[Usability] Re: Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Chrome Changes

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Mar 3, 2006, at 4:57 AM, Kristoffer Lundén wrote:
> On 3/2/06, Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com> wrote:
> > [The status bar] is a terrible place to show extra information, 
> > because one of the things that usability testing has shown over and 
> > over again is that very few people ever see information put down 
> > there. So if you'd said 'an excellent place to hide information in 
> > plain sight', I'd agree...
>
> I'm sure that testing has shown that, but it's still making it even
> worse to just remove it.

It's only making it worse if the people who don't know/bother to toggle 
the status bar's visibility get more benefit from having the URLs there 
than they would get from the extra space. For that to be true, there 
would need to be a decent chunk of people who are savvy enough to study 
URLs while hovering over links, but *aren't* savvy enough to turn on 
"View" > "Status Bar" the first time they ever use the browser. That's 
hard to believe.

If you're trying to protect people in general against phishing, you'll 
need a much more visible and understandable mechanism.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/