Comments on: Confusing Cross Browser UI Design

By: Jim Battle

Jim Battle — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 04:30:24 +0000

Something like 8% of men are colorblind (and less than 1% of the women). Rather than having a solid color bar to convey something important, like the trustworthiness of a web site, why not combine the color with something more geometric? For instance, having the URL bar white on the left and red on the right; the less trusted, the bigger the red portion. Or maybe make it striped, and the “duty cycle” of redness gets greater as trust goes down.

Is there a firefox extension that meddles with colors to simulate what things look like to a colorblind user (or more than one kind of colorblindness)?

By: Chris C

Chris C — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:55:47 +0000

Normal people don’t care what colour the URL bar is. They don’t know what SSL is. The odds of them stopping and consulting the manual when their URL bar goes red are very long. The correct solution to this is to come up with a better way of handling secure sites than by introducing some UI widgets which will ultimately be completely ingored. My personal fave is not allowing sites which are suspected as being insecure at all, and waiting for those sites which break to get fixed.

– Chris

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 14:37:05 +0000

@beltzner: according to the MS website “validation certificates” are required for a green URL bar. This is beyond that of a normal cert (not yet decided what). So presumably that’s a high trust situation. Hence a non-phishing site.

So it does make sense. What I don’t get is the color yellow, since that’s established as “secure”.

By: asd

asd — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 13:51:50 +0000

if yellow is ‘safe’, why not use green for ‘Suspicious Website’
No use in using color coding if the wrong colors are picked in the first place.

Why not use blue for https sites instead of yellow. Most banks commonly use blue as one of their main colors, because it reflects their stability and ‘thrustworthy’.

By: Robin Monks

Robin Monks — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 12:49:39 +0000

Well, you can always use my favorite color, which I also release into public domain:

#FFCC33

Oh, the beauty!

By: beltzner

beltzner — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 08:08:03 +0000

When I first looked at the IE7 URL bar colouring scheme I thought to myself, drat, that’s a good point about yellow meaning “caution” instead of “secure”. The more I think about it though, the less I’m sure that their design will work as intended.

Your post actually shows a potential weakness in the IE7 colouring design. It turns out that “green” doesn’t have anything to do with phishing in IE7. What it means, in fact, is that the site is SSL secured. I have doubts that people will understand why some sites go “green” and others don’t, and further worry about the reaction to a person completing their banking transaction, logging out, and then seeing their browser “go white.” What will this hypothetical person think that means? Have they just been subtly told to “not go”?

My primary concern is that the poor web user is already confused enough about what an SSL connection means, and I’m afraid of adding confusion by mixing in the concept of phishing.

By: ChrisJ

ChrisJ — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 07:55:17 +0000

I am a long time Mozilla supporter, but I have to admit that Microsoft’s color coding makes sense, more sense than Firefox’s when I come to think of it.

Why not cooperate with them and Opera to stabilize a uniform color coding across browsers, and, depending on the output of these discussions, possibly change Firefox’s in upcoming releases?

Of course, using yellow with other semantics would terribly confuse users when they upgrade, so it should no longer be used, should the color coding change in Firefox.

By: Humpty

Humpty — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 00:24:36 +0000

Some firefox themes change the colour coding and some don’t have the lock in the location bar. These should be standardised.