Barriers to Entry #3
I talked about barriers to entry a couple of times already, and I think that as we start to plan for Firefox 3, we need to make sure that as we try to advance the web, it is critical that we continue to identify and eliminate barriers to entry for users who would otherwise use our products. We need to continue to improve the core features for our existing userbase, and to keep up with the web, but most of the thinking there isn’t solving the barriers question, since by and large we’re innovating in new directions.
Here’s a few that I know are problems already:
- Better integration with systemwide settingsIf a user switches to larger fonts and icons in Windows, we should match those increases in the app. We force users to specify and update proxy data, helper apps and passwords separately within the app, where we could use system settings and APIs instead (the last perhaps on Mac only, but for how long?). A lot of this integration can be done, and should be done.
- Site compatibilityWe’re doing pretty good, marketshare helps, but we need to be better. We need to push Reporter, and put real time into analysis of the top sites showing up there. Sometimes its our fault and we need to prioritize bugfixing, sometimes its Tech Evangelism (and we need to get back to doing that too).
- Firefox lacks feature X from Browser YIt could be a serious shortcoming, or it could be something that should be addressed with extensions. We should make sure we identify these deal-breaking features and ensure that the right solution is in place, and that there are docs in place to point users at the answers they seek.
These are a few, but there are more out there. Please comment here or post to d-a-f with your own!
My friend’s dad gave up on Firefox after several seconds because when he installed the Google toolbar it didn’t instantly appear (Firefox required a restart). He never restarted, just closed Firefox and went back to using IE.
Aside from anecdotal scenarios (like that one), it seems pretty hard to track where we are losing users.
“”"it is critical that we continue to identify and eliminate barriers to entry for users who would otherwise use our products”"”
How about open-sourcing it?
Good to see you’re bringing this back up, but someone has a list of this somewhere because this isn’t new. There might be some new items but there are some old ones that need to be remembered, e.g. working with the anti-virus folks, import functions, specific issues w/ locales.
Wasn’t there an exit survey done. That’s a good place to start.
System wide settings – yes need to continue to do.
Site compatibility – will always be a problem because of biz deals e.g. MTV/MSFT and sheer volume of mom/pop web sites, proprietary interal apps; but much, much better than in 2000
Features – need to continue focusing on simplifying the application. Feature wars are no fun.
I was thinking about filing a bug to have an official “raccettura’s sh!t list”, but I kinda like what the Safari guys did with the “Hit List“. I was thinking in addition to the top 25 reported, perhaps get a page just to advocate the sites that are in the “hall of shame”. Perhaps get some traffic on the “naughty list”. Top 25 is obviously a great asset to analysis, but sometimes hand tuning is necessary. A human-edited list may be the right answer.
I’ve got a few things that should come to light in regards to reporter in the next several weeks. The idea factory has been churning during my semi-silence. Time to take it up a notch.
People who do user support in #firefox could have some kind of website to record how often users have specific problems. Obviously stuff like bug 357922 is going to be massive on there, but there’s other issues that are dealt with repeatedly. We could also use this data to improve FAQ documents.
Actually, it doesn’t have to be live data at all – anyone feel like going through #firefox logs for the last year or so?
And I really like the idea of the name and shame stuff.
I like Cameron’s idea of using #firefox logs, even though that would be biased towards problems geekier users have. It wouldn’t require reading through an entire year of logs. You could use software to count how many times each bug number came up in #firefox, and then for any bug that came up at least three times, look at the bug report and look at the context in #firefox.
Site compatibility: Quite a few sites break because of very little things (for example, browser detection code from 1998, ” used as the path separator, CSS ‘height ‘used as if it was ‘min-height’, the infamous ‘alt’ used instead of ‘title’ problem, etc.). Understandably the Gecko crew doesn’t want to add code that breaks web standards for the benefit of a few crappy pages, but many of these problems could be fixed by running a few lines of JavaScript right after the page was loaded and that’s what Opera is doing with their browser.js. Have you considered adopting that concept?
Three things: Website compatibility, website compatibility, and website compatibility.
I’ve deployed Firefox at several small businesses, and some users complain that IE6 (!) was better. Almost all their problems are website incompatibility. Either the websites don’t function or the functionality degrades.
Very few of these sites use ActiveX, but they are all geared toward business users where IE’s market share is much higher. The #1 barrier in the business world is reliable compatible with the IE ‘standard’, as unfortunate as that is.
The first barrier I’d say is that it isn’t installed in enough companies. A lot of people use at home the same thing they use at work.
Integration with the OS is a pita for me, especially because it is able to auto-detect whether I want to use my proxy and Firefox doesn’t.
