It used to be a standard design goal for computer software to give the user the feeling that they're in control. The trend these days is in the opposite direction: they want you to know who's boss. The central message is "we own you, sucka".
A lot of work went into giving the user that sense of "being in control", and I suspect that a lot of you are unaware of how much thought it took to establish that illusion (or "virtuality", as Ted Nelson might put it).
Consider that when you move the mouse, the mouse pointer moves in response. It does not, for example, dart around the screen on it's own to give you hints as to what you should do next.
And once it went without saying that the software you used yesterday would look the same as the software you use today-- if an upgrade was going to happen, you needed to explicitly do an upgrade, and if you did do one, you would do it when you had the time and inclination to deal with changes. And if you didn't like what you got after the upgrade, there was an obvious way to get back the old behavior ("where did I put those damn disks...").
In contrast, these days it seems like every single software project is doing their best to make sure you know who's boss (hint: it isn't you).
If you're using software that works over the web, they obviously have the capability to change it at will, but even if it's code you run on your own machine, it will invariably try to claim the right to automatically push software changes to you.
The excuse for this is typically "security updates", but they don't limit it to just security patches, they happily push UI changes to you.
We're now living in a world where everything is "free", but nothing is yours--
Use gmail if you want, but any time you check your mail, you may find that it's functionality has changed-- a particular favorite of mine is when they switched to using a javascript window for message composition. There was no doubt some rationale for doing this, but the non-standard behavior of that thing is a continual low-grade irritation. I feel like I've all but stopped using email because gmail is subtly unpleasant in so many ways email has stopped being fun (let's see I want to save this attachment, that's this button right? Oops that was "Save to Drive", and they mean their drive, not mine).
But the primary example of this disease that I have in mind is Mozilla Firefox, a jewel of the open source movement (as the great Randall Monroe has put it), the software project that succeeded in preserving the free and open web against the evil clutches of Microsoft...
So, I'm taking this opportunity to air some long-standing gripes about Firefox, but there are plenty of other examples out there, it's a far more widespread disease.
My perspective on these things: I run Firefox on Linux-- aka GNU/Linux-- (mostly Ubuntu, for now, though I plan to return to the Debian fold), but prefer to live inside of emacs as much as I can... I'm a firm believer in keyboard-oriented interfaces (even awkward ones) for the experienced user. I also, by the way, don't use or care about "smart phones"...
positive changes
I'm about to complain a lot, as is my wont, about changes to Firefox, but there have been a number of positive improvements with Mozilla/Firefox over the years. A big one is the introduction of tabbed browsing (not quite invented by Firefox, though certainly popularized by it, though it now has some later improvements first introduced by Opera).
Tabbed browsing is really remarkably useful. It's one UI change that Firefox slipped in that I personally can't complain about. I typically begin to research something by opening a new browser window (Control-n) and searching the web (with duckduckgo.com), then I read down the list of results, middle-clicking on likely-looking items. That opens each page in a new tab in the background, and when I'm ready to start reading them I switch between the already rendered pages with Control-Next Page, zapping the ones that are no good with a Control-w.
Another cool thing: it used to be that every time you did a Firefox upgrade, it broke half of your third-party addons, but it evidently occurred to someone there that they couldn't possibly switch to broadcasting automated upgrades if they didn't do better than that: all of a sudden they discovered the concept of stable internal APIs. I didn't think they had it in them.
And there are still more I might talk about... memory management has improved quite a bit (in ways that I vaugely thought weren't possible, even).
And now that we've got that annoying positive stuff out of the way, let's get started--
jargon: gooey hamburger
Oh, but first, some jargon...
There are lots of problems with graphical user interfaces, and a particularly bad one is that even if the interface is reasonably easy to figure out, if anything goes wrong you may find you don't have any way to talk about it. Good luck filing a bug report if all you can say is stuff like "I clicked on that thingie that comes up after you move the widget that's next to the whirling eyeball"
So, before we proceed, allow me to introduce a piece of jargon...
