I’ve seen several comments all over the place asking why we couldn’t, in Firefox 3, provide an option for users to revert back to the old UI for many things; or, my personal favorite, default to the old UI and make the new UI optional. Today, my goal is to explain why we don’t do this.
I’ll start with the second one since I enjoy it so much. The thing with new software is that users expect something new. If you default to the old UI, your user base is going to wonder what exactly you did in this new release, and why they even bothered upgrading. This only applies to major updates though, as people generally don’t expect anything new out of security updates. This user expectation is why we’ve had some form of visual refresh in almost every major update (at least as long as I’ve been following the project).
Now, why don’t we provide a way to get back to the old UI via a preference (even if it is just a hidden one)? There are actually a number of reasons why this is a bad idea:
- Performance
- Code bloat
- Test coverage
- Feature bloat
Each time you add a preference, you make that code run a bit slower. In many cases the overhead of dealing with preferences can be dealt with more code, but then you end up with a new problem – code bloat.
Code bloat may seem insignificant to an end user, and it probably doesn’t matter too much to them. That is, until you factor in the fact that more code means more that the developers have to worry about. All that extra code means bugs are more likely to be introduced, and new features take longer to add. Extensive test coverage can help prevent the bugs from creeping in, but it won’t help with new features being developed.
Test coverage doesn’t seem like a big deal when it comes to optional features. “Big deal – you just have to have a few more tests for those options,” right? No, not really. In reality, the code better have every combination of options tested to make sure they work well together, otherwise the bug reports and complaints will come flying in. Now, my probability and statistics is a bit fuzzy, so I hope I’m getting this math right. Let’s say you have just four features, each with only two options. There are 24 possible combinations, or 16 possible combinations that you have to test for. You can see how quickly this will blow up once you start adding more features to test for, as well as more options per feature. It gets pretty ridiculous pretty fast.
I leave feature bloat for last because there are people out there that will disagree with me on this being a bad thing. Giving users lots and lots of choices can quickly result in confusion. Having confused users is a bad thing, because it will end up driving them away from your product. As a result, we try to keep things simple, but at the same time make them useful for the majority of people.
All is not lost, however! The beauty of Firefox (and the Mozilla platform in general) is the extensibility of it. Say you don’t like the new download manager UI – it’s pretty easy to create an add-on that uses a totally different UI. I made sure of this when we were doing these changes. It may not be as easy elsewhere in the application, but there is almost always a way to customize it with an add-on. This is what has made Firefox so successful – if you don’t like something that most people are OK with, you can change it. Keep in mind, there are many core features that were first developed as add-ons (like session restore, the new theme for OS X, the download information in the statusbar).
16 replies on “No, we can’t give you the new *and* old UI”
Shawn, thanks for taking the time to write this up. It’s something we’ve all had to explain at one (or several) points, and rather than rewriting a partial explanation every time, everyone can just point to this post from now until users stop asking for both the old and the new UI. ;)
A good summary of the key points but try telling this to all those on Mozillazine, SUMO and elsewhere who absolutely despise the Smart Location Bar and roll back to to Firefox 2 as a result. The majority of them simply do not care about feature bloat, code bloat and test coverage and are not willing to give the Awesomebar a chance and see this as an example of Mozilla taking the “my way or the highway” approach of other browser vendors. I too was a doubter at first and learned to love it to the point where it is indispensable but most people just want the simple old behaviour that has worked for them for years and is the same on most other browsers and telling them to use an extension (and none of them so far completely ‘undoes’ the perceived “damage”) just does not rub I’m afraid.
I don’t think it’s a question of changing from new to old. It’s a question of of better or worse.
“The thing with new software is that users expect something new. If you default to the old UI, your user base is going to wonder what exactly you did in this new release, and why they even bothered upgrading.”
“This user expectation is why we’ve had some form of visual refresh in almost every major update (at least as long as I’ve been following the project).”
So they’re changing the theme for the sake of changing it? Geez, I thought it was because of “OS integration” but I see it’s just a silly art project.
* Performance – right…
* Code bloat – yeah, why maintain the old UI with the new UI when you could drop the new one?
* Test coverage – same as above
* Feature bloat – why not keep the simpler style of Firefox 2 then?
