Sadly, since the “big bang” of bookmarks there have been precious few new explosions.

The basic problem

The introduction of bookmarks, welcome as it was, created a problem that remains with us today. Once you start bookmarking pages, you inevitably produce a list of bookmarks that becomes more chaotic and less useful the longer it gets. Sure, a list of bookmarks is useful when you can look at it and quickly know what is there, and when you can see the bookmark you want to load right now.

But when you start having to scroll the list, and not only that but use the PageUp/PageDown keys to scroll the list quicker, it’s a good sign that it’s getting out of hand.

A collection of bookmarks is all well and good, but it needs some kind of structure superimposed on it to remain effective.

The bookmark toolbar

The bookmark toolbar encapsulates the insight that some bookmarks are more important than others and offers a number of improvements:

1. Allows marking some bookmarks as more important/more frequently used.
2. Gives them better visibility.
3. Provides quicker access to them (by not having to go into the bookmark menu).

The bookmarks are displayed on a toolbar, either as links or as links-within-folders.

Despite how useful this feature is, browsers have historically treated it as something of a marginal feature. Firefox, for instance, used to view the launcher toolbar as just another folder in the bookmarks collection (albeit with a special name, like “Personal Toolbar Folder”), which you could accidentally rename or delete, and then it wouldn’t show up as a toolbar anymore.

Another thing that matters a lot to the usability of the toolbar is the drag-and-dropability of bookmarks onto the toolbar, into the folders, and from one place to another. Even today, for instance, in Google Chrome I can’t reorder the items in a folder on the toolbar without opening the Bookmark Manager.

Import/export (and the silo)

It hardly needs stating that once you have a bookmark collection in one browser, you don’t want to manually recreate it if you decide to use another one. Browsers have historically been reluctant about giving out their bookmarks. All too often, despite making a show of offering to import your bookmarks from another browser, the import mechanism has bordered on the useless.

First and foremost, every browser vendor since the Ice Age has been eager to supply you with a tasty selection of bookmarks that he was convinced you would love. Importing your own bookmarks, therefore, could at best be seen as a supplement. No browser would ever just take your existing bookmarks and overwrite its own vendor-supplied ones, which is exactly what the user wants. Instead, it would stash them somewhere in the bookmark collection, well out of sight. Any additional metadata that was implicitly stored in your bookmarks would often be lost, like the order in which they were listed.

In particular, the browser would make no bones about trying to find out if you have a bookmark toolbar in there, and replace it with its own (despite the browser having a toolbar feature that worked exactly the same).

So having done an “import”, you would typically have to manually organize your bookmarks, nuke the stupid vendor bookmarks, and sometimes you’d even have to recreate the folder structure of your bookmark toolbar, all before you had been able to achieve the same state as in your other browser.

This kind of situation is standard silo behavior. By making the import feature so mediocre, the browser vendor would pretty much ensure that the user would not switch browsers without paying a high price for it. Simply using more than one browser on a daily basis, with an easy way to manage your bookmarks across them by a quick sync, is just not realistic.

Bookmark sync (and more silo)

A way of keeping your bookmarks synced across computers has been a no-brainer feature since the era when people started accessing the web both at home and at school/work. And yet, a working synchronization feature is a pretty recent development in bookmarks. I recall some failed attempts with Firefox extensions in the remote past, but at last it is here.

A number of browsers have a sync feature now, and it’s a big step forward in bookmarks. Even if your bookmark collection is a mess, you can at least have the same mess all over the place. Clean it up and it’s clean everywhere.

And yet, bookmark sync is yet more silo behavior: you can sync your bookmarks from Opera to Opera, but not from Opera to Firefox. The fact that bookmark sync doesn’t do the same half-assed job of the import feature might seem strange, but the motive is very obvious:

• ability to have your bookmarks up to date in our browser on every computer = good for the vendor
• ability to have your bookmarks up to date in every browser = bad for the vendor

Browser vendors know very well that if bookmark sync worked as poorly as bookmark import, they couldn’t sell it as a feature, because noone would use it.

