
 Browser Sedimentation - wglb
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/01/22/Confusing-Browser
======
chime
A wonderful example of this is people who type URLs into Google Search or
search queries into address bar (before most browsers had Omnibar-like
features). To all of us here, it clearly makes sense that the browser is a
local software that enables you to visit websites while a search engine is a
website that finds other websites. Typing a full URL in Google is generally a
waste of bandwidth and time.

This abstraction of service is lost on many users who see the browser and
search engine as the same thing. And even different websites and the Internet
as the same thing. I've had to field many tech-support calls because a Java
exception occurred on the outsourced Payroll processing site but somehow since
I manage the IT Department, clearly it is something I could fix.

I think a good way to look at this is to pick something complex that you use
regularly but don't know much about, like an automobile or cellphone hardware.
Why does my cellphone suddenly lose reception for 5 seconds when walking under
my carport? I have no clue but I suspect it has something to do with the
signal or maybe because there's a lot of metal around. That is how users feel
when you show them a big red X, regardless of how much descriptive text you
present. Best is to avoid situations where you have to show X and just make it
easy to revert to the previous situation.

~~~
saurik
While I largely agree with your comment, I think the story of you and your
cell phone differs from that of the user who calls you asking to fix the
website, in that you know that you do not know what is causing the signal to
degrade.

I have nearly infinite patience and can completely understand someone coming
to me with the following:

"hey, I have no clue what just happened, and you probably aren't even the
right person to ask this question anyway, but I figured that you might at
least be able to give me a better understanding of what went wrong if not: I
tried to access my payroll today, and it didn't work; is that something you
can fix?"

That is the kind of message I have myself sent on occasion when I'm "in over
my head" in a field I don't understand, and have run into issues that block
progress.

However, the kind of message I get on a daily basis is:

"you are a piece of work: I should report you and your organization to the
police. how dare you have given me this error message! I demand that you fix
this situation in the next 24 hours or I am going to go on Twitter and
Facebook and make it clear to everyone what kind of crook you are."

(Meanwhile, they are complaining to me that... their bank account is out of
money... and the error message came from PayPal. I even get users complaining
to me that my software took a $35 fee from their account because of their lack
of funds, which is obviously an overdraft fee from their greedy bank, and has
nothing to do with any of the software in the stack that is billing them.)

This person believes that they know the things that they in fact don't know
(or possibly isn't even able to contemplate that there might be something that
they don't know about the situation) and so is willing to go in with "all guns
blazing" against that one entity they seem to believe is in charge of
everything.

I am honestly not certain who is to blame for that: poor schooling, bad
genetics, developers who believe software should be "intuitive" (and thereby
put the moral equivalent of a cartoon-laden control panel that anyone could
believe they could operate on what should have been a very scary buzzsaw in a
woodshop)... the cause of this phenomenon is clearly in my "I know that I do
not know this" region.

Whatever it is, though, it is simply not fair to state that you, in an
analogous situation of being quite far and even fundamentally outside your
competence, would act similarly to these confused users; I just don't buy it.

~~~
shabble
I've found that the tone of the message is often an indication of what the
sender thinks it will achieve. The all-guns-blazing "How dare you do this to
me?!" is intended to get an immediate apology and admission of guilt, with the
probable end goal being a free or discounted service. People who immediately
threaten to "go public" with their experience without first trying to resolve
it are kind of banking on that sort of response, IME. It's the internet
equivalent to "making a scene" at the customer support desk.

It might be just personal experience, but the most foaming-at-the-mouth also
seem to be those who maybe realise or suspect they might be personally be at
fault, and are writing to reassure themselves as much as blame you.

Those who genuinely don't understand will often to go great lengths to
indicate that they've tried, sometimes with speculation on what they might
have done or where the problem might be.

