

Designing for the Ideal - alanh
http://www.subtraction.com/2013/04/11/designing-for-the-ideal

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alanh
As the submitter of this article, I should stay on-topic, but as an aside — I
find it fascinating that this article shows screen shots of Firefox, Safari,
and Chrome’s new-tab pages with a “grid of favorite sites” interface, and
_not_ Opera’s, even though Opera _invented_ this interface (as “Speed Dial”).

I’m not sure if there is a deeper lesson in this observation than the obvious
one about market share yielding mindshare or the truth that good design can
make an impact even if it doesn’t lead to “success” for the innovating party
(in this case, Opera).

Opera’s implementation is worth looking at for a comparison. Unlike Chrome,
Opera allows you to manually set and order pages in Speed Dial. (Less of an
echo chamber and more of a designed starting place.) It also literally lets
you use numbers on your keyboard to navigate to your favorite sites.

