Re: stacked buttons and address bar... why?

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>]

Hi Matthew,

On Fri, 22 Jul 2005, Matthew Thomas wrote:

> That someone is derogatory does not necessarily mean they're wrong.

I don't believe I said the OP was totally wrong, just that if he was 
trying to be constructive, he'd have to try a little different approach. 
:-)

> >  As for the buttons on the main toolbar: in the way Epiphany is designed to
> >  be used, the Bookmarks editor and the History window play a prominent
> >  role.
>
> Is "the way Epiphany is designed to be used" documented anywhere?

It is: look in the Epiphany Help, under "Browsing the Web", "Managing 
your Bookmarks", and further.

> I find it quite frustrating that I have to open the History window so 
> often, for example, instead of using the Go menu. Why doesn't the Go 
> menu contain a global history, like it does in Firefox and MSIE/Mac 
> and like the History menu does in Safari?

As far as I can see, the differences between Epiphany and Firefox w.r.t. 
the Go menu are that Epiphany keeps a list of most frequently visited 
websites and Firefox a list of most recently visited websites; and that 
Firefox allows activation of the History sidebar (that's one extension 
waiting to be developed for Epiphany). I'm sadly not aware of how 
MSIE/Mac or Safari do it.

Can you provide a use case that shows the frustrating part of having to 
open the History window?

> >  And you may not search webpages often, but others do, and the Find
> >  button is the quickest way to do it when one is not familiar with
> >  the keyboard shortcuts.
>
> At the expense of preventing them from learning the keyboard shortcut. 
> (The "Go" button has the same problem.)

Are you serious? I cringe everytime I see people use the mouse to move 
from one form field to another, but many people insist that remembering 
to use Tab to do that is too difficult for them. The same thing goes for 
the Find keyboard shortcut.

> >  As for the Homepage button, I don't really know how often it is used
> >  generally - but arguably more often than the Forward button, that you
> >  don't seem to think of as "wasted space".
>
> What do people use home pages for? Have there been any studies on this?

If there have been any, you're more likely to know about them than I am, 
Matthew. A search for 'homepage web browser' on Google Scholar doesn't 
turn up much interesting in this regard, in any case.

> "We always figured there'd be a much more sophisticated way of navigating, 
> but no one ever came up with it. Things like the Back and forward button, we 
> never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface." 
> <http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,57661,00.html>
>
> (IMHO, any browser with Back and Forward buttons doesn't fulfil Epiphany's 
> claim of "the simplest interface possible for a browser".)

If Marco would have started from scratch with Epiphany at this point in 
time, maybe he would have designed that part differently, who knows. 
(well maybe Marco does ;) Epiphany has proven to be open to paradigm 
shifts, however a major change like you're describing would require 
heavy prototyping and testing first, and someone's got to do it.

> >  Sounds exactly like the impression it *should* make on first time users!
>
> Really? Would it perhaps be better if the browser tried as hard as possible 
> to stay out of the way?

I don't see the contradiction here. The verbosity of the GUI to me seems 
to invite the user to try it out, without having to be afraid that some 
mysterious button does something unexpected or irreversable. YMMV.

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen	   ***	student of Artifical Intelligence
email: reinout cs vu nl    ***	mobile phone: +31-6-44360778
www.vanschouwen.info       ***	help mee met GNOME vertalen: nl.gnome.org