There's been a uh, trend of late toward, uh, simplifying interfaces, and hiding all operations in one place, under what I've heard called "the hamburger menu":
I suppose you might think of this as the "Chi'en" trigram (unicode character 2630: ☰), which would indicate "Heaven, Sky, Air". That would would indeed cover everything.
flipping hamburgers
In the comments to this jwz post, LionsPhil says:
Funny thing there is that I got finally fed up of Opera when they copied Chrome's "you don't need a menubar, let's just hide it all under one button" braindamage*, and moved to Firefox.
Guess what Firefox then did shortly after I actually got all comfortable and settled.
(This is something a lot of us don't get. What's with the Chrome-envy? If we wanted to switch to Chrome, we could just do it.)
firefox adware
With a virgin firefox profile, when you Control-t to get a new tab, it first opens up with a screen full of obscure blather.
Allow me to translate:
Now when you open New Tab, you'll also see sites we think might be interesting to you.
Back in the bad old days of Old Tab, when you opened a new tab, it would default to what you've defined as your "Home Page" in the Edit->Preferences menu. That's almost guaranteed to be a site that's "interesting to you", but the Mozilla team, I am sure, knows better.
Some of the sites you will see may be suggested by Mozilla and may be sponsored by a Mozilla partner.
Got that? Mozilla is dipping it's toe, ever so delicately into selling your eyeballs. The bold protector of all that is open and free has now become AdWare.
The really insidious thing about this, I think is that an experienced user like myself rarely encounters this "feature", it's something that you have to be a newbie to see.
I theorize that they get tired of cranky fellows like myself ranting at them, and are looking for ways to rake some bucks off of the young and naive without people like myself calling them on it.
We'll always indicate which sites are sponsored.
That's nice:
In order to provide this service, Mozilla collects and uses certain analytics information relating to your use of the tiles in accordance with out Privacy Notice. You can turn off this service by clicking the gear ...
That gear hieroglyphic is of course down under the hamburger menu, but you didn't need to be told that, because everything is-- oh wait: they're referring to a different gear hieroglyphic, which looks exactly like the other one but it appears on the new tab, and of course, does something completely different. (Ah, the intuitive nature of graphical interfaces... I don't know why I ever have any problems with them.)
By the way, I myself tend to open new tabs with Control-t, but if you didn't know that "shortcut" there's a simple way of discovering it, starting from the menu bar, it's the first entry under the "File" menu pad... oh wait, you can't see the menu bar by default now. But it pops open when you hit the Alt key, everyone knows that right? And there must be another more hip, graphical way to do a New Tab, right? I bet it's right under the hamburger menu... uh, no... maybe it's in the right-click menu on each tab? Nope... oh wait, I bet it's the plus-sign on the far right on the tab bar. Yes, there you go. And the mouse-over text tells you about the Control-t shortcut too. It's so obvious.
Anyway, where were we?
You can turn off this service by clicking the gear ... and unchecking 'Include suggested sites' in the New Tab Controls menu
Now myself, I might've called that option "Don't fucking spy on me you assholes", and stuck it in under the Security menu, but I guess the "New Tab Controls" is an okay place for it-- presuming you can figure out what they're talking about.
So if I uncheck that buried feature, the Sponsored link goes away (but... does this really mean it's stopped spying on me?).
And it's funny there's no obvious way to get back the old behavior, where new tabs show your home page.
Got it!
I sure have.
there's (almost) always a way
It does seem that there's a way to get the old tab behavior back via messing with Addons. This guy has some hints that might (still) do the job.
He's actually remarkably, touchingly naive about it... he's all happy and pleased with himself for having found a way to get new tabs to behave the way he wants them to, but doesn't seem to realize that that was once the default behavior. The fact that there's no option in the preferences menu to behave the way it used to is a slap in the face to long-standing users...
the tabs-on-top fluster-cluck
Here's a great cause célèbre you probably won't care about.
Ever since mozilla/firefox had introduced "tabbed browsing", they had put the row of tabs down low, right up against the content window. There's an intuitive logic to this: you use the tabs to select different content. The stuff below comes from outside, the stuff above are the controls you use to manipulate the browser.
