UX

The FireFox user experience

Lorcan 1 min read

Blake Ross has a blog. He talks about design decisions with FireFox:

This policy emerged from our basic belief that, for the 99% of the world who don’t shop at Bang & Olufsen, a technology should be nothing more than a means to an end. Software is no different. In this case, people had plenty of obstacles to the web already–popup ads, spyware, and that damn monkey who gets punched and keeps coming back for more–before Netscape decided that the only way to surf was with the aid of twelve managers, fourteen not-so-subtle links back to AOL web properties and other inane gadgetry. This is why, even though plenty of people made fun of us for it, Ben’s original “Why Firefox?” document celebrated that “Firefox offers 2% more space to web pages than Mozilla, 4% more than Internet Explorer, and a whopping 10% more than Opera.” Giving people unadulterated access to the web became something of a religion, and every wasted pixel, button or dialog that impeded it was a demon that nagged at us. Every time someone was “pulled out of the dream”, every time they had to stop and realize that they were using a browser called Firefox and not just the amorphous “Web,” was a personal failure.[blakeross.com � Blog]

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