Thanks to HushedChernobyl
Thanks to HushedChernobyl
Nobody knows how you work better than you.
The basis of Firefox is that you can do anything with it.
Want your bookmarks permanantly on the right of your screen? OK. Want your downloads on a small bar a the bottom of the window? OK. Want the ability to render websites using the Internet Explorer engine inside a Firefox tab? OK.
The basis here is that the user knows best. The user knows how he or she wants things to work. Which makes sense, right?
But what if the user doesn’t know best?
I’ve spent the last few years tweaking Firefox 1, 2, 3 and then 3.5 to work how I work, using combinations of extensions and themes to give me the features I want. Some of them I now can’t live without (AdBlock, mainly) and some are just useful or cool (loving the tr.im button at the moment).
Having been completely underwhelmed with the stability, speed and responsiveness of the 3.5 beta 4 release, I seem to have started using the Google Chrome 2 beta more and more without any conscious decision to ’switch’
In it I can’t view my downloads in a little bar at the bottom of the screen. I can’t open disgusting, evil, badly built websites in Internet Explorer when I need to, and I can’t download streaming flash videos to my hard drive with one click.
Instead, I have to press Ctrl + J, copy and paste the link into a Start + R > iexplore.exe Ctrl + V combination or dig up some third party tool to download flash videos.
But I’m having a far more enjoyable browsing experience none the less. It’s fast – I mean really fast – and it’s slick, it’s functional and it’s clever.
And that’s the reason I’m enjoying it so much – it’s clever. I don’t have to be clever to make it work, it’s already been done for me. I’ve not been given the ingredients to create my own browser, I’ve been given a fantastic browser on a plate.
Firefox’s downfall is going to be that the user doesn’t know best after all.
Firefox’s downfall is going to be that it gave it’s users enough rope to hang it’s browser.
