The Mozilla usability list published by self-proclaimed usability weenie
Matthew Thomas (aka mpt) has been a hot topic recently.
Not to be contrary–particularly against Ian, Asa and Blake–but I think I’m with mpt on this one, though not exactly for his reasons. Mozilla is a developer tool, and so should have features for developers. According to the 1.0 release notes, Mozilla-the-platform is targeted at the developer community,
and it’s up to third parties (like, say, Netscape) to take the codebase and customize it for a consumer audience. (I do debate classifying several of mpt’s items as usability issues–from an application perspective they’re clearly features, but from a future-of-the-web perspective they’re usability.)
I’d love to use a browser that makes the validation status of a page user-visible, because I want to use it to develop my pages. I don’t care about anyone else’s. The indicator doesn’t need to list the errors–the W3C validator and other tools will do a better job, as Asa argues–but it indicates that there’s a problem, which is what an indicator is supposed to do. It should do the same for any content type Mozilla can display. Arguing against having it in Mozilla because end users won’t like it doesn’t fly–end users don’t care about the DOM Inspector or Venkman (the JavaScript debugger) either, but there they are. (I rarely use them myself, but that’s because I don’t write a lot of JS… yet.) At times, for similar reasons, I’m even on the side of those who argue that there shouldn’t be a quirks
(i.e. compatibility) mode in Mozilla (or IE)–providing such a feature
without an indicator just makes it harder to show page authors, software makers et al. that they’re creating bad code.
(I’ve been looking for an article by mpt where he explains that he knows he’s been a real jerk
lately, but have had no luck–I’m caught in the Google gap. Should have blogged it a couple of days ago when I read it. The point was that I tend to agree with what he’s said but not the way in which he’s said it.)
Finally, lest it seem I’m a complete mpt apologist, I don’t like his weblog design–I find it’s hard to read and generally not aesthetically pleasing. (I’m going to echo his own criticism of Internet Explorer: to me, his blog looks like a refugee freom Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory
. I’d almost go so far as to bemoan its usability. Almost.
