You do need to be careful with whimsical messages so as not to look the fool. It is a sort of artificial intelligence. Devising a good message is the culminating step. It says to the user: I perceive your situation, and here is what it means for your situation. Just make sure that your app really does perceive the situation as astutely as your pithy message implies.
Donât depend on the browser for powerful error reporting: BSOD comes to the web! The javascript BSOD.js provides an easy-to-use class to boost the error reporting user experience of your websites!
Hodie natus est radici frater. (Fun error messages have been around foreverâŚ)
I write software at an engineering/manufacturing company. They are serious no-nonsense types. The only person who would be laughing if I did this is the HR person assigned to my disciplinary action.
I wonder when the web became about browsers, not about the content displayed in them.
Hm, wasnât Twitterâs fail whale kind of funny the first twenty times? Not so much anymoreâŚ
Even if a web without AdBlock was somehow tolerable, I would still not use Chrome. Chrome is about CONTROL. Control the web, control the world. Do you really trust Google that much? Itâs bad enough they have a record of all of your search activity. You want to also give them the opportunity to have a record of all of your browser activity? Mozilla may be seriously in bed with them, but at least there is SOME degree of separation.
Also, when I tried Chrome, the UX was all Google saying itâs my way or the highway. Configurability? Nah, who needs that! Weâre so brilliant we came up with the single best way for everything and everyone!
BTW, if you like chrome, you can use ad muncher to get rid of the adds. Works like a charm in all browsers, but it is windows only.
Reminds me of the time (man, this is going to date me) when a friend and I patched the mbasic on an Osborne to have more umm, earthy, error messages. Eg. instead of Syntax error on line 4 youâd get F*ck up on line 4. We called it fbasic.
Errors shouldnât even exist!
An error implies that something bad or wrong happened.
If you enjoy bad things then yes, Error Messages Can Be Fun.
The first time probably it will be funny, but if it keeps popping, f@#$!
Anyone still tweaks FF to have only one close-tab button?
Yup. Prevents accidentally closing the tab when you try to switch to it and your click is slightly off.
As other people noted, the strange Google Update service comes along with Chrome:
- There is no option in Chrome to disabled it;
- If you use msconfig to prevent it from running during startup, the next time you open Chrome, bang, its back to the startup;
- Never warns about anything it does.
To me, this service is not only unnecessary, but behaves very strangely. The only way to get it disabled is by shuting it down in task manager and then deleting it. And Chrome never complains about it.
My most recent web app, for 404 and 500 errors, shows a picture of Gordon Brown with the subtitle: Here is someone who messed up worse than we did. Sorry you had a problem, weâve been notified and attend to it as soon as we can.
Iâve noticed that most people are suprised to get this, laugh (because itâs trueâŚ) and are generally amicable about whatever problem they are experiencing.
Hi Jeff, iâm fan of Firefox because i love their addons, but i think that if Google Chrome will be capable to adapt the addons of Firefox, then Chrome will be the choosen one.
As cutesy as âfunâ error messages can be, Iâm afraid I have to sit in the camp that calls them unprofessional. When Iâm working with a program, I donât want the program to make me laugh when something goes wrong. I want it to tell me what went wrong, and clearly, so that I can avoid doing it again if I can. More to the point, Iâd rather that the five minutes spent coming up with a cutesy line and ten for the frozen tab icon have been spent on fixing the bug in the first place. Sure, itâs just five minutes here, ten minutes there - and if theyâre really spending more time than that per âfunâ error message, they ARE wasting time - but it adds up fast.
As far as Chrome being the greatest and first revolution since IE 4? Itâs a browser. And a very stripped down browser, at that. Google has gone after it with a severe one-size-fits-all mentality. I can get the same effect by keeping a separate profile for Firefox with no add-ons enabled. My choice to use Firefox is one of flexibility, not one of speed.
If Iâve learned anything at all from having worked the help desk, itâs that users never ever read error messages. Years of experience with poorly designed UIs with error messages that might as well have been written in Babylonian cuneiform for their readability have trained users to reflexively click the buttons until the message goes away. Often, this reflexive conditioning is so complete that the user is not even consciously aware of having seen an error message at all and only noticed there was a problem afterward because the application is no longer responding or their work has been lost.
If the message is still up on the screen when you VNC into the PC to take a look, itâs because either they could not find a way to make the dialog box go away or because theyâve called help desk about that exact problem before and the tech support person answering the call had insufficient information to diagnose the problem (because the error message was no longer displayed and the user had no memory of what the message said) and he/she specifically told the user to leave the message up on the screen and call back if the problem happens again.
We had a tape backup robot that had a sense of humor. We came in one morning and found that backups failed to run. Looked at the robot and there was tape on the floor of bots cabinet. The error message on the screen read, Oh rats! I dropped a tape.
It put a bit of fun in a failed backup.
I agree that Chrome is the best browser out there. I use it when I can. The only two issues I have is after remaining open a while (read: days) it gets flaky. Also, it seems to run a bit hot for multimedia.
Still, even with those issues it is my preference.
I would love to hear what makes Chrome such an excellent browser, in Jeffâs opinion.
My experience has been that the only people who find Chrome to be the better browser of the bunch are the people who were desperately clutching onto IE until very recently. Chrome provided them with an out of their embarrassment, allowing them to switch while pretending that theyâre switching now only because, phew, finally something worth switching came out. I know Jeff alludes to IE above, but he is the classic clutch-onto-Microsoft sort of guy, so I wouldnât discount it as a motivation.
So why is Chrome better, Jeff? The JavaScript thing is long a thing of the past, and apart from that⌠Oh look, tabs randomly freezeâŚgreat. What a feature.
Really though. Rereading Jeffâs hilarious claim above â that Chrome is the first big advance since IE 4, I am desperately curious for some backing to that rhetoric. For most of the rest of the world, Chrome is like going back two years, but it made a splash because it held the JavaScript crown for a very short time.