Bad page titles

Strangely enough, I’ve come all this way without mentioning just about the most glaring problem that bookmarks have: bad page titles. Since the name of the bookmark is simply the title of the page in 99.99% of the cases, the title ought to be both descriptive and concise. Instead, we have historically seen that web creators much prefer titles that are variations on this theme:

The Excessively Long Title Of My Website Which Is Very Nice Indeed: Section Title: Article Title

With titles like that, all too often you can’t even see the title of the article in your bookmark list, because the text is truncated somewhere in the middle.

Quite apart from the length problem, web sites often prefer to give articles catchy titles rather than descriptive ones. So with a title like:

Something Amusing That Makes You Think About What The Page Really Is About

you have the short term benefit of being amused at the cost of the long term benefit of a descriptive title.

Bad metadata

Bookmarks belong eminently to the category of things where the number of items is so large that it would be great to have a way of automating the retrieval/organization of the items.

Yet, despite announcements from Mozilla in the past that they would soon obliterate the old model of bookmarks-as-a-list, and introduce a new and all-conquering search based approach, we still have the list. The fact is that bookmarks don’t contain enough metadata to make search useful. A bookmark has two pieces of data:

1. The name of the bookmark.
2. The url.

Sure, some browsers give you the option to store other things too, like tags, but if we all agree that the user can’t be bothered to keep their bookmarks organized, let’s not pretend he will actually input any of the optional stuff. And even if he does, 90% of his bookmarks won’t have any other data associated with them, so we’re back to the short list above.

So why doesn’t search make sense? Because much too often neither the title nor the url contains any of the keywords that you would want to use in order to find this bookmark. Web sites don’t pay too much attention to titles, and the real data that would be useful to search is the page itself, which is not available.

Bookmark oblivion

What should seem ironic is that bookmarking a page often has the effect of not bookmarking it at all. The bookmark is saved somewhere in the long list and then never seen again, either because the list is too long to really bother looking at beyond the most recently added items, or because the page title is useless, or because it was bookmarked “for future reference”, and by the time we return to this topic we’ve forgotten about the bookmark.

We tend to grow pretty oblivious as to what’s in our bookmarks. Over time, some pages expire, others drift out of our sphere of interest, yet the bookmark collection doesn’t get updated.

Just about the most obvious feature a browser might offer is to try loading the bookmarks from time to time, in the background, and marking the ones that return 404.

Another idea might be to offer to list bookmarks according to how often they are loaded, making the never used ones fall to the bottom of the list. Applying this to the bookmark folder might be especially useful, so the user doesn’t have to reorder the bookmarks to make the frequent ones quicker to reach.

There’s a reason ui critique is so hard to do without getting into a fit of fury. It’s like a guy standing over you saying “no, don’t tie your shoe laces like that, do it like this”. And then he forces you to do it his way every single day for the rest of your life.

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Adobe, the tool builders for the designers of the world, complimented on their ui.

Embarrassment of riches! There are a few problems with this feature:

1. While it’s great that you help me install the plugin, I have no idea what all these things are. All I wanted was “java”.
2. There is no “default” or “recommended” choice. I can see that one of them is selected, but for all I know that’s because the choices showed up in this order at random.
3. Even if I were inclined to think that the selected choice is selected for a reason, there’s another choice that’s exactly the same.
4. “No description found in plugin database.” is not exactly helpful. In fact, it could be just the thing to help me here.
5. If I wing it and install one of these, and then it turns out it doesn’t work (perish the thought!), the little notification at the top of the web page isn’t going to show up again (because a java plugin, working or not, would be installed). So there’s no way I can come back to this screen.
6. If I am the kind of user who understands that the choices in this dialog represent packages in the system, then I don’t know what they are called, because the package names are not mentioned. So if I want to uninstall a plugin that doesn’t work, I don’t know what to uninstall.

There is another dialog in the Firefox settings for plugins:

Strangely, there is no option to uninstall plugins here, just disable. But I guess that if I disable the java plugin, I can revisit that java web page and get that plugin selection dialog again (and try a different one). Still, it takes a bit of detective work to figure that out, it could be made more obvious.

This example demonstrates the difference between starting on a problem, and actually solving it. I’m very pleased that we have these helper dialogs now, but it needs a bit more thought put into it.

Bug: #320989

I actually picked this example because there used to be two or three options in that dialog, but now there are five.

