前 IE UI 设计师转向 FF，并指出 FF UI 存在 5 个问题

趣闻。

顺便说一下，UI 是用户接口的意思，就是界面。

http://slashdotcn.org/

新增一个用户对Firefox 市场份额的影响或许只是微乎其微，但当这个用户是Scott Berkun，那对Mozilla团队或许就意味着是一场胜利舞会。Scott Berkun是Microsoft IE项目的UI设计师，从IE 1.0 一直工作到IE 5.0（他提到今天的IE UI仍还是7年前的样子）；他近日在blog中写到：It’s a sad day and a good day，曾是我设计了IE UI，但我的爱却早已凋零；一周前我开始使用Firefox，现在我很快乐。他在blog中列出了让他转向Firefox 的5个原因，同时还指出了Firefox 在UI设计上的5个瑕疵；不知Mozilla社区是否会听取他的建议并应用在Firefox 2.0。

http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/?p=115

Why I switched to Firefox

It’s a sad day and a good day. For years I’ve held onto my IE install out of love. I worked on IE 1.0 thru 5.0, and was one of the people that designed much of its UI. But my love for the past has faded. Last week I switched to Firefox: and I’ve been happy.

Why I switched:

   1. IE is a ghetto. There are specs I wrote for UI features in 1998 that are unchanged today, 7 years later, in a world where browser usage has changed dramatically. I’ve watched bugs that I fought to have fixed in 5.0 become regressions, appearing in 5.01 and surviving in 6.0. Even though it’s the product I was proudest of, using it now makes me sad - it’s been left behind. I do read the IE blog now and again - smart folks are working - but there’s nothing for me to install.
   2. Bookmarks work. The Favorites UI model in IE is the same one we built in 1997, when we knew most of our users had 20-40 favorites. It was made to be super simple and consumer friendly as most of the population was still new to the net. This UI is effectively broken today, designed for people that don’t exist. The Favorites menu and Favorites bar show links in different orders, the organize favorites dialog is just weird, multiselect doesn’t work: favorites is a sad forgotten place. This was by far my greatest frustration with IE, even though I’m responsible for much of the original design.
   3. Firefox has quality & polish. IE 5.0, for its time (1999), was a high quality release. Really, it was. Joe Peterson, Hadi Partovi and Chris Jones fought hard to give the team time to do lots of fit and finish work. We did fewer features and focused hard on quality and refinement. Firefox feels to me like what IE 6.0 should have been (or what i expected it to be after I left the team in ‘99). It picked a few spots to build new features (tabs), focused on quality and refinement, and paid attention to making the things used most, work best. The core UI design is very similiar to IE5: History/Favorites bars, progress UI, toolbars, but its all smooth, reliable and clean.
   4. They made a mainstream product. One of the big challenges in designing software is balancing the requests of earlier adopters in the community, with the needs of the majority of more mainstream users. After playing with mozilla on and off I was afraid firefox would be a built for programmers by programmers type experience. It’s not. I don’t know who in the firefox org was the gatekeeper on features and UI, but I’d like to meet him/her/them (seriously). They did a great job of keeping the user experience focused on the core tasks. If you’re reading please say hi.
   5. Security isn’t annoying. . The press makes security into such a huge deal, but I’ll be honest. I don’t want to think about security at all. I’ll do what I need to, but mostly I want the system to take care of it and stay out my face. Nothing in FF makes me feel safer explicitly, I just don’t deal with as many warnings, settings and other details. I know from the PR that security in FF is better (even if only because it’s less targeted by spyware, etc.) but I’m pleased that the product doesn’t remind me of how safe I am all the time.

Problems with Firefox:

I’m a UI design guy, so many of these are UI related. (Added note: I’d used FF on and off, but since I’m now 100% some of these are complaints might fade in a month of usage. Stay tuned).