The chief designer at Mozilla in those days, Alex Faaborg, decided to change this, bumping the tab bar up higher, and putting controls down below it. When they did this, I found it a bewildering violation of the whole concept, there had always been this boundary between content and controls that was gone now. Didn't they get the "metaphor" of tabs selecting a window of content much like file-folder tabs?
I had to watch some videos of talks by Faaborg where he explained his reasoning to get even a clue as to why that was supposed to be an improvement. I have to say I still find it puzzling: he goes off into generalities that only barely make sense.
I gathered that the new idea is to put stuff that's associated with the content of the tab on the tab, so there's a visual indication of the association. E.g. the location window changes URL as you change tabs, so the URL box should be on the tab, not above it.
Neither way of thinking about this is wrong, exactly, but the older idea, a boundary between controls and content (or between Mine and Theirs) had been in use for many years. This change is just big enough to annoy a long-standing user, but not big enough to impress a new user as being a good idea. I would guess newbies don't even notice, and my readers-- if any-- may have trouble figuring out why I'm going on about this.
The central point is "who is in control?". You upgrade your browser one day, and suddenly see this weird thing happen for no apparent reason. You actually need a good deal of inside knowledge for this change to even have a hope of making any sense. Faaborg has talked about this repeatedly over the years, with to my ear quite a bit of defensiveness, making the excuse that "First they hate it, then they love it."
I would guess that that's an exaggeration and it's more like "First they hate it, then they get used to it enough to stop thinking about hiring a hit man", but I want to place the emphasis on the first part: "First they hate it." This man was willing to do something to us that we hated and the justification for it seems very weak. Would you let someone like this near your users?
Recently, I reviewed one of Faaborg's talks, Designing Firefox, and there are a few stray remarks that make me think I actually missed the point of this tabs-on-top move: there was some sort of scheme afoot for a Firefox "app store" (I guess it's this thing-- does anyone use it?): they wanted to give these apps the ability to take over the entire UI. As you switched tabs, you might see an entirely different set of controls appearing on each tab...
My feeling had been that they were violating the old boundary between Mine and Theirs, but what Faaborg was really doing was moving the boundary. He was giving away the UI to third party developers.
This prospect does not exactly thrill me... even without indulging in "firefox apps", I've been severely annoyed by sites that do stuff like mess with my right click menu. Even worse is the way firefox lets pages with embedded video steal my keyboard commands... e.g. if I switch to a tab with a flash ad, I typically can't even zap the tab with a Control-w.
inconstant UI and inconstant customization
The first thing we were told when complaining about the tabs-on-top change was we could change it back easily enough: there was an option under the View menu for this. Then later, after another upgrade, the option went away. We were told you now needed to install an Addon to fix this:
Tabs On Bottom.
I can only guess how long the addon will keep working. Twice now I've had to do research just to keep the UI from changing, when will the third time be?
The second time, when the about:config preference stopped working, I very carefully documented the problem and reported it as a bug... along with many other people. I've since given up on reporting firefox bugs.
My suspicion is that their commitment to user customization like this is very shallow-- it's more a matter of tossing bones to get people to shut up for awhile.
See, if you only gradually screw-over your established user-base, you can convey an impression of only muted outrage... and not incidentally, it lets you tell yourself that you've won over the skeptics with your great design genius.
jwz switches from tab to pepsi
But now let me go from a firefox annoyance you probably don't care about to one that I don't care about.
Jamie Zawinski-- one of the original Netscape programmers, and a key founders of the Mozilla project-- wrote a piece about how he's given up on using Firefox in favor of Safari, because he can't stand tabbed browsing. Now, a hell of a lot of us find tabs pretty useful, and I must say I suspect that the main reason he dislikes them is that they weren't part of his original design, but nevertheless, I sympathize with his experience: he upgrades firefox, sees that they've slipped in some odd feature he doesn't want, then he goes looking for a way to turn it off... and then later that stops working and he has to find still another way.
The Firefox UI is a moving target. It is under constant "improvement", which means "change" which means every few months I'm forced to upgrade it and shit has moved around and I need to re-learn how to do a task that I was happily doing before.