Pretty much everyone will occasionally vent their anger at some public contact
point of an organisation they're having problems with though, especially if
there's external pressure (bank charges, missing SO's birthday delivery, or
whatever) on top. The impersonality of email doesn't really help, although
anyone who's worked phones or retail knows that some people will rage
anywhere.

~~~
saurik
That's an interesting strategy (attempting to enrage those whose help you are
asking): for my part I can say with utter certainly that I bend over backwards
to help people who send me the kind requests, and stick to "no, we do not
offer that service" for anyone who skirts the "this is making my day
unpleasant, I would rather be doing anything but this e-mail" category. :(

However, I am concerned that now in having worded the two responses along the
kind/mean access, I have also ruined them as examples of the thing I was
actually hoping to demonstrate.

I also get perfectly nice requests from people who still believe that I can
help them. I got an incredibly kind e-mail today, for example, from someone
asking me to remove software they had previously posted to Cydia (as they were
now selling something similar somewhere and didn't want the free version to
undercut them).

This request was all-sorts-of-hedged against things that didn't even matter,
such as that they had released it under CC and therefore knew I was not
legally required to do so, and that they knew I was busy working on other
things they appreciated, and that maybe we simply never removed things at all,
etc. etc..

However, the real core of the issue is that I do not host their package at
all, nor was I even the person they had originally given the package to: they
needed to contact the site they were hosting the package with (as Cydia is
pretty much just a web browser of third-party content), a repository I
happened to know would honor the request immediately.

I was in a similar situation to this recently: I was trying to register my
company for physical sales taxes in my county, and figured I needed to contact
someone somewhere at the town hall, county center, what-have-you. I went to
each of these places, and stated "I am not certain if you are even the person
who would be in charge of this, but maybe you will be able to direct me to
where I should go" before asking them my question.

I personally believe that that difference is important: I knew that I didn't
really know whether what I was doing made any sense, and that I was honest
with the people whom I was interacting with that I had no clue about anything
related to selling physical products.

I feel like, once you admit that to yourself it becomes much easier to problem
solve and work your way into a state of "knowing": in these cases, maybe
asking yourself "is this in fact the person I should contact? why am I
choosing to contact this person? will I make that person feel awkward if I
assume they are in charge of something they are not? who else might I contact
in addition to or instead of them?".

I might then go even further and posit that the people who are trying to
"reassure themselves" that I or you are to blame are in essence somehow
feeling that "not knowing" something makes them powerless somehow, and that
they therefore need to be overly confident to "reassure themselves" that they
in fact know what is happening.

So, interesting: thanks for responding to my comment! I will think about this
more (as I continue to drudge through the last week of hate-mail, which I've
been doing ever since I woke up). ;P

------
dsr_
The default has to fit these requirements:

\- The OS/desktop manager-specific stuff needs to be there, or else you
fragment the overall UX for the computer.

\- The browser needs to give immediate access to the actions that a typical
user will use all the time.

\- Tab mode has won out over separate windows, so you need a visual indicator
of what tabs are open and which one is active.

\- And the contents of the web page are the contents that you care about right
now, or else you're looking for a way to navigate away.

Modern browsers do a pretty good job with all of those requirements. I'm
surprised that Bray is even interested in a notional "home" page, since
everyone I know, technical or not, either wants their session restored from
last time (on startup) or a very fast search page to come up when they tap for
a new tab. People don't reset tabs -- they close them or go somewhere in
specific.

Best of all, this behavior is all customizable by normal people who never have
to type about:config.

~~~
alexis-d
I'm not sure we really need all those bars. I mean I use this
<http://i.imgur.com/0U1yW.png> everyday and it's perfectly fine/usable (ok we
may need to add an url/toolbar for most people, but at least it merge the tab
bar and the title bar).

Edit: It also merges the file/tools/help bar in the left button.

~~~
alien_acorn
How do you get the Firefox icon instead of the word "Firefox" in the orange
drop-down button?

~~~
kibwen
There are probably several addons and themes to that end, here's one that
seems reasonably popular:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/movable-
firef...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/movable-firefox-
button/)

------
_delirium
In broad terms, this same concern (sedimentation of layers of interface) was
one of the original motivations for the MacOS's otherwise unusual single menu
bar at the top, rather than separate menu bars for the OS and the application.
But that of course hasn't carried over to webapps: while Safari might use the
OS menu bar, Gmail inside of Safari layers a new one inside it.

------
Lagged2Death
Check out yesterday's browser, and compare it to his FireFox screenshot:

[http://screenshots.modemhelp.net/screenshots/Netscape/v7.01/...](http://screenshots.modemhelp.net/screenshots/Netscape/v7.01/Navigator/Index.shtml)

Are software UIs really getting more complex, or are they getting simpler?

------
alexchamberlain
I'm not sure this is an issue. Every application has a hierarchy of controls
at the top of the screen, and the user understands this.

------
ck2
_Firefox3 Theme for Firefox4+_ and _status-4-evar_ extension solve a great
deal of the modern firefox problems and actually make it functional again.

Modern browsers are going to raise a bunch of idiots who aren't even curious
about how the page actually works - even "view source" is now buried.

~~~
batista
_Modern browsers are going to raise a bunch of idiots who aren't even curious
about how the page actually works_

Historically, 99.9 of the web users didn't cared about "how the page actually
works" either.

~~~
batista
Btw, are you "even curious" about how your car actually works? Your TV? Your
grandfather's artificial valve? X-rays? How milk turns into yoghurt? How
epidemiologists study disease? Who was the kind of Sparta at the time of the
roman invasion? How the books you read are typeset?

