Wednesday, January 26 2005 @ 09:18 PM EST Contributed by: glosser
Blake Ross, one of the creators of Firefox, describes why useability is king and how invisibility is the key in this blog entry titled "The Firefox Religion". I normally don't post blog entries, but I found this one an interesting read.
One of the questions I’m asked most frequently by innocent observers of the Firefox phenomenon is: “What’s all the fuss about? It just surfs the web.”
You’d think this would be frustrating—I did surrender any semblance of a normal adolescent life to work on it, after all—but few people understand that this is actually the highest compliment they could offer. Building “just a browser” that “just surfs the web” was, after all, the original intent. These were the same people sighing that Google just searched the web 7 years ago.
You’d be hard pressed to believe it with the ongoing media circus, but Firefox has humble origins in a product that—if everything went as planned—was designed to be invisible to the person using it. I remember sitting on IRC with Dave, Ben and Asa painstakingly debating feature after feature, button after button, pixel after pixel, always trying to answer the same basic question: does this help mom use the web? If the answer was no, the next question was: does this help mom’s teenage son use the web? If the answer was still no, the feature was either excised entirely or (occasionally) relegated to config file access only. Otherwise, it was often moved into an isolated realm that was outside of mom’s reach but not her son’s, like the preferences window.
This policy emerged from our basic belief that, for the 99% of the world who don’t shop at Bang & Olufsen, a technology should be nothing more than a means to an end.