... this kind of thing happens with Firefox all the time in general too. A new version comes out, some random behavior has changed, and either you suck it up, or you go play whack-a-mole in the minefield of preferences checkboxes.
The customizeability of Firefox is one of it's main virtues: the fact that the Mozilla project is indifferent about supporting it's customizations is genuinely a problem.
the war on customization
Every now and then, there's something everyone throughout the computer industry seems to seize on and use as convenient justification for whatever they believed already (e.g. we're now watching everyone use Steve Jobs to conclude it's okay to be an asshole).
One of the key events of recent decades was that Facebook beat competitors like Myspace. The now universally presumed reason for this is that Myspace gave people too many options. Myspace pages were a mess, Facebook was simpler, the obvious conclusion: fascism is good. The little people out there clearly can't handle it if you give them too much freedom.
If you ask me, Firefox's primary advantage is that it's so customizable, but you get the sense that they don't really want you to use those customizations.
They periodically remove or hide features I've been using for years-- like the ability to turn off javascript in the user preferences.
Atrios (aka Duncan Black) has noticed this in the realm of twitter: Customizeability Is The Enemy:
I really don't know when things started to change, but once upon a time you could customize every program in every way. Now many applications don't even let you change the damn font size. Something something "single user experience" something something but I don't know why.
tacitus voltaire comments:
1) allowing customizeability is a big pain in the ass for programmers
2) software is not a product any longer, so there is no incentive to improve it. rather, it is now given away free to increase audience share for the advertising or data collection where the money is now made
There are indeed many web sites out there with some not-so-subtle airs of fascism about them. Meetup is not at all amused if meeting organizers try to encourage members to email each other directly. (If you "met" here, you stay here, cause we own you, sucka.)
the pui gui
Ted Nelson, in his Geeks Bearing Gifts (version 1.1, p 125), argues that the advent of the GUI essentially killed the users ability to write their own programs, and I think that's only a slight exaggeration. As he puts it:
... the computer was being reduced to office equipment, not the extension of possibilities and imagination that originally came with the raw computer.
In the dark days when I needed to do stuff on Windows, I often did a lot of work with recorded macros in MS Word, often with additional edits to the recorded Basic. For some reason though, attempts at doing a system level macro recorder come and go, but always seem to flop.
(By the way, when Ted Nelson-- arguably, the first software designer-- talks about the GUI, he uses his own invented term PUI, because he does that. The P refers to PARC: he wants to remind us that what we call "the" GUI is a variation of just one design, the old Xerox PARC interface.)
I was once using some software on Macintoshes (Cricket Graph, I think) to plot experimental data, and it was remarkable how ridiculously tedious it was. I needed to do the same steps on every graph I was producing, and there wasn't any way at all to automate the process-- sure, doing the first one was reasonably easy to figure out, so you could give the software some points for "discoverabilty"... it was a shallow learning curve, but it maxed out at way too low a level.
the hamburger menu:
They seem to have decided they want to support mobile devices-- I personally couldn't care less, but that's fine, why not?
But they also seem to have decided that Firefox needs a single default set-up, and that if possible all users should be nudged toward using this One True Way.
So even if you're on a desktop-- even if you've been using Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox for two decades-- you get an interface optimized for a cellphone. Unless you jump through an ever-changing array of hoops to get something else...
Now, there's a real difficulty to supporting variant behavior: it's hard for any one developer to notice the impact of a change on anything but their own favorite set-up. It's easy enough to say they need to do thorough Q/A, but even if a bug is reported later (after the developer has stopped thinking about the feature, and is trying to move on to something else), it's inevitable that they're going to prioritize a fix very low if it only impacts a small percentage of users using a particular customization. It's also entirely possible for there to be problems that only effect people using a particular configuration of multiple customizations, there's a "combinatoric explosion" of different configurations that may need to be tested.
My contention: the wrong answer is to eliminate customizations, particularly to eliminate long-standing ones. ("Never take away a feature from the user", ever heard that one? Firefox struggles with it.)
The right answer would be a suite of automated tests that verifies that the browsers behavior is unchanged, and does so automatically, checking various different configurations.
