Firefox 3 smart bar is just too smart
FF3 came out today and I followed the crowd and upgraded to it. Within 5 minutes it became obvious that I passionately hated new "smart bar" feature.
A smaller thing was that it wasted tons of screen real estate and just didn't look esthetically pleasing. It rendered auto-complete items in two lines. It also made the whole list look like an Xmas tree with its liberal use of fonts, bolding and favicons. Apparently this particular "improvement" was so good that the FF3 devs removed a setting for disabling it from the about:config page. One now has to resort to using an add-on called "oldbar" instead. This made the suggestions list far more compact and it looked way cleaner and more usable.
However a far more annoying change was how smartbar populated the list. It matched what I typed not just to the head of the old URLs, but to any part in them. And to the bookmarks. And to the bookmark descriptions. And the page titles.
So typing "news" no longer brought up a list of news.ycombinator.com, news1130.com, etc, but rather slashdot.org (News for Nerds), digg.com (All News, Videos ..) and some other obscure URLs that I didn't even remember visiting. They say it learns and will eventually put most relevant URLs at the top of the list. Great, thanks. This just solved a problem that I didn't have to begin with. And it all would've been well, but here's a kicker - YOU CANNOT DISABLE THIS.
This leads me to the reason why I decided to make this post. This situation is a good example of how not to approach adding features to the application.
1. New features and behavioral patterns. These can be the defaults for new installs and this should gradually migrate everyone to the new feature set. However users arriving to a new version via an upgrade path should have their experience preserved as intact as possible.
2. Replacing features instead of adding them. You can bet that there are users that explicitly depend on existing behavior and taking it away is a big deal.
FF does not conform to these principles. Also by looking at the Mozilla forums it is obvious that the devs were aware of the problems these changes created, but decided to ignore them. Too bad really. It's not like it would've been too much work to handle these changes a bit more gracefully.
/eor
56 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadThe awesome bar uses historical data from previous searches, so if your search for "news" always ends with you clicking on HN, it will put that at the top. Over time, the bar will learn your preferences and become much more useful.
I hated the bar at first, to the extent that I considered going back to FF2. For example, I used to always type "en." to find a wikipedia page, but that no longer worked well. Now I love being able to type in parts of pages, and I no longer use bookmarks since I can just search my entire history. The only thing missing is the ability to sync the history and awesome bar training to other machines, which we're working on ( http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/ ).
Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla :)
My problem with "awesomebar" is that while it does bring up the sites I visit often (which FF2 did, and given they're a small number of social/news sites; /., reddit, hn, facebook, nytimes, etc its not exactly difficult to list), the order they're listed gets mixed up every time I try to visit a site.
reddit.com showing up ahead of news.ycombinator.com when typing "news" for example doesn't make me like this new way of figuring out what URL to go to (guessing randomly? I'm sure there's an algorithm behind it but after using it since RC1, it still looks random to me) what URL I want when I'm typing the URL in the URL bar.
At first it was a little messy but I've gotten used to it so it's fine by me.
As I said above - the transition logic for FF2/IE/etc users was not thought through AT ALL.
Given it's a smart bar, I expect it to be more flexible in its configuration, so that I could adjust its smarts as needed. E.g. it could have configurable weights that control how important a match in particular piece of data is. This way I would've zero'ed the importance of everything, but the matches at the head of the URL and happily went about my business without ranting :)
Again, this sort of flexibility is not a hard thing to implement nor does it pollute or burden the UI in any way. Why this or something similar didn't make it into a production release is beyond me.
There are probably a bunch of people like me who have grown quite accustomed to using the Firefox address bar as a quick way to do a Google i'm feeling lucky search. For me, as an FF2 user, this fits quite perfectly with that pattern of usage, and actually extends it conveniently.
Like you I do get tripped up when I try to type a straight URL in there though. Maybe if they raised the awesomeness level a tad they could do some basic pattern matching to recognize when an explicit URL is being typed there. Until then it's just a "cool" bar in my book.