Having a drastic change in the UI for each major release isn’t a good thing either. If you want someone to upgrade, don’t completely move everything around every year.
A lot of people complain about website compatibility, but I rarely have problems. I suffer more from websites that are IE-only (probably ActiveX) that are on my intranet.
Of course there’s always the fact that IE comes with the computer, so there isn’t much of a driving factor to go download a new web browser.
-Alan
“Better integration with systemwide settings”
Yes please! And don’t stop at the API level. FF 2.0 theme was a departure from 1.5 on the theme level : 1.5 tried to be native, 2.0 tries to be custom…
As for the APIs, GNOME covers lots of stuff (keyring, dbus, system fonts, etc), and so does Windows (wallet for instance), so I don’t see why it should be Mac only…
There needs to be a fix for the flash issue where badly written flash drives the CPU to 95-100%. This I feel needs to be worked out with Adobe to find and fix the issue. They seem to not care much, since their activeX version works with IE.
That’s the biggest complaint seen at times on the Support forums, is that Firefox is slow, sluggish, my Laptop is hot and shutting down, and when the issue is found, its a run-away flash object.
Same needs to to checked/fixed with run-away javascripts. Business page at MSNBC.com with the ticker js will drive my CPU 100% all the time/everytime.
Users should not have to install and maintain Noscript, or FlashBlock to keep the browser from going ape with badly written flash/js objects.
Check out this page:
http://us.f316.mail.yahoo.com/dc/quick_start
It is yahoo’s instructions on how to use their new webmail UI. We should ponder something like it for introducing Firefox features.
I think we ought to have the following installed by default:
- ‘load image’ when image not loaded (great for dialup users – lots of these still!) – reload not so important. This is really quite a big thing to have.
(sadly IE handles this better)
- better ad blocking, like adblock, that lets you do regex removal.
- Better feed management, much like Sage. Live Bookmarks really suck
- Possibly mouse gestures, disabled by default.
- happily, we now have session saving. Perhaps when Firefox 2 is first installed, opened, and closed, if the ‘what to show when Firefox starts’ isn’t set, perhaps it could ask on first shutdown?
Basically, what I would like is the best features of extensions that are widely used to be integrated, so that I can install less extensions, to make it more reliable.
So I guess I can add to this list:
- More control over extensions, e.g. over what they can access or how they can run. (same for plugins – abiliy to enable/disable these would be great)
Additionally, some non-extension features:
- Threading of tabs, with foreground tab given higher priority. That way, tabs in the background don’t kill the active tab.
- Not using lots of CPU when running in the background. If I have Firefox open without focus or minimised, and I’m doing something else (like gaming) that takes a lot of CPU, and it starts to slow down, I KNOW each time it’s almost certainly Firefox doing it. This is a bad user experience.
- The bit about the reloading to install/disable/etc extensions would be great.
- I think contentEditable is a big developer feature we need asap. Pity it didn’t make 2.0.
We should also be looking at stuff that others don’t have – for example, showing EXIF data of images would be a great way to get interest from photography fans/pros.
Also… uh guys, you are looking to see what bugs users in #firefox talk about … wouldn’t it be far better to look at the bugs that have been heavily voted for?! You’ve already got a system for people to say what they care about, you should use it!
Also, I forgot to add MHTML support to the above list. That’s a big one for me.
Re: Better integration with systemwide settings
Please get someone to revive the native theming work. There shouldn’t be a lot to do, given that Silver had done most of it before he finally got pissed off enough with MoCo to hang it up.
Firefox 2.0 has taken further steps away from respecting the native theme (now both menus AND tabs are un-native), and this is _crazy_, especially given your totally correct assertion that Firefox should respect system font-sizes, etc.
I’m unable to log to yahoo after I’m trying the beta feature. I get stuck in http://us.f316.mail.yahoo.com/dc/quick_start page and when I try to continue to the mail page, it always bounce back to http://us.f316.mail.yahoo.com/dc/quick_start.
Are there any yahoo!mail users get the same experience? Please help me…
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I just installed FF 2.0 and loving it. As far as newer vrsions of FF are concerned, How is CSS issues and FF Crashing are being handled as well as its memory leak problems ? Loved the theme though.
I have faced severe problems with my site http://www.coders2020.com and FF not able to show CSS properly. I was told that FF is hard browser and also doesn’t support lot’s of javascript functions. I had to completely redesigned my site from scratch. *sigh* Anyway FF is million times better than IE and surely far better than Opera due to its plugins. Thanks Mozilla and all those who have worked for FF.
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