August 18th, 2004

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Technology
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10 Features for a Perfect Browser

My interest was piqued by the title of this article on K5, until I read the first feature: “Toggle proxies at the touch of a button”. Yeah, that’s a feature to get excited about. This feels to me like an article written by a programmer. I’m not disparaging coders, as they’re taught and paid to wrestle the devil and his details, not see the big picture. Those programmers who do demonstrate vision tend to become the technical architects and CTOs.

Still, you’d hope that the author of this piece would think outside the box a bit. I was hoping for the equivalent of tabbed browsing. I’m not sure what those all would be–taking notes on the ‘back side’ of a browser is a good example–but I can’t really get excited about “store configuration files as simple plain text”. That certainly won’t perfect the browser.

Comments: 4 Responses so far

Chris
August 18th, 2004
10:40 am

Well, to be fair, it IS an article written by a programmer. As such, it’s understandably skewed – perhaps the title “10 technical features I would like to see in a browser” would be more accurate, but then again, it was posted on a techie website.

There are already a lot of revolutionary features out there (on the order of tabbed browsing) that aren’t being used by that many people – mouse gestures come to mind. Hell, even tabbed browsing itself is only used by Well, to be fair, it IS an article written by a programmer. As such, it’s understandably skewed – perhaps the title “10 technical features I would like to see in a browser” would be more accurate, but then again, it was posted on a techie website.

There are already a lot of revolutionary features out there (on the order of tabbed browsing) that aren’t being used by that many people – mouse gestures come to mind. Hell, even tabbed browsing itself is only used by

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Baron Chandler
August 18th, 2004
4:22 pm

I agree with you; that article sounds great but ends up rather silly and under-delivering. The average user doesn’t know what a proxy is for or what it does, let alone need to change a proxy server at the drop of the hat.

We should not lower our expectations of developers’ abilities to deliver usable and reasonable product. While you’re right, forests and trees and all that, it’s still important for developers to keep their overall goal straight and not get lost in the minutiae. How are we to have better, more usable products if the people creating them have NFC about how real users perceive thier creations and, perhaps more importantly, use them?

I have never understood the geeky-desire to tweak and tune documents — colors, fonts, sizes, scale… *shrug*

Perhaps the red and blue colors in the Mona Lisa need to be inverted, and the nose made a bit larger and the left eye rotated a bit. Also, I think she should have a moustache. Maybe I’m just l4m3, but I just tend to see art as the artist painted it?

Excellent link!

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squeak
August 19th, 2004
2:30 am

I read the article as well and thought he was overly picky. Your right Baron about programmers having NFC.

As for the, “toggle proxie by press of a button” he mentioned he trolls forums etc. No wonder he needs a proxie all the time. >:)

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Chris
August 19th, 2004
10:38 am

Being a programmer, I’m going to have to object to all the programmer bashing. Some of us DO have a FC about the use of our products, and many software companies have UI focus groups and such.

That said, there are idiots in every profession.

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