

Dear Steve Ballmer - sayrer
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/03/20/open-letter/

======
petercooper
_I think a head to head comparison makes you look pretty good. It makes the
iPhone UI look like it’s made of ugly jelly beans._

A joke, surely. For the Windows phone I'm seeing unnecessarily gigantic type
set against irrelevant background images with no consistency amongst the other
UI elements. The "head to head comparison" he links to is, itself, based on
criticisms of Microsoft's UI by Edward Tufte.

~~~
memoryfault
Gigantic type set? Ok. Irrelevant background images? No consistency amongst
other UI elements?!

Please explain. All I see is consistency in this UI style. And the background
images look pretty relevant to me.

~~~
petercooper
_Irrelevant background images?_

Non-stroked or unshadowed white text on busy photographic backgrounds isn't
good for readability.

 _All I see is consistency in this UI style._

It's consistently sloppy, but I don't think that's what you meant.. :-)
Perhaps pointing out the inconsistency was a bad choice of term. Really, it's
just "bad." I'll use <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9F4QJK1wFs> as a
reference walkthrough of the interface for some examples.

On "still" screens (that is, not in the middle of scrolling or similar) you
end up with the giant typography getting chopped up:
<http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46wk/w1> .. "pictur"? Or
<http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46w6/w3> "game"?

When displays like "pictur" and "game" are scrolled horizontally to show
further content, the distance travelled doesn't match the position of the
header at all. See here how the headline has moved slightly (now obscuring the
"g" of "games") yet an entirely new style of view has appeared (with overly
light text, no less): <http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ib/w4> \- Everything
seems to move at a different speed in relation to everything else on the
Windows Phone. This is inconsistent and "feels" wrong.

Front page elements are varying sizes:
<http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ws/w2> \- some items even embed other items
inside. And white on turquoise == poor readability.

If you watch the video above around the 11:00-11:30 mark (the "People" screen)
you'll see contact boxes randomly changing, pictures popping up inside, etc.
There's no indication that this should be occurring.

Another problem is that there's also no solid indication that there's anything
to scroll to on the right, yet when the guy does so, there's a bunch of stuff
over there. Using the truncated title text as a sort of "this page is wider
than you think" indicator is a really crappy UI hack.

I haven't got time to go through everything that feels wrong about the Windows
Phone UI, but I'll leave with the Tufte-derived view that the information
density is also poor. In the demo of the photo section, the number of photos
shown on screen at once is very low. On a touch device you can't go too nuts
with filling the screen up, but Apple has struck a smart balance between too
little and too much - Microsoft leans way too far towards whitespace and
endless scrolling.

~~~
glhaynes
The main "vision" of the UI seems to be "you're looking through a small
viewport onto a much larger area". Which doesn't seem like a feature to me ...
having a too-small display and having to scroll a lot has _always_ been really
unpleasant in my experience: using remote desktop to connect from a small
display even to one that's only moderately larger always gives this
uncomfortable feeling (perhaps not unlike claustrophobia?) of being in a
cramped space and always being partially blind to your surroundings.
Additionally, one naturally tries to keep a "full size map" in one's head,
which is a lot of extra cognitive load.

I believe this effect is mitigated when most/all of the offscreen elements are
just more instances of the same type of thing as those already shown (example:
repeating table views), and also when the offscreen portion of the elements
are along a single axis only (i.e. you would only have to lengthen the device
in a single direction to be able to see everything at once). Somehow this type
of scrolling doesn't cause the same "looking through a keyhole" response in
me.

Many of Palm's advertisements for webOS portray a similar effect (screens
tapering into offside infinity on either side of the device) which seems to me
likewise unattractive and poorly considered, though the actual experience of
the device doesn't appear to be like that, and certainly isn't _designed
around it as a feature_ like WP7S is. Regardless, the ads emphasize complexity
and overwhelming amounts of data -- to their unfortunate detriment, I expect.

------
jpwagner
open letters are so lame

~~~
dca
Particularly that one.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
My sense of humour might be miscalibrated, but I thought this was a piss-take
of the very earnest open letters you see all the time, written as if they are
actually addressed to someone that will actually read them.

This is just a weird way of pointing out that they don't have a NDK on the new
Windows Phones, and if they did then Firefox would get ported (with some
gratuitous plugs for ongoing work on competing platforms).

~~~
davidw
The first lines are actually a ripoff of The Onion's "Jim Anchower":

[http://www.theonion.com/content/columnists/i_got_some_sweet_...](http://www.theonion.com/content/columnists/i_got_some_sweet_new_digs)

------
FluidDjango
If I worked at Mozilla Foundation, I think I'd hope that the blog had been
_hacked_ \- rather than that Sayre actually posted that.

------
kogir
It's not clear why he'd like native code access.

Is it that he doesn't think Firefox performance will be acceptable in
XNA/Silverlight, or that he doesn't want to port any of the existing code to
the CLR?

~~~
mhansen
Porting the Firefox code base to the CLR would be a massive undertaking

------
fname
..and he's posted an apology (of sorts): [http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-
sayre/2010/03/20/things-ive-lear...](http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-
sayre/2010/03/20/things-ive-learned/)

------
fnid2
The latest behavior from Mozilla is making me really uncomfortable with it as
a viable platform for the future.

~~~
mhansen
Why?

------
budwin
The Mozilla blog is the mouthpiece of the Mozilla foundation right? Unless I
totally missed something, didn't the author on behalf of their organization,
offended both of their largest platforms owners?

~~~
sp332
This isn't _The_ Mozilla Blog, it's Rob Sayre's blog at Mozilla. His name
doesn't even get any hits at The Mozilla Blog.
<http://blog.mozilla.com/?s=sayre>

