Since I've been blogging about Perl
a lot lately (trying to maintain and advance my
Planet Perl Iron Man
status), I've been neglecting to blog about other things. So here's a
new entry not about Perl, not even about programming - but about web-browsers.
I've been using Firefox (now at version 3.6) as my primary browser on my
Mandriva Linux Cooker system for a while now, and have been mostly happy
with it. Today I wanted to edit
this wikibook
titled "How to Write a Program". It had been written awfully
(see the
discussion page), but I was introduced to it after it was made
a
prerquisite of a different wikibook which I've written, and decided
that the dependency should be kept (assuming "How to Write a Program" would be
written better). Now, I could either throw away "How to Write a Program"
and start from scratch, or revamp it to submission. Right now, it seems like
it would be a combination of both.
In any case, after editing it, I've ran into a long-term
bug in Mandriva, or
in my Mandriva setup (which is exhibited in any Firefox that is running
directly on it.), which I've finally reported there (though I believe I had
reported it in the Firefox bugzilla too) and so had been unable to use Firefox
for it.
So I've been looking for an alternative browser. I ruled out
Konqueror because
KHTML has been suffering from a lot of bug report, and Konqueror is just
plain annoying. (WebKit has been forked from KHTML, and it proved to be
more popular.). I initially ruled out
Opera because it's not open-source. So
that left me only with WebKit-based browsers. I asked for recommendations
and people on #ubuntu-uk (great
channel, BTW) recommended Chromium and
GNOME's
Epiphany, and some other more obscure browsers. I've decided to check them
out.
I decided to go with
SRWare Iron as
my Chromium browser. The first thing I noticed was that the Linux download
link led to a web forum post - very unprofessional. After downloading and
unpacking the archive, it refused to run -
/home/shlomi/apps/iron-linux/iron: error while loading shared libraries:
libbz2.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
A symbolic link to libbz2.so.1.0.0 (done by root) fixed that problem, and
then it crashed with an X error. However, it started the second time and seemed
to run fine (don't know what the problem was). I noticed Chromium
was indeed very fast, but then I ran into a few glitches:
-
No menu bar. WTF? All desktop applications, including web browsers had menu
bars for generations. And I'm used to invoke the File menu and select
"New Window" and "New Tab". But Chromium does not have any menus, and it appears
to be by intentional design (but probably a crappy one).
-
If this wasn't enough, there was another more minor but still irritating
annoyance: after clicking on the URL bar and pressing double click, only
the current word is selected as opposed to the Firefox behaviour of selecting
the entire URL.
So I decided to look at Epiphany. Slower than Chromium, but maybe it will
work. Or maybe it won't. The first thing I noticed was that it looked
ugly - very unaesthetic and several widgets in the main window were slightly
out-of-place. Its URL bar also behaved unlike Firefox in the double click
respect, which was also annoying.
So what can I do? I eventually decided to use Opera for editing Wikimedia
wikis until the Firefox-influencing bug is resolved. It is fast, it has a
menu bar, and double click in the URL bar selects the entire URL. Very nice.
It's not open-source, so I'm trying not to get myself used to it, but seems
like I'll need to use it.
If you haven't done so already, I suggest you read
the
"Joel on Software" "must-read" books recommendations page. I haven't read
all the books there, but the page itself is also good. Quoting from it from
our context:
A few months ago when we released CityDesk, I got an email from a customer
complaining that he was used to doing Alt+F, Alt+S to save files. Unfortunately
due to a tiny, unnoticed bug, that keyboard shortcut saved the file and then
closed it, irritatingly. I had never noticed because I'm in the habit of doing
Alt+F,S to save files, not Alt+F,Alt+S -- a tiny difference -- and Alt+F,S
worked fine.
Once you get into the habit of doing Alt+F,Alt+S to save, it becomes so
automatic you don't think of it as Alt+F,Alt+S. You think of it as save. And
when you push the "save" button in your brain and the file you were working on
goes away, it makes you feel like you're not in control of your environment.
It's a small thing, but about the fourth time that it happens, you're going to
be seriously unhappy. That's why I spent several hours tracking down this bug
and fixing it. In a bizarre application of Murphy's Law, this fix led to a
cascade of events that caused us to waste something like a week, but that's
neither here nor there. It was worth the time spent. This is what it means to
be concerned about usability. If you still think that something as small as how
long you hold down the Alt key when you activate a menu command doesn't matter,
well, your software is going to make people unhappy. These tiny inconsistencies
are what makes Swing applications so unbearably annoying to use, and in my
opinion it's why there are virtually no commercially successful Java GUI
applications.
If I can't go to "File → New Tab" in the menubar to start a new tab then I'm
going to be unhappy. If I have to triple click the URL bar in order to select
the entire URL, then I'm going to be unhappy. These tiny things are why I can't
use either Chromium or Epiphany. (And frankly, a lack of a menubar is a huge
UI screw-up, not a tiny one).
At the moment, I'm just ranting, but I am planning on reporting these bugs
to the bug trackers of the appropriate projects. I just hope Google won't
think the lack of menu-bar in Chromium is a feature. "Welcome to Google UIs".
(Welcome to Google Hell…).
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