Re: comments on draft-barth-mime-sniffing

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 5:50 AM, Mark Nottingham<mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
> Speaking personally -- that's all fine and good and understandable, but why
> can't I as a user turn it off, either as a preference or on a case-by-case
> basis? Sometimes "going the extra mile" gets it wrong, and as with any
> heuristic, there needs to be a way to say "no, don't do that!"
>
> E.g., how hard is it to have an unintrusive non-modal indication that the
> type was sniffed, giving the user the option to view it without sniffing (as
> FF does when it asks you if you want to remember a password)? This isn't
> perfect (e.g., because there can still be unwanted side effects of loading
> the document with the incorrect media type), but it's a good step in the
> right direction...
>
> I know that implementing that take developer time, but how much developer
> time has been sunk on these discussions already? ;)

UI is very very rarely the answer. I believe chrome as a rule to only
add UI if they think that over 90% of their users will use it. In
firefox I don't think we have an explicit rule like that, however we
are still very conservative about adding things to the UI. The reason
is that if you add UI for too many scenarios you'll very quickly end
up with a cluttered UI. While your proposal is something that users
that don't understad/care what it is can simply ignore, it's still
something that takes attention away for such users and leaves them
wondering what is going on. Imagine getting one or two of such an
"information bar" on every page you visit, for things like popup
blockers, content sniffers, security notifications, use of deprecated
features etc. Very quickly this will become very annoying and unlikely
to no longer fulfill its purpose.

One think that we often tell people that want something added to
firefox UI is: Build an extension that does that, then get people
excited about it and build a user base. Once we see that there is a
real desire for this, we have much better data to make an informed
decision if we should add it to the default firefox configuration.

I'll also point to the success of firefox compared to the success of
the old mozilla suite. Basically the two were the same browser, the
main difference was that firefox had a severely simplified UI by
removing buttons and menu options.

So it's not at all about how hard something is to implement, it's
about if it'll make a good product or not.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 15:48:38 UTC