Not really.
It looks like I submit more than I read. So the "awesome" bar puts "submit" before the "index" page. Counter intuitive to what I really want, the index page where if I have to I can add /submit. It just means I now look at line 2 if I want to read.
I tend to agree though. I'm still being driven nuts that Google's favicon has changed. I think companies need to be sensitive to all the momentum that people bring to their products.
But then you have to balance that with the overhead of supporting an "old" feature for the sake of old users.
This might have been one of those things that might have worked better as an add-on. I think it might have been kinda slick when you first fire up FF3 to be presented with a choice of basic add-ons to play with, like "Smart Bar".
For example, say you wanted to set up computers for public use at a school or library. Which way is it better to set the option? If it were a default/option pair, it would obviously be better to set it to the default, since people would be more familiar with it. If, however, it were just two equally valid options, which one would people be more likely to be familiar with? Multiply this by every possible [add-on on/add-on off] pair, and you have, perhaps, 1000 or more default browser configurations, any of which are equally likely to run into in the wild!
Anyway, on your first point, I think users need to be a little more sensitive to the fact that, if they don't allow themselves to be pushed out of their comfort zone every once in a while, their experience using their software (or anything for that matter) will never improve. If a feature worked crappily, one would never know it until they adapt to the "new way" enough to see how bad it was before. Until then, their comfort with the old way makes them much too partial to be a good judge.
That's the thing actually - supporting the old behavior in case of FF3 wunderbar is trivial as it's just a subset of the new behavior. Just restrict latter as this:
I'm not an FF dev, but this should hardly take more than a couple of hours of work, esp. if one is familiar with the code.Personally, I think the Awesome Bar is fantastic.
And according to my IRC conversation with someone on #firefox # irc.mozilla.org earlier, Firefox 3.1 will have the option of having. They even have the patches all ready. So why it's not in Firefox 3 is beyond me.
Yeah, which is why that setting is pretty much useless. Also, when setting that property to 0, it causes the screen to flicker intermittently when typing in the address bar (at least on Mac OS X Tiger).
Oldbar https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227
When I find that I visit a site so often that I habitually key in the first few characters, hit down, and hit enter, it is time to bookmark it and give it a keyword (in a bookmark's properties). After doing so, (as an example) if I go to the bar and type 'hn' and hit enter, it automatically takes me to http://news.ycombinator.com/. I think using this feature would benefit you, and maybe ease your hatred to mild distaste, and, just maybe, eventually you'll even _like_ the Awesome Bar.
I wish you luck.
That's just me, though.
Brilliant.
Maybe it should be possible to disable it, but since I actually like it, I don't care...
You know about the bookmark keywords, right? I have set news.yc to keyword yc (in the properties of the bookmark), so when I type "yc", I go straight to this site. Maybe that feature could alleviate your pain?
Not all of us want feature creep, and if we're doing something a crappy way, then I don't mind if I sometimes get dragged kicking and screaming to a better model. I eventually got used to opening my browser windows in tabs instead of new windows. I got used to Gmail compared to Eudora. It's hard to satisfy everyone, and if you can satisfy a lot more people with a hard change that upsets a few people, sometimes it is better.
I don't think the points you made are prerequisites for good UI design.
Without reading up on it, I'd guess the SmartBar is an attempt towards trying to address the fact that "a lot of" [1] people don't distinguish or understand the differences between the address bar, a search box in the chrome, and whatever largish text box is at the top of their home page. That doesn't mean I don't hate it though.
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/27/1160055...
i could see why someone might want to disable it, but i find it supremely useful. i don't have to search through my history...the super-wicked bar does it automatically for it. it's like my whole history is instant-searchable in the url ("super-wicked") bar!
more and more software is continually making use of instant search technology (e.g. application launchers like Launchy), and it's a great thing indeed.