Move all common features to small ambiguous buttons in far corners of FireFox

[Quan]

Hi all,

The top left of Firefox is too focused on. If Mozilla leaves all the
features there it makes it too easy for the user. I propose Mozilla
takes really commonly used features of Firefox like bookmarks (which
Mozilla's own studies have shown is the most clicked on feature in
Firefox) and turn them in to an ambiguous button and move them to a
random corner of Firefox. This helps:

* Massively increase user eye strain
* Confuse users so that us more techy people can smugly point to where
common features are
* Increase needed mouse movement which over time may accelerate wrist
problems and reduces accuracy of button clicking due to Fitt's law
* Blazingly ignore all studies Mozilla has commissioned on cognitive
processes
* Reduce discoverability by putting brand new features as tiny icons
in the status bar, which is really a bar with questionable value

To help confuse and disorientate users further I suggest Mozilla start
putting in features with UI which lacks any sort continuity or
integration with current Firefox UI. Perhaps some random shortcut like
alt + * or ctrl + space. Make sure the new UI completely baffles the
user by making it take up the whole screen with no obvious way to
escape, when they weren't sure how they got there in the 1st place.
Make sure it has complex meta-conceptual features which arbitrarily
don't fit in to any previous way of organising any UI. Make sure once
users interact with it it starts hiding parts of Firefox from the user
unless they become an expert at it.

Also just to make it harder for users, introduce a new menu system
that makes very common actions like bookmarks and history into sub
menus so users have to click through even further than normal. To top
it off make the region in which they have to click through very small,
using an obscure take on a common UI feature with no immediate visual
indication that this feature is different to normal. Then present the
feature under the guise that it makes navigation simpler with less
click through, even while ignoring your own studies which show that
bookmarks is hugely clicked on.

Finally, please make Firefox UI less customisable from basic mouse
click kind of operations. Make it hard to find a space where you can
Right Click > Customize.... Make adding any old default toolbars look
disorientingly unintegrated. Don't let users move objects about, just
give them static choice options and call it "progress".

Please take my suggestions seriously and think about all the kind of
benefits these have on the user.

[Mike Beltzner]

Hi Quan,

Thanks for your input. It's too late in the Firefox 4 development cycle to consider a change of this magnitude. We'll keep it in mind as we move forward.

cheers,
mike

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[Quan]

Thanks Mike, you've always been fairly listening to my UI feature
suggestions in the past and even if you disagreed you always listened.
It surprises me a little that you've allowed such UI usability
regressions for the sake of "coolness".

I'm sorry I wasn't involved in this development cycle at all and
sitting here from the sidelines and commenting does seem a little
terse and ungrateful, but unlike in the past where I was jobless and
had time to spend huge amounts of energy filing and defending bug
implementation:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457651

My free time is now very little. So sorry for the long sarcastic
commenting, but I didn't see any other way to grab anyone's attention.