There is another slight regression here. The click area for the plus (+) sign beside each directory (the one that expands/collapses it) appears smaller now, after the icon has been changed. It’s smaller now, and it was already quite small before.

Ubuntu Bug: #254039

KDE Bug: 168379

I’m not submitting it specifically to kde bugzilla given how Shuttlesworth raves about Launchpad’s synchronization capabilities to various bugzillas every chance he gets. Hopefully that means they have a link set up with KDE as well. The regression was spotted in Ubuntu anyway.

It is hereby my pleasure to present to you a piece of wonderful ui writing which describes the beloved Adobe Acrobat Reader. Here’s a taste:

After the unpacking, the install process itself took 10 minutes. I could only thank Adobe’s engineers, presuming they were filling up my hard drive with yummy icons, tasty DLLs, and amazing 3D JavaScript add-ons. No matter — the 210 MB it required was there to be used.

The Ubuntu gdm theme is nice and clean and it’s easy to figure out how to change the session. This dialog does the job without much ado. But then you find this:

After you’ve changed the session, assumed that the change succeeded, stopped thinking about it, and moved on to start the session by logging in, you get this idiotic dialog.

This is horrifying in several ways. First of all, the gdm login screen is completely clean of any dialogs, so there is no hint given that you should expect a popup. Secondly, once you’ve set everything using the secondary controls at the bottom of the screen, you just want to login and be on your way. When I’m in that mode, I’ve basically learnt to hit Enter as many times as it takes to get me through, so I’m very likely to accidentally accept the dialog since I don’t know it’s coming.

And finally, the question of whether to make the session the default one is completely cut out from the menu for changing the session, which shows a complete lack of consistency. Here I’m done doing something and later on I have to answer unexpected question about something I already finished.

Not to mention that the “unsafe” choice is selected by default, I might accidentally change my default session just by clicking Enter twice after putting in my password.

Worst of all, even when I know that the popup is coming, I absolutely do not want to have to answer it again and again just because someone couldn’t figure out a better place to put that option. Make it a checkbox on the previous dialog, that’s what everyone else does, why must you be so special?

I’ll be nice and I’ll just call this sloppiness.

EDIT: Bug filed.

UPDATE: Bug fixed in gdm 2.21.

Well, sometimes ideas do actually surface. Jensen Harris talks about the process of redesigning the gui for Ms Office. It’s an insightful talk that approaches the problem of the well known gui (that has caused us all a lot of pain) with the appropriate humility towards the frustrated user. It also shows off some of the improvements (which are major!) that makes the 2007-series gui a lot more intuitive by making commands whose names we know appear visually and offer dynamic previews. Obviously, these ideas are specific to the domain of formatting and don’t apply to any application, which happens to coincide with why they represent a big step forward: they enrich the experience in the domain they are for.

As you might expect, I’m not particularly interested in Office or any products coming out of Microsoft in general as they do not address my needs. But I sure do wish projects like OpenOffice (which, again, we’re stuck with) would stop trying to clone the bad gui of old Microsoft products and do a little brainstorming themselves. Other examples that continue to live on in infamy include the gimp (how many thousands of dialogs have you clicked through today?), vlc (great technical performance, horrendous gui) and gvim (the gui offers next to nothing over the keyboard ui).

This is a lesson in user interface design. ethereal is now called wireshark, and it’s the same exact gui window that it always has been (with some minor incremental improvements). Here’s the difference though. They figured out that data visualization goes so much further when you actually give a thought to representation.

The before picture, googled for an old screenshot of ethereal:

The window is split into three panes. The top one is the one you’ll look at first, this is the list of packets we captured. Notice how small the scrollbar is and just imagine we have a large chunk of traffic in front of our eyes. Scroll up, scroll down, sort by protocol, whatever. In the other two panes you have info on the packet that is selected right now. In the middle one you have nicely structured info, in the bottom you have the raw data. This is the way to look at packet content. Btw tcp packets can be up to 1.5kb in size, so it’s not exactly a sizable amount of content.

