Dean recently announced IE7 will have tabbed browsing on the IE blog. In the post he says,
“Some people have asked why we didn’t put tabs in IE sooner. Initially, we had some concerns around complexity and consistency… will it confuse users more than it benefits them? Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don’t have tabs? I think we made the wrong decision here initially, and we’re making the right one now.”
I can completely relate. Who hasn’t had the same conversation about their own product? It is often so hard to see these things from inside the box. You end up in conversations that end with:
“I think the user will be confused by insert new concept here. Let’s not go there now.”
“insert new concept or UI widget here isn’t consistent with the rest of the suite. Since we can’t do it everywhere, we probably shouldn’t do new concept.”
Hats off to the IE team for admitting their mistakes and learning from them. Although it will take a lot more than that to get Firefox users back. Once you go Firefox, you never go back.
I don’t know that I completely agree with this stance, although I’ll readily admit sometimes it is the case. In the case of something like IE (and Microsoft applications in general) they really are the market educators on things like interface. I think people forget that as a collective society we are becoming increasinly more educated and technical in general. Things I was teaching people to do 10 years ago that were too complex for them seem laughably obvious now. I might put forth that IE and Netscape actually transitioned the paradigm that allowed for the concept of browser tabbing. Sometimes “enough” people need to become accustomed to the paradigm before the market as a whole is ready to blossom into the next level of complexity. A bit of a complexity “tipping point” perhaps.
In a loosely related thread to “collective developement” there was an article in the May Issue of Scientific American, “His Brain, Her Brain” (I’d link it, but they make you subscribe) that stated that normalized intelligence scores indicate that average intelligence is increasing by 3% every 10 years for as long as they’ve been collecting information.
So you are suggesting that it took Firefox to introduce and socialize tabs for them to be acceptable in something mainstream like IE. I could buy that. I suppose what I was entirely dismissing was the fact that IE and Firefox have very different considerations when they think about changing interface. IE has to worry about 80-90% of the market where Firefox doesn’t have the same baggage.
Anecdotally it sure seems like people are getting stupider. Maybe this is a situation where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?
Not quite. I’m suggesting that it took Microsoft and Netscape to get people use to a basic web browsing paradigm and in doing that they sort of became obligated to carry everyone along. Then as you mention, the smaller innovator Firefox with nothing to lose is able to take some risks, or cater to a niche audience. Something sticks, it retroactively becomes obvious, and we move on from there. The primary thrust of my assertion, however, was that had tabs been introduced from the outset it is entirely possible the whole thing might have flopped because the paradigm hadn’t reached critical mass yet.
As for people getting stupider, there is no doubt of that. I think everyone probably peaks quite early and then just gets increasingly stupid from there. Think about who you spend most of your time with…they are old and just getting older. The intelligence testing was always done with the same age group and they are pretty young. I suppose it is entirely possible that what is really happening is that people are just getting smarter earlier :-)