Ideally it would fix the **** problem itself. It astonishes me that mail clients still aren’t intelligent enough that if, say, authentication is disabled and the server returns an error indicating that auth is required to send mail the client will spit out an error message (ranging from useful in Mozilla to completely hopeless in Evolution) rather than turning on auth and trying the user name and password used for incoming mail. The issue is removing the cruft in most cases. See the m/b prefs removal.

– Chris

Indeed. But do you think it would be better if it displayed no error at all, and just silently failed, so the user sits there clicking buttons and getting no feedback at all?

The bookmark manager UI sucks – should we strip the bookmarks feature out of the browser completely?

I’d be quite happy to see the JS console disappear from the UI in its current form, but it should be replaced by something which can do the support job better.

Sally: “Does it really get in your way though? It doesn’t bother me, tucked away under the steering wheel. I mean I only ever see it when I’m pulling the cat out from under the seat in the parking lot at the veterinarian.”

Bob: “Sure, I see what you’re saying… out of sight, out of mind… Well, I guess its a little different for some of us. When I’m driving I think about it, the lever, that is. I know its there. Its hard to explain but its makes me feel edgy. My car is so complicated as it is, I just wish I could…”

Sally: “But Bob, its a car and cars are complicated things. Most people seem to be able to use them alright. Well, I guess I could relate to your situation better if the lever were instead a big flashing red button in the middle of the dash, but its not, its out of the way, just like is should be.”

Bob: “But its still there, which doesn’t seem right. I don’t use it, most drivers I know don’t use it, and cars should be designed for drivers right?”

–POW!!–

Sally: “Bob! What was that?”

Bob: “Err, its just…”

Sally: “Bob! Look! Smoke is coming from under the hood! Pull over! Oh, no! …what should we do!?”

I don’t think removing error dialogs is a good way to improve a product.

If MS changes the color of the blue screen… that doesn’t fix the crashes.

/wonders why this hit planet again.

Er… so you’re saying that end users don’t need or want support?

Outlook Express insists on giving out a mangled string of completely opaque internal error messages when it fails to carry out some action. A trained support agent can identify the experienced problem and prescribe a solution just by having this string read out over the phone. Does this mean that the OE error results box isn’t a zombie abortion from hell? No, it does not.

The JS console isn’t and wasn’t ever meant as a support mechanism. Its intended purpose is to have a quick syntax checker for hackers. Hackers are not normal people. Kill-kill.

– Chris

So what if 95% of the users don’t use it. For the remaining 5% of the users (the developers which actually make the content that the remaining 95% consume) it is not just a gimmick, it is a very useful tool. They shouldn’t be told to resort to extensions for every little thing.

Robert, implementing new features like Google does it can seriously hurt the discoverability of the feature. And if the users don’t know about feature x, the usefulness of feature x decreases a lot. For example, they let you search using inurl:something, but you have to know it is there, you can’t just find it. Their documentation about that isn’t particularly great either, but ideally it can be found without documentation anyway. So you’ll have to watch out with overdoing the ‘smart addition’ of new features.

Btw, I really love you bookmarks improvement suggestions, and I hope they will be implemented!

~Grauw

Er… so you’re saying that end users don’t need or want support? I’m not saying users want the JS console, I’m saying it’s needed until there’s a better way of getting the information out of it to people doing support.

PNG support isn’t a UI feature, so it doesn’t count. Intelligent Bookmarks is an ideal example of how to add functionality without messing up the UI, so it’s definitely a good shipper.

Almost everything can be explained in terms of “fix the interface without removing things”. The Go menu, for instance, is just an awful way of accessing recent history. In this particular case it serves no purpose whatsoever, so should be excised.

The Go menu, bookmarks-in-the-sidebar, Live Bookmarks and all the mail integration besides “send” should be cut out of the default build. Context menus everywhere should be viciously attacked. The Options UI should be given no mercy. None of these things make Firefox less usable. They might very well make Firefox sufficiently great that it makes Epiphany obsolete, which I would like very much.

– Chris