Gear up for the after picture:

Yeap, colors. Really, that’s all I had to say. People underestimate what a difference it makes to have the same exact output in contextual coloring. The same data just jumps up at you if you know it’s gonna be in red and you don’t have to parse the whole chunk of text to get to it. Notice how the old version and this one have the protocol column just the same, but how much easier is it now to spot different types of traffic? It makes a world of difference.

wireshark has another brilliant addition that I don’t remember from years ago. You right click on a packet, like the tcp packet selected in the screenshot above that belongs to an http stream, and go Follow TCP Stream. What you now get is a new window with aaaaall the packets that belong to this conversation assembled and you can observe the whole thing in one place. Fabulous. You can also filter the data (on message level, not packet level mind you) on host if you like. It’s fantastic.

If you thought *that* was bling, this will really blow you away. wireshark does not only assemble http conversations, it assembles a lot more protocols. For instance, I saw a talk the other day where the guy was demonstrating how he sniffed a voip conversation and then reassembled the whole thing to a simple audio file with a few clicks!

These two features, packets colored by protocol and packet assembly, alone make wireshark about 200% more useful than it used to be. And think about what has changed here. It’s still the same data. The only difference is how you represent it.

Chew on those features. We’ll be coming back to them.

Let me take you back in time to a year I like to call 1996. Those were the murky days of 28.8kbps dial-up modems and “personal websites” that said “Welcome to my website! (under construction) Here’s my email address.” It was also the prime of Netscape Navigator, the new browser that had taken the fast expanding internet by storm and become the successor to the venerable Mosaic. Netscape was about as ubiquitous as you can imagine, for all intents and purposes it was the world wide web. Anyone privileged enough to have access to the web (chiefly in universities) had Netscape running. Microsoft (already then king of the desktop), having famously discarded the internet as a fad, had nothing to offer and Internet Explorer in 1996 was a complete joke.

This is the climate in which a little Norwegian software company decided to launch their precocious new product: a web browser. It was very much the right time for that. The web browser was by no means an established product, it was a very fresh concept. Netscape was putting in all sorts of new features and had no competition (yet). So in 1996 Opera launched their Opera web browser 2.0 and the game was on. The project was a success: a couple of years down the road a lot of people knew about Opera. And it was cool to have a Norwegian company out there in the arena – one of the most hotly contested applications even to this day, the browser.

Of course, there were hard times ahead for Netscape. Microsoft made serious progress with IE and bundling it with Windows (adding to the ongoing internet revolution where more and more home users got connected) meant that Netscape’s position was threatened. Little by little it was becoming apparent that Netscape was a dinosaur next to IE, which loaded quicker, ran faster and crashed less. Netscape was not blind to this, but their counter strategy turned out to be the cyanide pill in the cocktail. They decided to scrap the existing code and start a rewrite. And thus, give or take, we never heard from Netscape again. Over the next couple of years IE pushed out the old Netscape installations (and with no new releases, IE won by default), and basically captured the whole market. This was a time when IE actually was the best product. (I know how incredible that must sound.)

Where was Opera in all of this? Catching up, it would seem. But by 2000 Opera had caught up quite nicely and Opera 4 was a very slick browser. It wasn’t as complete as IE, but it looked good and both loaded and ran faster than IE5. This seems like the first time Opera was in a position to start competing with IE. It had momentum, it had speed going for it, it had new features. Hot on the heels came Opera 5, and then Opera 6 in 2001.

This is where Opera set an important precedent. With the benefit of hindsight, knowing how incredibly difficult it has been for Firefox to unseat IE, things could have been different for Opera. I recall using Opera on and off in this period. I liked the product, I liked how lightweight it was and still worked just as well, but there was just something… off about it. It didn’t quite feel right. As a user of IE, I didn’t feel at home in Opera. The user interface was not just different, it was too different. Then and there, I realized that Opera would not be my first choice, in spite of everything it had going for it. Purely because of the user interface.

It wasn’t just me. Opera failed to build a user base. It had adoption among technology enthusiasts, but it utterly failed to break into the realm of average users. We are talking about a browser with an attractive interface, with tabbed browsing, and faster page loading. Not only that, it was more solid than just about any Microsoft application: it just did not crash. IE5, meanwhile, was on a downhill stability slope where the crashes and freezes would only get worse and worse with the proliferation of pop-ups and various nasty advertising gimmicks that the web was becoming infested with. Opera handled this so much more gracefully. But Opera was #3 (still behind Netscape) and light years behind IE in user base, without really making progress.

