Re: [Epiphany] "I feel lucky" preference on Address bar

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo debian org>]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 06:02:01PM +0200, Gavrila wrote:

 > I think you misunderstood what I wrote. Since this project born to
 > give a REALLY simple but powerful browser, one of the line of devs is
 > to not implement gui options to configure "tweaky" things. And that's
 > fine for me, just because that's why they decided to fork from
 > galeon. The question indeed I was asking is: why to negate the
 > possibility to 'hack' these settings when someone is able to?

 Having to "hack" the settings/preferences in is just as wrong.  While
 gconf is in general a good idea, it's prone to be abused in this kind
 of way.  What is the reason, from a HCI point of view, for making
 something that's, no matter how you look at it, a _user_ preference
 _not_ configurable in an accesible way?

 > I mean: the young and inexpert user, won't be able to tweak anything
 > and since the gui is clean and simple it will be all "click 'n' go",
 > but the expert user will know where to go to tweak and configure as
 > his taste says.

 Yesterday the reason for this behaviour dawned upon me.  "blank:"
 reads:

    You can start browsing web pages either by typing a web address
    (example: www.google.com) or a search phrase (example: best computer
    shop) in the address entry and then pressing the Enter key. [...]

 Now try this: type "holiday inn" in the location bar.  Presto, you are
 taken to an extremely obscure URL but it's probably the "right" one.
 In other words, if you type the common name for an admitedly wide range
 of things (companies and organizations particularly, and persons to a
 lesser extent), it "just works".  In plaintext: you are getting rid of
 that "unintuitive" URL thing and are replacing it with something
 "normal" people can understand.

 What this means is that you have drawn an extremely thick line between
 so-called power users and what Gavrila calls "young and inexpert".  You
 start with the assumption that these "young and inexpert" users not
 only do not want to learn, but they are incapable of it.  If you can't
 see why that's wrong I won't waste my time trying to make it clear to
 you.

 > What do you think about this?

 Honestly?  I think it's bull.

 Marcelo