AlanBarber.Org
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Why I don't recomment Firefox
This is another one of those old news but I still want to post about it.
I found this interesting entry called “Why I don’t recommend Firefox” posted at the Kalsey Consulting Group blog.
The blog entry is in response to a grassroots campaign the mozilla people are doing in which that email website owners asking them place FireFox buttons on their website.
This is the great quote that I love…
quote:
Most Web users don’t know what a browser is. That blue E they click on the desktop isn’t a browser, it’s “The Internet.” Or maybe it’s “Yahoo” if that’s what their home page is set to. Tell them to download a new browser and they don’t understand what you mean. I put Firefox on my wife’s computer and removed the IE link. She asked why she didn’t have My Yahoo on the computer anymore. My wife’s not stupid — to her the IE logo is how she got to the Web. Without that, she didn’t know how to get to My Yahoo.
I have to agree with what he has to say. Many developers, open source in particular, I believe get too caught up in the fun of the development process and forget who they’re suppose to be developing for. Too many products are full of wonderful features but are so unusable to the mass public that they end up failing in the end. It doesn’t matter that your application is smaller, faster or has some cool widget that the other guy’s software doesn’t. If joe user can’t understand how to use your product they’ll stick with that bloated, slow software that they at least know how to use.
Go check out the entry. It’s a pretty good read and the comment discussions aren’t bad either.
on 09/22/2004 at 08:34 AM