Each time you add a preference, you make that code run a bit slower. In many cases the overhead of dealing with preferences can be dealt with more code, but then you end up with a new problem – code bloat.
about:config ?????????
I’ve never understood the “make the new behavior an option, off by default” argument. I’ve heard this from some people in regards to the awesomebar as well. Why would we go through all the effort of improving the UI, only to hide it by default, so that only determined users would find it? It makes very little sense.
Okay, so first off, I would like to say that I’ve come to love the awesomebar. Like most people, I first despised it when using FF 3.0, wondering why they would ruin my nice configuration, and making a note never to use it. Only a few months later, however, I was doing some work in FF 2.0 and became acutely aware of the fact that I wasn’t using the awesomebar; 9 months later, I find it almost impossible to not use the awesomebar, that’s how much I rely on it.
To quote comment #3: “So they’re changing the theme for the sake of changing it? Geez, I thought it was because of “OS integration” but I see it’s just a silly art project.”
I think you’ve missed the point. I do have qualms about some of the new UI, but I know it’s not for the sake of change. The argument of not changing is long-term preposterous; if that had been followed, then we would all be happy on our green 80×24 terminals.
And most of all, the power of Firefox, or any browser, or most programs, in fact, is that if you don’t like it, you can do something about it. Make an extension (or use one if you can’t make one yourself); barring that, you could take the unprecedented step of using a different browser: no one’s pointing a gun at your head to make you use Firefox, you know.
* Performance – right…
No, this is a valid point. You’ve obviously never coded if you believe that something as complex as a preference lookup could be done in such quick a time.
* Code bloat – yeah, why maintain the old UI with the new UI when you could drop the new one?
By your argument, the transition to GUI desktops should never have been made; nor the transition from typewriters or slide rules. The funny thing about innovation is that it sort of requires new things.
* Test coverage – same as above
Ditto.
* Feature bloat – why not keep the simpler style of Firefox 2 then?
Look at Internet Explorer and tell me, quickly, why we should not innovate at all.
Your argument is based on the idea that everything is perfect as it is; you can still continue to use FF 2, after all, because I know there are people who still use NS 4 believing it to be the greatest thing yet created. Just be forewarned that others will not agree with your opinion.
@Chris
This argument won’t sit well with everyone, sure. All I can do though is present the facts about why we do what we do. I tried to make the argument that all of these things hurt development (for instance, look at Vista), but then the users who complain about change could probably care less about new developments.
For what it’s worth, I hated the new location bar at first, but made myself try it out for a while before making my final decision on it. I’m really glad I ended up doing that because it’s one of the most useful tools I use on a daily basis.
@John
Better and worse is highly subjective. When we base user experience decisions on human-computer interaction research. It’s not like we say “hey, I like this better so we should do it this way”. Sure, not everybody is going to like it (in fact, a lot of people don’t like change), but when you have 150+ million users, you aren’t going to please everyone anyway.
I figured someone was going to bring this up. My statement was an oversimplification of the reasoning. I could have elaborated on all the reasons why we changed the theme, but that would have made the post two to three times longer, and wouldn’t have contributed much to the argument if anything. I’m still going to claim that users expect change in the UI with a major update.
You have numbers to back your claim up, right? I know I sure do.
@Ted
That’s why I enjoy that one so much :)
Go button
downloads window
Highly slow (a second to delete a folder?) and highly complicated bookmarks system (come on now, bookmarks toolbar folder is under Bookmarks menu but not under the hierarchy
dumb bookmarks star that’s dumbbb and highly invisible to most users as to what it does exactly.
new theme overhaul once again, including an unprecedented bigback/small forward button
Considering the vast number of options included in about:config and the vast rendering performance gains in FF3, despite the inclusion of a new bookmarks system that is unnecessarily biased towards extremely heavy users which results in slow managing, I do think it’s possible to have more features and options and be overall have better performance. But..
Again, you’re big picture argument is a wrong one. Of course it’d be unnecessary to have new and old UI together as options (when we have bookmarks, download window, etc overhauled in each versions). The better question should be what is best for the user?
Think recently of the elitist decision to move the home button to the bookmarks bar only to be moved back to the toolbar. The original decision had no basis on user usage, only theory.
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/07/06/reality-show-results
Well good thing we have Mozilla metrics project coming up so Mozilla will stop theorizing and start observing
@John
I have no idea what the first part of your most recent post is even about or in reply to.
