Firefox

Posted Dec 14, 2005 21:12 UTC (Wed) by grouch (guest, #27289)
In reply to: Firefox succumbs to GNOME disease by bk
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

I've just found Mike Shaver's message in that Desktop_Architects thread and am greatly encouraged about how Firefox may mature. If Mr. Shaver's philosophy about "the Linux desktop" has sufficient sway in Firefox's development, that browser is likely to own the Web, eventually.

I think the Linux desktop is at its best when it promotes experimentation, big bold ballsy gambles, and lets market evolution pick the best results with bloody claw and gleaming fang. I think it's _not_ at its best when it is beholden to gods of a HIG, enterprise requirements, what Microsoft has done with its products, or even (more controversially) the expectations of the users it inherited from twm.
[...]
Make it _easy_ for people to do totally new stuff, like Gimmie, and then promote the hell out of it. If it sucks, find a new one. The Linux desktop should be what lets you do what you _can't_ do elsewhere, not the one where you can do _most_ of the stuff you can do elsewhere, but with better software licensing terms on some of it.
--Mike Shaver

I am also greatly relieved to be wrong about why Firefox seems to lack configurability. It only appeared to me to have caught the dumbing-down disease in comparison to its parent. Earlier in the thread, he explained:

We have among our design principles that users shouldn't pay complexity cost for things that they don't use, but we expend significant effort supporting the extension community and writing our own extensions to allow users to choose which other things they _will_ use.
[...]
Where a user wants to do something with our software and can't, because we haven't figured out how to make it possible without adding complexity cost for everyone who _doesn't_ want to do that, it means that we have a design bug.
--Mike Shaver

The first part of that I had seen before, but not the 2nd. The latter makes a huge difference. I still think the lock-in view of the browser history, "about:config" and having to install 3rd party extensions for so many things are just plain wrong, but there's hope. It's young and growing fast.