Chris Messina thinks Mozilla should focus on the XUL platform and less on the browser. Anne Zelenka thinks Mozilla should focus on browser features and less on the platform. And what do I think?
I think the world’s asking, “What’s this orange doohickey in my address bar when I visit some sites?”
Mr. Messina thinks “joe six pack is not [Mozilla's] audience”. I sure hope he’s wrong.
But Joe Six-Pack doesn’t know what tabs are, or how to use them. Or what the orange doohickey is, even though we know it’s the feed icon and we know it means the Web site you’re visiting has indicated it has a feed and we know what the #$%&*( a feed even is.
Because Joe Six-Pack isn’t a twenty-something tech guru in Silicon Valley. Joe Six-Pack is, well, a “Factory Joe” working at the steel plant. Or Joe is a civil engineer, or maybe a civil servant. Jane is a flight attendant, or a physical therapist, or a bookkeeper. In other words, Joe and Jane are ordinary folk.
From their standpoint, Firefox is fairly feature complete, in that Firefox has 200% more features than they know how to use. It’s not that they can’t use them or even won’t use them, but they just don’t know what they even are.
For example, pop open a clean Firefox window. Do you see any tabs? I don’t see any tabs. Sure, somebody could muddle through a menu and notice a “New Tab” choice, but they’ll only visit that menu when they go to print a Web page, and even then they might not notice “New Tab”. While I think the IE7 “start everything in a tab” looks a bit dorky, there’s absolutely no question its a better discoverable interface, and I’ll venture that there is more rapid uptake on tabs through IE7 because of it. It wouldn’t shock me if in a few years that people say, “Oh, Firefox has tabs? I thought only Internet Explorer did”, even though Firefox got there first.
What I think would be an eye-opener would be if there were a “people meter” edition of Firefox. By that, I mean a Firefox with a built-in capability of tracking usage not by site, but by browser feature. Mozilla could recruit Firefox users to run the “people meter” edition just like Nielsen recruits families to watch TV with their monitoring box attached, courtesy of a bit of Google money. If the “people meter” edition indicates that some prominent Firefox features, like tabs, aren’t used nearly as much as one might expect, then that suggests places where engineers need to focus on discoverability. In other words, the “people meter” is to usability “bugs” what the Firefox crash log tool is to coding bugs.
So, I’d like the Mozilla Firefox team to focus on two things:
- Better understanding of what gets used, what doesn’t, and what can be done to make Firefox’s power more approachable to more people
- Even more empowerment of the third-party extension community, so they can bang out some of the features that Mr. Messina and Ms. Zelenka would like
Technorati Tags: mozilla firefox
2007-05-11 at 16:16
This is something that I wanted in Flock. I felt that, in aggregate, being able to know what people click on in a browser, like you get with something like Google Analytics for webpages, would be essential for understanding, at the very least, what features are getting used commonly. It might not provide understanding, but at the least it would give us an aggregate sense of what’s being used (for example, the feed chicklet).
I’d like to point out that I didn’t say that Joe Six Pack *isn’t* Mozilla or Firefox’s audience, only that it’s fruitless to try to reach him or her… simply because I don’t think browsers or installing them matter much. They’ll download movies and music and games… but I’m not sure they’d download another frame to view MySpace or Facebook in. Now, I could be wrong — and I would *love* to be proven wrong, but again, I think OEM deals, where Firefox is bundled on laptops sold from Dell for example, is a much more efficient way to make that happen.
Thanks for your comments — and carrying the conversation forward.
2007-05-12 at 11:51
Sorry, I’m just going by the words on your blog (“joe six pack is not your audience.”, leading off bullet #6). I don’t remember you having the audio download available at that time; I’ll download it and add it to my podcast queue. I apologize if what you say in the media clip differs from what you wrote, and that I only went by the words.
“only that it’s fruitless to try to reach him or her… simply because I don’t think browsers or installing them matter much.”
Agree with the latter, disagree with the former, at least depending upon how you define “reach”. I agree that most Joe and Jane Six-Packs will be getting Firefox because somebody else put it on their PC for them — OEM, ISP, company IT flunky, whatever. However, even then, on Windows, they’ll have their choice of browsers. If they’re going to switch to Firefox, they need a carrot (i.e., something they can obviously do in Firefox that they can’t in alternatives) or a stick (e.g., company IT flunky telling them Firefox is more secure, learning Firefox use is company policy because of its cute mascot). Conversely, once they’ve switched, they’ll need a carrot or stick to switch back off Firefox.
I’d just like developers to consider what it takes for a “feature” to become a “carrot”, and that pretty much means Joe and Jane Six-Pack have to be able to realize the feature exists and be able to get at least minimal use out of it without reading online help or asking somebody how to do XYZ. At least, until we develop a culture where Joe and Jane Six-Pack feel comfortable reading documentation or finding assistance online.