And I speculate that the trouble with this idea is buried in the nature of the GUI itself. As Ted Nelson points out, along with the introduction of the GUI interface the user all but lost the ability to program, and that actually makes it fairly difficult to automate tests of user-level behavior.
Trying to make software manageable by reducing it's capabilities is a bad deal for the user, particularly when you consider the needs of virtual users and test automation.
when they die, where are you
Adrienne LaFrance talks about a cluster of problems with the modern web: When Amazon Dies:
When you purchase a movie from Amazon Instant Video, you’re not buying it, exactly. It’s more like renting indefinitely.
This distinction matters if your notion of “buying” is that you pay for something once and then you get to keep that thing for as long as you want. Increasingly, in the world of digital goods, a purchasing transaction isn’t that simple.
In other words, unless you’ve taken the time to download each title you purchase to stream—Amazon recommends you do this “promptly after your purchase” in its Instant Video Terms of Use, by the way—your access to that film depends on a variety of factors, all of which are outside of your control. Amazon, which didn’t respond to multiple interview requests for this story, doesn’t even have to go out of business for you to lose the film you bought.
In order to keep a film in your collection watchable, there’s a constellation of pieces that must be in place: The software that streams the video has to work, the devices you want to use to run that software have to remain compatible with it, and the film itself has to be accessible on that software. None of these things is guaranteed. The films you buy could already, at any time, automatically disappear from your Instant collection. (Again, that's right there in the Amazon service terms.)
A friend of mine once lost a large collection of is original photographs because he made the mistake of thinking that the Flickr site was a reliable place to keep them.
custom fox
By the way, one of the firefox customizations I use is this: Flash and Video Download.
My net video watching habits involve downloading videos to my laptop's hardrive where I can watch them later even without net access (or worrying about buffering and so on). And eventually I archive videos by burning them to DVD-Rs, so even if they disappear from the net I should still be able to watch them again years later.
Though myself, I don't use the big streaming services like Netflix, partly as a matter of principle (anything that gets too big makes me nervous), and partly because I don't think they carry a lot of stuff I'm interested in.
Okay, so they've got Ouran Host Club now, but only with dubs, not subs? No one who cares about anime wants to watch a dub-- they invariably use these horrible voice actors from LA who make everything sound like the Brady Bunch.
For the present, I'll just have to make do with sites like this.
And in general, my web probably looks different from yours:
trust broken, trusts busted...
Robert Reich has suggested it's time to use anti-trust laws against the big internet giants:
... as has happened before with other forms of property, the most politically influential owners of the new property are doing their utmost to increase their profits by creating monopolies that must eventually be broken up.
The most valuable intellectual properties are platforms so widely used that everyone else has to use them, too. Think of standard operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android; Google’s search engine; Amazon’s shopping system; and Facebook’s communication network. Google runs two-thirds of all searches in the United States. Amazon sells more than 40 percent of new books. Facebook has nearly 1.5 billion active monthly users worldwide. This is where the money is.
Despite an explosion in the number of websites over the last decade, page views are becoming more concentrated. While in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all page views in America, by 2010 the top 10 accounted for 75 percent. Google and Facebook are now the first stops for many Americans seeking news — while Internet traffic to much of the nation’s newspapers, network television and other news gathering agencies has fallen well below 50 percent of all traffic. Meanwhile, Amazon is now the first stop for almost a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything. Talk about power.
My own feeling: that's certainly something that needs to be thought about... but I suspect it's not quite the right approach, it's trying to use an old set of tools against a new set of problems (and it's an old set of tools that's gotten quite rusty over the years, and will need what amounts to a political revolution to revitalize).
I think it might be worth going after some other ideas, like a "digital user's bill-of-rights"...
I wouldn't put these guys in charge of the project though: We have rights! But so do they.
Whether you’re paying for a service or not, you have rights - just not as many as you probably think. User entitlement, especially in the tech scene, is at epidemic proportions. In an effort to help curb this behavior we’ve set up a list of rights we’d like the web community to embrace.
Yup, those damn users are so entitled. We graciously allow them to put their whole lives on our websites, and they actually feel like they deserve something in return? Oh my.