Barriers to Entry #2
One of the things that’s pretty key about barriers to entry is that each one has a potential veto over users continuing to enjoy and use the app. If multiple barriers exist for a user, each must be addressed in order for the user to continue using the app.
As an example, if you rely on a site that fails in Firefox, AND you sometimes need to read pages that use complex scripts we don’t handle well, AND you have an authenticating NTLM proxy that uses some weird variant on the protocol that we fail on, addressing just two of those still blocks you from using Firefox full time. And eventually, people get sick of running two browsers, and switch back to the one that always works, even if it doesn’t work as well overall.
The big question, and I don’t have an answer to this, is how do we identify all of these, and how do we get a real-world answer on how many potential users these issues are barriers for? Thoughts welcome, as always.
You’re perfectly right with what you say, and it was one of Firefox’ main advantages over Opera in its earlier days that it supported NTLM (at least a little bit, even though the always-appearing dialog asking for a password that was already saved anyway was ugly).
Opera very long denied accepting that NTLM proxy is something that is used, even though they didn’t like it.
I guess the really widely spread entry barriers are now removed in Firefox, I can’t think of anything that annoys me, ever.
SessionSaver was something that made using Firefox more smooth, but I would never have considered that as a barrier.
And this is what is important for Firefox – create features that are so useful that they are considered as entry barriers on other browsers that don’t support them.
Given that most of the time Firefox crashes is due to some third party plugin, the inability to easily disable and enable those plugins when a particular web page is causing a plugin to crash is the most annoying thing I find. Why should I need an extension for that? Nearly every other browser can do that.
Don’t we already have many ways of collecting bugs (bugzilla, report broken website, help forums, crash info, etc.)? Or are you referring to something else?
I’d promote the ‘Report a broken website’ feature more prominently. Make it a one-click process: Website not working? Click this button to let us know.
FF could also collect javascript and other errors that do not cause crashes. (Of course, it should be opt-in, anonymize data, and clearly notify users.)
Or do I misunderstand your question?
I think reducing barriers to entry would produce the most value for web and FF users.
You’re getting plenty of this kind of input for free in the form of complaints in Bugzilla bugs that “this bug stops me from using Firefox”, but nobody seems to make any priority decisions based on them (quite the opposite, in fact). See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40873#c55 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18808#c165 for random examples.
Note also that both of those are from 2003….
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! jvilisjqyxa