In 2002 Netscape returned from the dead. The rewrite everyone had long since forgotten about was released into the open, under the name Mozilla. It had little in common with the old Netscape now, the rendering engine (Gecko) was new and the user interface had been replaced (phew). Meanwhile, it was IE’s turn to stagnate, IE6 was released in 2001 just before Windows XP and there ended the trail. By 2003 I felt Mozilla was so overwhelmingly superior that I wrote an advocacy text in favor of it, to wean people off the (by now) awfully backward IE. Firebird became Firefox and a year or two later the popular Firefox revolution began for real – suddenly everyone and their grandma was using Firefox.

Today IE is the dinosaur next to Firefox. The dinosaur still dominates the market, because of the unfair advantage of being pre-installed. And for the sake of completeness, grab a can of Microsoft Anti-Competitive Practices and sprinkle the whole historical period generously. But it’s completely obvious that Firefox has long since won in every dimension, on technical merit, and in folklore.

Browser market share is a notoriously contested metric, but the general consensus (to the extent that there is one), is that IE remains first, then Firefox, then Safari (they basically pulled an IE on the Mac), finally Opera at #4.

With the release of KDE 4.1 on Windows and Mac (expected in July), Konqueror (which seems to be gaining ground on Linux) will be available on all platforms. If KDE adoption on Windows goes well, which I think is entirely plausible, Konqueror (now with the webkit engine) could relegate Opera to #5.

What is wrong with this picture? Let’s return to the features I mentioned at the start.

Tabs. Mouse gestures. User-agent switcher. Dedicated transfer window. Pop-up blocking and javascript abuse filtering. Integrated search box. Page zoom. Session saver.

Here is the big question: which browser was first to include these features? Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. Opera. That’s right, Opera prototyped all of these things. And it would actually take years before other browsers could be persuaded that these were good ideas. For heaven’s sake, Firefox didn’t include saving your tabs until version 2.0 in 2006! Futhermore, Opera has taken certain ideas from others and improved upon them. Firefox was first to save your passwords, but it works better in Opera.

Opera also predates every browser in common use except IE, its contemporary. And yet Opera has failed to make a real impact, why? It’s not because the technology isn’t good enough: Opera is still super stable and faster than anything else. Performance wise Opera completely dominates the embedded market, that should be sufficient proof. And it’s not for a lack of ideas, clearly.

To put it bluntly: why did people rally around Firefox and not Opera? Is it because Firefox is technically superior? It isn’t. Is it because Opera is closed source? No, I really don’t believe the average user understands the distinction, or cares about it. Is it because of the extensions? It is definitely a great sales pitch, but again I don’t believe that’s the reason. “Power users” adore them, but does grandma really care? I sort of doubt it. Is it because Firefox is more “secure”? It isn’t. Nor is it any less portable, you get the same Opera on every platform, just like Firefox. What’s more, I don’t think Opera has an unfair reputation on any of these points. It’s just that Opera is the browser I’m going to use if this one crashes. It is “the alternative”. It isn’t the first choice.

Taking a stand to be different is bold, and deciding to make your application different and expect users to adapt is even more bold. It doesn’t matter if your way is better. If there’s one thing you absolutely have to know about software engineering, it is this: people hate change. If you are first to the party, you set your own rules. But if you’re second, alas you have to play by someone else’s. Opera is not competing for the theoretical masses of people who don’t have a browser and are looking for one. They are ostensibly fighting to convert people from IE and Firefox.

I first heard about Opera through Norwegian media in 1999. I was excited about it and I’ve kept an eye on it ever since. I have made several attempts to adopt it (most recently because Firefox&adobe-flash is such an explosive combination, pun intended), but they’ve all failed. It is little things. How I cannot satisfactorily reproduce my Personal Bookmark Folder toolbar the way I have it set up in Firefox. Or how when I click to close a tab in Opera the tab that becomes active is not the one I want, I want the Firefox behavior. Or how I can’t use extensions that I have come to expect (nowadays it is Firefox setting the standard for browsers). Or how when loading pages from slow servers they seem to get stuck loading and never time out, which doesn’t give me a conclusive answer as to whether it’s just slow or it can’t connect. Or how when I want to configure something I can never seem to find that specific option amid a lot of other options I don’t care about. Or how the caching mechanism seems to work slightly differently, so that I have to deliberately reload pages more often. Or how the fonts until very recently (before 9.50) have been scaled different and looked wrong. A dozen little things like that and it adds up to “I don’t quite like this application”.