Just because we get a win in one place doesn’t mean we should/can regress performance elsewhere…
It is necessary to look at both the forest and the trees – not just one or the other. [See Also “Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe]
What is this, the democratic primaries? Please let’s keep it civil…
What, developers can’t count as users? Maybe they are only allowed to count as three-fifths of a user…
“I have no idea what the first part of your most recent post is even about or in reply to.”
I am listing the bad parts of the new UI as compared to the better one.
Well, bookmarks managing performance has tremendously regressed with Firefox 3. You get that awesome bar thing which is really useful because people have a hard time going to ebay.com and searching for that item they just saw as opposed to the extremely local, unprecedented, easy way of intuitively of typing it in the URL bar.
“It is necessary to look at both the forest and the trees – not just one or the other. [See Also “Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe]”
Do you want to make a point.
“What is this, the democratic primaries? Please let’s keep it civil…”
Ok, so you don’t disagree with my example, you just don’t like my analogy…
Developers should not push on to users something they don’t wish, never complained about, and don’t help them, simple as that. If they really had the user’s wishes at heart, they’d include Adblock.
Bloggers are hardly a representation of the average user population. Their not all advanced users, but most are the kind of people who just love to complain about every single thing that is different and they didn’t like for the few minutes they tested it.
The Smart Location Bar requires some training time (a couple of days?) but then it becomes indispensable. Typing 3 letters to have the right site on the top of the list? Priceless. The majority are going to love this, I think. It was a good call in my opinion.
As for the UI, I think it’s the most shocking for Mac users. It is almost entirely different. But I think it is a welcomed change. Firefox no longer looks like a Windows application on Mac, at that is a good thing.
Change occurs and people bitch about it. Movie at 11.
[…] admit I have no idea how doable this is, although I know that Shawn Wilsher on Planet Mozilla said giving us both the old and new UIs is simply impossible. Perhaps what […]
@John
The awsomebar seems to be the single most loved feature in Firefox 3. I personally find it the best thing since sliced bread.
Then there is this small but loud minority that hates the awsomebar more than anything. I’m sure that the Mozilla devs respect that opinion, but they have to weigh the loud haters against their mission to make the best browser out there.
I think you are right that users expect to find new UI elements with a major upgrade. Although I still think that many would expect to find the elements that they previously used at exactly the same place that it was before. I think FF3 found the right balance in this regard.
What I think is wrong though is that this has to go with “new and improved” icons for everything every time. From the feedback that I got, especially users that have been there all the way from FF1 or earlier have are tired of seeing new icons in the default theme every time.
thank you (usefull)
I wonder have you poll the users whether the new UI is better than the old UI. As for FF being able to have addon’s to do things. Don’t you think that is a little too much work?? Your original idea was to simplify things but now you need an add-on. Most people don’t really have time to learn a new UI. I do support for a living and more than a few users are screaming at me now. Just imagine how much extra work I have to do either install an add-on or teach end-user the new way of doing things.
Like many computer users, from time to time I’ve found fault with software companies, mostly bot not totally Microsoft. They continue to sell software that hasn’t had all the bugs removed from it prior to sale, in order to meet artificially optimistic sales schedules.
Contrastingly, I have had little or no complaint with the free software I have used from Mozilla. Currently I use T-Bird and FF3. They’ve worked near flawlessly for me since I switched from IE 4 and Outlook Express about 6 years ago. I look upon any new release of software as an opportunity for new learning, not a reason to bitch to the manufactures for not including my favorite features from the last version of that application..
The complaints I have read today on Shawn Wilsher’s blog seem to come from people who want software to be as efficiently written as it was 5 to 10 years ago. I believe that for the most part the huge increase in computing speed during that time has rendered that argument moot.
So, to the unhappy minority of software compulsives out there in Cyberland who have enough spare time to bitch about FF3 features or the lack thereof, I say: SUCK IT UP, PRINCESSES! Societies all move forward, not backward. Whining about a single click versus an double-click is petty and ultimately a waste of human energy.
To conclude, life-long learning has been proven to aid in the prevention of brain diseases like Alzheimer’s disease. Learning something new about anything, including web browsers, on a regular basis is a great way to help ensure a happy life in our reclining years.
Don’t worry; Be happy.