David Emery OnlineCurse of the gecko
12 July 2007
Gecko, the underlying rendering engine that powers Firefox, seems to be cursed at the moment. Well, maybe cursed is going a little far but two things have caught my eye this week that use it and and seem to be loosing their way:
New URL highlighting feature in FireFox 3 aims to make phishing harder
Flock first, as it’s easiest: what on earth have they done to their website? Not only is it truly awful, but the site they had before was pretty good and didn’t even need redesigning. Flock the browser as a concept I’ve always found a little redundant – why do I need something that lets me blog or post to Flickr on my browser, when I can just go to my blog’s admin page or Flickr.com in said browser instead?
They used to have quite a few very smart people on board (Chris Messina amongst many others), and when they did I was always under the impression that while the whole concept might be slightly flawed, they could well come up with some interesting innovations that other browser vendors could use. Sadly, all those smart people have left and I think this website is the beginning of the end for Flock.
The first link is part of a much more worrying trend coming from the Firefox team; they seem to have really lost their way. In my opinion, from what I’ve seen so far from Firefox 3 it’s going to be a really disappointing release, with no massive new features that really affect the user experience significantly. This release is coming at exactly the wrong time for them as well – they need a great release now, with the combined threats of a re-invigorated Microsoft and the new cross-platform Safari.
This url feature is a perfect case in point – it’s just a really poor implementation of reasonably good idea. Yes, differentiating the actual domain name in a url is a good idea to try and help cut down phishing but achieving that by dimming out the rest of the url is not the way to do it. Most of the time the most important part of a url is the bit after the domain name, as you almost always know what site you’re on and hence are much more concerned about where in that site you are.
Dimming this information is not a good idea.
In addition, on the Mac dimmed text in a text field signifies placeholder text that disappears when you click, so when viewing this field I’m half inclined to expect that all the grey text will disappear, just leaving the domain name. This of course touches on a much wider problem that Firefox has – namely attempting to have a OS native look and feel, while simultaneously trying to keep all the versions looking and working roughly the same. This is, of course, impossible.
Sure, this example is a small minor feature but it’s quite symptomatic of the changes I’ve seen that are going into Firefox 3 – hopefully they can get their act together before it’s too late as I’m sure no-one wants Firefox to disappear.