looks and everything, and lack of support for a bunch of javascipt bits that Web2.0 seems to depend on made me switch to Firefox as my default browser.

And now that I’m here, it’ll be hard to go back, since Safari lacks support for add-ons like Firefox has - I don’t know if I could live in a world without Firebug =P

Ironically, my biggest pet peeve about Firefox is that it uses the standard OS X window bar, what made Safari nice was the brushed metal window bar - it made browser windows distinctive when they were in the background.

Oh well.

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Only if you have the privilege to work on a nice platform. Now, I certainly wouldn’t call Vista “a nice platform” (just out of habit), but on XP I would choose ANYTHING that looks nice and that means NOT native.

You’re right, though, on your core point… Apps need to become more native. Problem probably is that if you don’t build it into the language, you get many “half-assed” attempts that don’t work out anyways.

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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.

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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.”

I reiterate–you are a complete moron.

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I agree with the article. Safari is much better for browsing and the UI is the main reason.

It’s not just the visual eye-candy though, the widgets behave like other the rest of the OS. They just work better.