The other great web navigation technique (under Vista) is voice. It sounds really corny, but first time you see a browser correctly responding to you saying: “Microsoft es-q-el server 2005 management tools” instead of the multiple other “Microsoft SQL …” links on the page, you’ll be impressed.
Not as quick as the keyboard yet, but even “Show numbers…52…OK” can be rifled off pretty quickly. Of course, voice is bad for passwords and it really magnifies focus problems, but it’s definitely a new way to search.
Good voice needs about 400-600MhZ of proc time and new phones are definitely pushing this. Most phones already have some form of voice commands, but I expect that even two-dimensional browsing will soon be pushed back.
Has been discussed for Firefox since 2005, apparently never really implemented. But there is something way better than spatial navigation: Hit-a-Hint! Just look here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1341
Hi,
Vimperator (http://vimperator.mozdev.org) is a firefox extension, and has solved the problem of keaboard navigation by using something similar to incremental search. When you press [f], all clickable icons get a red label with one or two letters in them. Just type the two letters and your link is clicked. Neat! Works for most web pages.
Powerlord said: “Just looking at Amazon.com’s main page, I count more than 60 links in its left column alone!”
My eyes! That’s horrible! It’s not a problem for the navigation. As we have seen, there is a wonderful variety of options that developers and usability engineers bring us all the time. Just to make bad pages somehow tolerable to use.
The reason Opera probably isn’t as popular as the Three Magnificent might be those great features, which user has to learn. I really can’t spend time developing_a_dependency on a one great browser. (And I still remember the time they had commercials :G …shrug)
And I stand behind my statement: a web page shouldn’t contain 200 links. No, not on the same page. (http://www.apple.com/ isn’t really the altar boy for a web page, but there the number of elements is correct.)
This is a really great “new” thing :). Text browsers like Lynx or Links or w3m implement this from the very beginning I guess.
By the way, did you try to use cursor navigation in Firefox? Just try hitting F7. It does work quite well when you need it, and when not - just disable it by pressing F7 again.
Opera single key shortcuts simply blow Firefox out of the water. I can browse with my keyboard, using z,x for back/forward; 1,2 for switching tab, ‘/’ and ‘,’ to search for text/link, plus spatial navigation with shift arrows. Plus I can map almost any action to key: zoom, fit to width, switching to user’s css are those I use regularly.
I also think that having all as many useful features built-in as possible is better (than having them as extensions.) Think about vi/emacs.
Another option for incremental search and only incremental search in IE is Inline Search from IEforge http://www.ieforge.com/InlineSearch/ which I personally find less bloated than IE76Pro but I am biased
Am I the only one who has heard of ctrl-f? In firefox you can even turn on quick searching and search a page by just typing anything. If I want to follow a link, I type in the text that encompasses it. If the link is a picture, it doensn’t work, but I can make due by typing in something near by and backtabbing.
Also, spatial navigation works on ajax but not on flash. And I still hear some people say that in the future all webpages will be in flash…
Sure, all apps these days are written in java too! And desktop linux just got more users than windows last month. And the eastern bunny, turns out that he really exist!
Tom A wrote:
Some other things it also has that I find useful are:
Mouse gestures
Completely customizable interface (and it’s dead simple to do so)
Ad blocking
Opera ad block is painfully bad, it only works for blocking some images you do not like in webpages that you visit often. If you want really good blocking, try ad muncher (www.admuncher.com). It works so well that I feel kind bad for the non obtrusive ads…
Like he people said, Opera shortcuts are totally custumizable (preferences- advanced- shortcuts). Personally I like spatial navigation in ctrl + arrows since if I’m in a textbox with shift it would select the text instead of changing the focus. Opera is just genial in the way it is so simply in the default configuration but still is custumizable for those who want to. And man, there are so many things to custumize, and almost nothing requires hack and slash in .ini files or add-ons.
Opera is massively underrated. I’ve been using it for a long time after switching to Firefox from IE (and Opera for a while before that). However, my single biggest concern in a browser is Mouse Gestures (well, after tabs anyways). There’s an ok extension for FF, and the Opera ones are pretty good. I had an IE mouse gestures plugin that was simply horrible and did everything that I didn’t want it to do, including crash. I’ve just switched back to IE though as I’m using ALToolbar ( @ http://www.altools.com/ ) for Mouse Gestures (disclaimer - I currently work for the company). There are a few other nice things in there too that speed things up, but the Mouse Gestures are just essential. It has incremental search with highlighting as well, which for the life of me I can’t understand why it isn’t in IE…
I still use both Opera and FF though. Depends on what I need to do and the OS I’m on. There is no “one browser to rule them all”.
For market share, I see Opera at anywhere from 2% to 4% on some sites I run.
One very small thing in Opera that I’ve really liked was the “Paste Go – CTRL + B” feature. Silly small, but convenient.
I love being both an Opera user and a .NET developer. When my fellow raging anti-Microsoft Firefox using programmers start lecturing me on how much better Firefox is than IE7 I immediately respond “yes I expect you’re probably right, I wouldn’t know because I use Opera”. I love the utter silence that results, and the look on their faces of “I don’t understand. Why doesn’t he use IE, what is this ‘Opera’?”
Many people seem to use Firefox simply because it’s “not Microsoft”. On the other hand I like to base my choice on whether the software meets my needs and how well it does so. Maybe I’m crazy.
I still don’t know why more people aren’t using Opera as standard - it does everything built into other browsers, a whole lot of stuff that they only have through third party plug-ins and it still manages to be perceptibly faster than anything else out there.
It’s been my main browser since about 2002 and throughout that time it is fair to say that any innovation I have seen in other browsers originated in Opera. It may not have the users but it has the serious thought put into every aspect of it’s design.
I finally decided to buy a copy about a week before they started giving it away and then I was really glad I hadn’t got around to it a week later…
I am one of the biggest Opera fans you’ll meet, but I still don’t think it’s for everyone just because it’s so different from IE and FF. Certainly if you spend more than about 5 minutes a day navigating the web you will appreciate all it’s features, like disabling GIF animation, scale the page (I used to hate this, but now images scale reasonably well and it works with many flash sites), paste and go, mouse gestures, the carthago skin, fast-forward, search from the address bar, search the page with one keypress, and of course, Commodore 64 mode! Even Speeddial is useful.
As Matt Campbell said above, screen readers for blind users offer some interesting alternatives. Well-structured HTML can be parsed and interpreted by the screen reader software, allowing the user to hear a list of heading elements, and navigate the page via the document structure. Of course, that’s a must-have feature for blind users who can’t view the page the same way sighted users can, but it’s also a feature that any user could benefit from.
