Hot answers tagged browser
86
It's called abstraction.
Greatest achievement of mankind, I think.
If we abstract things in our mind, we can use them with lesser cognitive efforts and integrate them better in our lifes and thinking-models.
For example the Internet, it's not a real place: it's a bunch of tubes...I mean servers, to which we send requests, but it is easier to handle if we ...
50
You want your users to use your service. Your users want to use the service but they need to invest first (i.e. time to upgrade their browser).
Ideas:
First of all be nice and show an empathic message, e.g. like Apple does if you run a browser that's not supported by iCloud
Tell them why it's worth investing the time (list benefits, preview what they can ...
42
Key point that hasn't been mentioned: Some people CAN'T upgrade.
At work, I'm forced to IE8 (Upgraded from IE6 late last year, early this year).
Do what Basecamp does. Push IE 6/7/8 into Chrome-Frame :
You can't "Force" everyone to upgrade. Some users don't have the option. Give them options to use within their restrictions (Work Restrictions, ...
38
Chrome does the same thing:
There are two reasons for this:
It makes it hard to click close on accident. This is easiest to note on the Chrome example, if every one of those super teeny tabs had an X, it would be extremely difficult to select a tab without closing it. Prefer safe actions. If you have a safe action and a risky action, the risky action ...
35
You might want to briefly try explaining the value of upgrading, while promoting the action with positive language, and demoting the negative action with not exactly negative language, but just less positive.
You also need to provide information for those who are unable to upgrade (for example corporate restrictions may prevent use of anything except IE6), ...
28
I really want to say "never!", but as with all things, there are exceptions. As mattlant mentioned it can be because there are items on the page that cannot be lost, help pages can be good for this, as the user may be half way through filling out a form when they click 'help' and are going to be pretty annoyed if they lose all their entries (although a ...
17
I can't believe no-one's mentioned it, but PDFs and other non-web documents should be opened in a new window, mainly because users who do not understand windows/tabs/embedded plugins have a greater expectation of that behaviour than the 'replace web page with PDF' behaviour of 'same window' linking.
17
You could do what this GIANT Austrailian company did and charge an extra "tax" for old browsers in compensation for having to support them
Kogan.com
'It appears you or your system administrator has been in a coma for over 5 years and you are still using IE7.' It begins, before going on to break the news about the costs. 'To help make the internet a ...
16
It's consistently been shown that Firefox is more popular with younger demographics than IE and Chrome is the most popular browser amongst young and tech savvy users. IE is still most used by older users. Don't take this to mean you can assume your IE users are old or that your Chrome users are young, however.
Historically it's certainly been the case that ...
13
It's a matter of abstracting relationship and direction.
The reason why the direction for the metaphor is one from here to there is because of goal oriented perception. Or in other words, the essential and for the context of this metaphor defining idea is that:
information is not here, otherwise I wouldn't be needing to look for it
information is in other ...
11
What it is the value of WYSIWIG?
It provides immediacy and the ability to fiddle quickly. Bret Victor capures it perfectly in this video where he shows the importance of immediacy in the creative process during the coding of animations and games. Creativity benefits hugely from experimentation, playing and being in the moment. You can't achieve that by ...
11
Did a quick Google search for "how many tabs to people use". Here's the top link
http://dubroy.com/blog/how-many-tabs-do-people-use-now-with-real-data/
First, we saw that people who use tabs heavily can create 2 to 3 times as many tabs as other users. It’s not obvious what the cause for the bi-modality in the distribution is though. ... we see that ...
9
I think it's about time URLs in general got abstracted out of sight of ordinary users. Most people couldn't care less about this dotted syntax, the TLDs, the sub-domains, not to mention the protocol part. It's too bad that the current state of technology doesn't offer a superior alternative.
Your aunt doesn't care about URLs. If she even knows which site ...
9
Maybe, maybe not, but it is not "bad" because it violates a "rule".
Rules don't always work in all situations. One of the main reasons designers exist is to decide when rules ought to be broken, or what rules are useful in a given scenario.
For instance, there are (at least) two general "rules" (I prefer the terms guidelines or patterns, for the record) ...
9
But UX point of view no end user going to re-size and view as
mobile/tablet.
What makes you think this? People resize browser windows all of the time.
Cant we just disable media queries if desktop browser, what are the
advantages of not doing so.?
What are the advantages of disabling them? It should make the experience better. There doesn't ...
9
Jennifer Morrow (part of the Firefox user experience design team) wrote a pretty detailed blog post about removing the Firefox status bar in 2010. As already mentioned, the aim was to remove the unnecessary "chrome" from the Firefox UI. I'd recommend you read the whole post. A short extract:
The goal is to find places where chrome can be minimized, both ...
8
How are you warning your users before the point of sale?
Some text along the lines of "Your current browser is not fully compatible for use with this site. To get the maximum productivity/effectiveness, one of these browsers is recommended" is the easiest/most common tactic, sounds like what you're doing.
There are a number of javascript-based overlays that ...
8
Redirect them to the scaled-up mobile-version of the website and display a heading on top, saying they can use the full-version when they decide to upgrade their browser.
I think this is better than outright refusing to serve them as bounce-rate when met with a "brick-wall" (upgrade your browser to proceed) will be far higher.
Scaled-up, mobile web-sites ...
7
I don't see any problem with the way that you have it now.
When someone clicks the back button it is to go back to where they were before rather than some idea that it should take you back to the previous node in some structure.
You're using it for a browser, so if I really want to go back to a tab that I was at 20 tab changes ago, I can simply click on ...
7
The simple answer is "Provide your users value."
If there is value worthy of a user downloading your app, they will do it.
Firefox is a tough example as nearly every smart phone already has a web browser. Convincing people that there is added value in installing Firefox on their phone is a tough sales pitch.
To answer your bullet points:
Detection - if ...
7
Here's some answers to some of your questions based on my personal experience over the years:
What was the original purpose of the Home button?
The home button stems from the time when the internet was a new thing to home computer users. Being a short link to the browser's default start page, it offers a way of consuming content and as such it was more ...
7
Other than the obvious answer: "re-write your app so it supports common user actions better" You could try manipulating the browser history using new development techniques (usually outside the scope of a UX answer). Otherwise, a JavaScript alert will only fire after the users have tried to leave the page for any reason, which might be confusing to them. ...
6
The issue is in this due the shading being done with a regular matrix of squares in two colors in classic newsprint style. It leads to two problems:
At small scale, the matrix dimensions do not evenly divide into the screen pix available. The rendering algorithms try their imperfect best, but an uneven shading results (including the gradient towards the ...
6
Our admin [Rahul] said that his contact on the Google Chrome team had told him, "because tests indicated it was necessary".
Knowing how much testing happens at Google before changes are rolled out, such a response isn't surprising. However, it's not unheard of them to reverse the decision based on negative real-world feedback. So, it might return in a ...
6
How does your site work with a text only browser? How does it appear to people using screen readers? If your response is that it doesn't work, you may be in contravention of disabilities legislation in your jurisdiction. When pushing the technological boundaries, you have a number of issues to deal with including this. Even for user who are capable of ...
6
I used to assume most Windows users don't resize their browser; that it'd be maximized and that's that; however, from some studies that I've done over the years, more and more people are not maximizing it for a number of reasons (Windows 7/8 Snapping, hi-res monitors, task changing using a mouse are the top 3). Also, a number of college students that I've ...
6
You can ask a similar question to NFS video game fan that why does he feel that he is driving an actual car when he is simply pressing buttons on the keyboard.
Even if you are sitting in front of your system only while using internet, your browser still has to send a request to the server. So in a way, you are still visiting the server virtually.
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