If you answered no to ANY of those, do you consider yourself an idiot?

If no, why should users be "curious" how the HTML page actually works? Because
everybody has to have YOUR expertise in the field YOU'VE chosen?

~~~
ck2
Yes I use my car weekly and learned how to do basic repairs.

I also learned how a TV works decades ago when reading about Philo Farnsworth.

The other items I don't use so I tend to not know how they work.

I didn't start out to learn how to be a web developer, I just got curious how
the web pages I used every day worked. Even yogurt has a list of ingredients
on the side but "view source" is essentially gone from modern browsers.

------
skrebbel
Maybe it's because English isn't my native language, but I didn't understand
half the worlds in this article.

I mean, 'sedimentation'. What?

I find this a bit odd given that the article is about understandability and
accessibility for the layman.

~~~
justincormack
Sedimentation is a geological analogy, as rocks are laid down in layers of
sediment and he is looking at the interface layers. It is not normal
conversational English but is more of an educated style of writing which is
faily common.

Keep at it!

~~~
skrebbel
I'm very fond of an article called "Consequences of erudite vernacular
utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with long words used needlessly",
won an Ig Nobel prize in 2006
([http://personal.stevens.edu/~ysakamot/730/paper/simple%20wri...](http://personal.stevens.edu/~ysakamot/730/paper/simple%20writing.pdf)).

I agree that my being a non-native English speaker clearly makes the
difference in this case, but "more of an educated style of writing" generally
means "bad writing" to me. If there's a difficult ("educated") word and an
easy word to choose from, there's absolutely no reason to choose the difficult
one.

~~~
justincormack
Often you are right, and that article points out some of that. And many people
do write badly on purpose, or do not write well by not thinking about it. But
simplified English is not going to catch on with English speakers, we enjoy
our words too much. The fact that English has more words than any other
language is due to constant borrowing from other languages and also constant
invention nd reinvention. It is not just educated words, it is full of street
words, dialect words, all sorts. And they do convey extra nuances. Look at
Shakespeare or A Clockwork Orange for word invention. Of course though there
is too much simply bad writing too...

------
andrew93101
This is why I love site-specific browsers. On the mac I make SSBs using Fluid
for most of the sites I use throughout the day (email, calendar, google docs,
ci server, pivotal tracker, etc.) and then use traditional OS app switching
mechanics to switch between them.

As a result, no browser controls: no back, home, or url bar. The window is
dedicated to a single site.

And now on Lion, I can make anything fullscreen if I want to get rid of the OS
chrome also and focus only on the content of the app/site I'm using.

~~~
tikhonj
Does Fluid basically do the same thing as google-chrome -app=<whatever>? (I
think it does, but I could be missing something.) This was a big feature
touted by Chrome when it came out. You can access it from the UI via wrench
menu > tools > create application shortcut (I think it used to be more
discoverable, but it is a little hidden now :().

Additionally, you have been able to make browsers full-screen for years, in
all OSes (that I've used, anyhow) using F11.

------
lbotos
I understand this is an issue, and quite a serious one at that, but how do we
solve it for users? As a web dev, we have to assume that the user is decently
prepared to use their browser of choice and once on our page "learn" our
interface controls, right?

------
16s
I have trouble finding my "home" button too in Firefox. Maybe I'm just getting
older, or maybe things are just getting more complex. Probably a bit of both.

~~~
willvarfar
Or they keep moving it :)

------
Zigurd
I find myself fumbling with the three scroll bars in GMail: Two are owned by
GMail, one for the main pane of the UI, and one for the message pane embedded
in it. The browser's scroll bar controls scrolling for the contacts displayed
on the right side of the window.

A case can be made for this in that all the scroll bars are closest to the
content they scroll. But it also points out the unsatisfactory state of having
the browser control some scrolling and the active content inside the browser
control some of it. This would never fly in the design of any UI library for
creating interactive applications.

~~~
notatoad
I'm not sure whats going on in your browser, but I've never seen gmail have
more than one scroll bar.

~~~
Zigurd
If you have a thread longer than your window, that's one scroll bar. Gmail
creates it.

If you have a reply, for example, in that thread longer than a few lines, it
is scrolled within a view in the thread.

If you have your chat contacts displayed in the right pane, the browser
window's scroll bar scrolls that pane.

That's the case I'm describing.

------
JonnieCache
Wait, people still set a homepage?

~~~
sp332
In FF, my homepage is Google. In Chrome, I don't need one. Edit: I guess I
should mention that I would use the "search" bar next to the address bar to
Google for stuff (instead of going "home" to search), but I prefer to leave
that one set to Wikipedia.

