Why Can't Error Messages Be Fun?

I love the Flight of the Conchords reference whenever I edit my posts too often. Always makes me chuckle.

Chrome is cool, but not half as good as the new Safariā€¦ and thatā€™s just in beta. Blistering javascript performance, and itā€™s rock solid.

Chrome feels bare compared to Firefox, and Firefox feels completely featureless compared to Operaā€¦

Iā€™m honestly not sure whatā€™s there to love. At the end of the day, itā€™s just a browser, and they all do the same thing.

I love the error where the Chrome browser window goes totally blank and it stops responding to anything I type or do other than to just kill the entire chrome browser.

No wait, I hate that.

Cutsey error messages are all well and good for those of you that like that sort of thing but frankly Iā€™d rather they spend the time making me see any kind of error from Chrome in the first place.

This BrightKite login error made me laugh out loud. http://i44.tinypic.com/4hsh2c.png

@Jeff, i donā€™t mean to be a sourpuss (no, wait scratch that). chrome is cool yes but what is with this opening the new tab right next to the one i am using? if god had intended us to do that then firefox would be doing it too!!! i tend to open many many new tabs thus the first i opened will be right next to the one i am reading in the end. placing tabs at the end just so happens to fit my order of priorities.
other than that minor gripe i love chrome and i tend to use it alot when just surfing for fun. it is my other browser.

Fun error messages are alright, but remember the user should almost never see them -

Remember the bomb icon in Mac OS 8/9?? Pretty funny the first few times, but after losing what youā€™re working on a couple times it quickly loses itā€™s funninessā€¦

You can have Chrome on OS X if you arenā€™t willing to wait for Google:
http://dev.chromium.org/

Have you even read the Scott McCloud comic that Jeff links to?

They promise a revolution. But all they deliver is somewhat more secure and somewhat faster. Yes, an improvement. Not a revolution. In particular the inability to properly separate cookies of different tabs. (yes, that would break some sites, but the main origin of XSS attacks is the flawed /model/, not implementation)

So far, Firefox feature set and the general feeling is IMO unmatched.

The error messages are cool and amusing. Itā€™s a good thing.

However, Iā€™m surprised that anyone loves Chrome that much right now. Itā€™s missing a lot of config options that other browsers have. And, its UI is far from keyboard-friendly.

Chrome has per-process stuff and a task manager, but its UI still isnā€™t as great as Operaā€™s. If I switched from Opera to Chrome, Iā€™d be losing so much. Iā€™d much rather just have Opera do the per-process stuff.

Finally, Chrome does the sin of all sins and closes the whole browser when you try to close the only open tab. It should just clear the tab instead (by default, at least on windows and linux). (FWIW though, Mozilla stupidly started doing this crap recently. At least they have a config option to turn it off.)

Seriously man, arenā€™t you supposed to be doing the whole Lamaze thing right now???

Also, you might want to take a moment to hold a memorial to a good nights sleep cause you will never get one again :slight_smile:

There are a lot of delights in Chrome: Iā€™m especially fond of it opening source code in another browser window, so that links are live.

I needs me my Firebug, though, and my IETab, and my Foxmarks and a few other plugins, so Chrome will remain my niche task browser for now.

Iā€™m not sure about the funny message thing - thereā€™s definitely a place for appropriate humour, itā€™s just that, as you can tell from my spelling of humour, Iā€™m not American. And the rest of the English-speaking world doesnā€™t have the Snap! meme. So that particular message grates a little, as another example of the US-centricity of some global developments.

That sort of reads like itā€™s unbelievably petty and it may indeed be, in which case I apologise. It doesnā€™t hurt from time to time to point out that the majority of the English-speaking Web World are not actually resident in the USA, though, hard as that may be to remember at times.

Sadly in many companies, such Error Messages are considered unprofessional and mocking the customer. In the mind of some people, a customer who experiences an error and gets such a silly error message would think So they had time for this crap, but not for a proper program? Great, Iā€™ll change vendors.

it reminds me a bit of Winampā€™s It mostly works! bullet point that they had before they were assimilated by AOL and had sticks being put in their behinds to make sure that they stay professional from now on.

That being said, I am not one of those hypothetical customers. Iā€™m in for the fun, and after being disappointed by Firefox 3.0 so badly, Chrome is my default browser since a few months and itā€™s great.

About browsers:
I agree with Marko, itā€™s just a browser and all functionality still comes from the web.

Firefoxā€™ search kicks ass and it has some cool plugins. I see no reason to switch to another browser because itā€™s error-messages are more fun.

About errormessages being ā€˜funā€™:
I doubt our customers would appreciate it. Itā€™s a sign of unprofessionalism.
Apart from that I would definately not appreciate a ā€˜funnyā€™ message when it turns out a database was corrupted and Iā€™ll re restoring backups until midnight. Or anything like that.

Errormessage should at first be informative. All the crap Iā€™ve seen in some Open Source software makes me quiver. Thereā€™s nothing worse than a programmer trying to be funny above giving me useful information about what went wrong.

If the error happens frequently, will it still seem funny, or will you think that it is mocking you? Humorous and cute messages can be appropriate, but can rapidly become annoying.

Error messages should not be fun! They must tell the user that there is a problem with the software and take immediate action.

Try to uninstall it, somebody told me that it says something like this:

Did we do something wrong?

Ironically, we did just this for a clientā€™s site.

It seems every single user that got the error messages gathered on a related forum to complain about how weā€™d obviously spent way too much time on funny error messages, and not enough time making it work.

Apparently not everyone appreciates having friendly error messages.

Chrome, chock-full of error message truthiness!

These Chrome error messages are pretty ugly.