Attention to Detail

March 25th, 2008 by Luke | Posted in UI, Web |

While debugging the site in the newest Firefox 3 beta, I’ve had ample time to reflect upon my relationship with the young Fox. And naturally, the shortcomings have a way of bubbling to the surface. How hath Firefox 3’s new Proto theme failed me? Let me count the ways.

It’s pregnant. You know, pregnancy is great, but I always felt my browser and I had a casual relationship, and I just wasn’t ready for this. What am I talking about, you ask? Behold:

pregnant.png

Yes, pregnant. What do you mean, “What do you mean?”? Okay, maybe this will help. Here’s Safari:

plump.png

See that? It’s “plump”. Plump is charming and hospitable. Safari is plump, and so is everything else in Leopard (they call it “Unified”). You’d be risking extreme embarrassment confusing pregnancy and plumpness 1.

Alright, I can see there are still quite a few baffled readers. To resolve that, I took some slices from each browser’s UI and dialed down the exposure in Preview (equally for each slice) to make things more visible. And now it becomes quite clear:

Pregnant:

firefoxslice.png
Picture 4.png

Plump:

safarislice.png
OompaLoompa-192x195.png

Right.

My next complaint requires no such exposition. Here’s Firefox in front of Safari:

firefoxfocused.png

Pretty clear who’s in charge, no? Now, here’s Safari in front of Firefox:

safarifocused.png

And finally, so there’s no doubt as to what’s going on, here’s Safari and Firefox both in the background:

neitherfocused.png

It’s like an M.C. Escher painting! Indeed, that sinking feeling is the horrifying realization that Firefox never changes, save for the subtle dimming of its close/minimize/zoom buttons. And instead of being boldly focused, Proto is a sort of “noncommittal grey”, matching neither focused nor background OS X applications. Weirder still, the Proto theme uses the “background app” shade of grey for its bookmarks bar all the time.

It’s like the uncanny GUI valley: the closer Firefox gets to emulating a real application, the more alarm bells start ringing when something’s just a bit off.

So, to conclude: always have interesting content in your browser’s pane.

(As a note, the GrApple themes fix the bookmarks bar and in-between-grey, but remain pregnant and ambiguously focused. I assume those issues are limitations of the theming engine.)

1See Season 3, Episode 22.