When I’ve spoken to people about Opera I have never heard complaints about technical shortcomings. What people always say is “it’s too different”. And it was too different from IE when Firefox came along as it is too different from Firefox now. User interface is a very delicate problem. People’s perceptions of how things are “right” or “wrong” are very subjective and entrenched, much like how in one city you feel at home and in another you don’t. Opera has stayed true to their user base over the years by doing things slightly differently. I think this is also how they have taken themselves out of the running in the browser wars, despite having a highly competitive product at least since 2000.

That isn’t to say they have failed. Opera Software is a thriving company and while they have 1% or less of the desktop market, they have made a successful land grab on the PDA/smartphone market with Opera Mobile, which is the same browser. While I find the proposition of putting a browser on a 200 pixel display is a horrible idea, I would pick Opera any day for that role.

Still, one could easily imagine a status quo where Opera is more of an influence. I think had they been more reluctant to redefine the browser this could have been the case. Ironically, most people will remember Firefox to have innovated the concept of tabbed browsing. Just like Apple “innovates” by recycling old ideas. By now Firefox has taken just about every good idea left from Opera and put it into a product and a form that people are more eager to use. That is to Opera’s credit, and yet it is a bit sad that that Opera hasn’t gotten the credit for it by attracting users.

I do actually think Opera has been converging on a lot of these little points of friction over the last couple of years, so it makes a stronger case than it used to. They have adopted some Firefox-bling that Firefox users expect to have, like an Adblock-lookalike, themes, about:config etc. Unfortunately, there is also more competition these days, from Safari (which sort of sucks, but not enough for people to rebel) and soon perhaps Konqueror.

So when I launch into the nicely pre-configured KDE 4.0 desktop the first thing I notice is that my configuration settings from KDE 3 no longer apply. What’s happened is that the ~/.kde symlink has been pointed from ~/.kde3.5 to ~/.kde4.0 and so every remaining KDE 3 application (of which I have many), is now trying to locate its settings under ~/.kde4.0, where it has no settings. In other words, every application I’ve configured from akregator to yakuake now has to be reconfigured (even though it hasn’t changed!) because of KDE 4. That stinks, I don’t want to waste time trying to reproduce the settings of some 20 applications to match exactly what they used to be.

What are my options? I can go into ~/.kde3.5/share/apps and copy every directory I care about over to ~/.kde4.0/share/apps. Then I have to do something similar for ~/.kde3.5/share/config versus ~/.kde4.0/share/config. But if that is all it takes why didn’t KDE 4 do that on the first run? There are a lot of configuration files in there, and I’ve never looked at them nor should I have any reason to, they’ve all been written by the application they belong to. Furthermore, some applications are upgraded with KDE 4.0.0, so I don’t know if it’s safe to copy their config files across. For instance, kwin-4.0.0 is one of the new packages I installed. Now, I like my existing kwin settings, and as far as they still apply I want to use them in kwin4, but I don’t know how kwin4 deals with old configuration files. Applications know this, users don’t.

What KDE 4 could have done is to duplicate ~/.kde3.5 into ~/.kde4.0 (although that could potentially grab a lot of disk space) and then selectively migrate the configuration files on a per-application basis. So kwin4 could figure out there are some things that no longer apply, discard those, and accept the rest. It would only have to do that once. And all the KDE 3 settings would still be preserved in ~/.kde3.5.

The thing to remember is that configuration settings is still user data. Losing a user’s settings is not as egregious as losing his emails, but it’s still data loss. It’s valuable information. And the more configurable your application is, the more you should care about keeping the user’s settings safe, because a complicated configuration is a lot harder to remember and reproduce than a simple one. Preserving old settings is fine, but it isn’t very useful when you don’t also migrate them to a new version of your application.