   1. Find UI. Why does the find dialog appear at the bottom of the screen? I agree that a dialog box (semi-modal) can be a mistake if you’re doing multiple searches, but flipping a coin for placement (top vs. bottom), the top is a better choice for any UI, especially if it’s going to look and act like a toolbar. I can’t move it so it earns a spot on this list. However, the overall implementation isn’t circa 1992 like the IE one. It highlights, it searches on type, & it warns on unfound items - nice..Firefox find
   2. Download UI. Here’s a case where modeless makes sense (it’s never my primary user task), but here we get a dialog box. My first crack at this would be a one line toolbar, much like the find bar, at the bottom of the screen telling me about downloads. That’s where all the other dl status info goes. Again, despite my nits, it’s an improvement on the ancient IE implementation (which we all hated forever too).
   3. Tabs and new windows. Firefox goes against IE behavior and starts each browser instance from scratch. IE intentionally brings the browser history into the new window: the bet being that users who want to continue from where they left off can, and those that want to go their home page can do that with one click. Everytime I hit Cntr-T and see a blank screen I think I’m in Word. I use tabs less often than I expected: opening new windows is often more comfortable - easier to track which window lives where. With multiple tabs (I find) the back/forward behavior becomes complex and hard to predict. Strict UI logic would put the tab UI above the toolbars, not below, but that creates other problems.
      Firefox tabs
   4. Tabs and modality. The desired illusion of tabs should be to make each tab a virtual browser. Well this breaks when you bring up a modal dialog within a tab: you can’t switch to another tab. It’s an annoyance, not a sin, but when it happens it reinforces my new window habit, and slaps my wrist on my growing New tab habit.
   5. The return of the go menu. It was with great pride that we killed the go menu in IE 5.0. It was the stupidest menu I’d ever seen, since it was never used and no one knew what it did. For accessibility it was necessary, but had no rights to be a top level menu (IE has View.Go). The Go menu was probably inherited from NSCP/mozilla, but it really should be put out to pasture. And if it stays, someone needs to explain why it shows a different history list than the one in the back button drop down.

chnwxx：（好象法拉利是自动档的，档位按钮就在方向盘上？）回到原帖

那个叫Tiptronic。。。可以在自排和手排之间自由切换。。。

其实就相当与汽车，有人喜欢自动档的--方便，有人喜欢手动档--省油及享受操作的乐趣，
大抵喜欢FF的都喜欢自己动手搞点名堂，乐趣所在。
（好象法拉利是自动档的，档位按钮就在方向盘上？）

没有一个说得让我同意的，find 还是放在下面好

superfox：Go菜单还是蛮有用的，我觉得。回到原帖

应该具备键盘或者鼠标单独就能完成，所以还是不要去掉Go，不仅不要去掉，还应改在搜索栏旁再加一个Go

注：我用过一两次maxthon，用的最多的是tt，我觉得他的有的个别功能还是不错的，比如那个拦截就很方便操作

我也看完了,,但是看不懂/?

Go菜单还是蛮有用的，我觉得。

1、2、3、4、5全部赞成~~~~~~~~

我的界面上保留了Go这个按钮，只是感觉有它插在地址栏和搜索栏之间比较好看，总比什么都没有的好。

下面的文章来自asa Dotzler的blog
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/arch ... refox.html

Scott points out some of the shortcomings of IE that led him to move to Firefox and goes on to point out some usability issues with Firefox. I wanted to take a second to address some of Scott's concerns about Firefox.

His first criticism is of the Find toolbar's location, at the bottom of the app rather than the top. We tried both configurations and the bottom was the solution that didn't cause the content area to shift down a couple of lines. This seemed much less jarring. We haven't done any serious usability testing on this but we've been following the feedback quite closely and Scott's not alone in this concern.

Scott's second concern is about the download dialog. I think he's asking for the amazing Download Statusbar extensions. For people that do a lot of downloading, this is certainly a nice UI. I use it occasionally. Scott, extensions kick ass <!-- s;-) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_wink.gif" alt=";-)" title="Wink" /><!-- s;-) -->

His next criticism is the new tab not inheriting session history from the previous tab (how IE does for new windows.) Again, this is one of those decisions that we spent a lot of time thinking about and we think we've settled on a reasonable default behavior. Perhaps some formal usability studies would enlighten us but I think that tabs are fundamentally different from new windows and just copying the new window behavior seems wrong too. Fortunately, and once again, extensions come to the rescue. Either Clone Window or Duplicate Tab should give Scott the behavior he's looking for.

Scott's forth issue, that modal dialogs which should be tab modal are app modal, is a bug. It's probably 123913 and we should fix that. It's a pain in the butt.

Scott's final complaint is that Firefox has a Go menu. Indeed. Not only do we have a go menu, but rather than displaying session history like the back and forward button, our Go menu shows global history. He suggests we put it out to pasture. I wouldn't have a problem with that

I'm really pleased that other than those issues, Scott, who worked on IE versions 1-5, is finding Firefox to be a better fit than IE. It's even better that he's offering some good feedback. Without high quality feedback, we wouldn't have the Firefox we do today.

Scott, if you're reading this, I highly recommend you give Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 a test drive. It's my daily browser and I find it to be not only faster and more stable than Firefox 1.0.6, but also considerably more polished. Oh, and as for your question on the gatekeepers for UI, that was Blake, Ben, Dave, and me

全部同意……

gzpbx：Firefox 有模态窗口吗？回到原帖

供 FF 本身或扩展使用的就有，供网页使用的就没有。

期待FF变得更加完美.

他曾经是IE设计员之一，他现在只是转而使用fx，不是准备加入开发。

只同意最后一项，其他的还是算了吧