Aehso’s Output

A common user interface design concept in software user interfaces is the provision of feedback to the user when a user event (keystroke, mouse click etc.) may take some time to process. Jacob Neilson provides excellent guidelines on this topic in Chapter 5 of Usability Engineering.

Internet browsers have always provided visual cues to the user when documents are being loaded from a remote server. Firefox, for example, provides two visual cues to the user when loading resources:

The spinner in the top right corner

The status and progress bar in the bottom left corner

However we now have web sites such as Google Mail that typically serve a single document. The ‘main’ HTML document uses many Ajax requests to update the existing document content after loading or when events such as user mouse clicks occur. The intent here is to provide a more interactive experience for the user by eliminating full page loads which can be slow and distracting.

However, sending many Ajax requests and dynamically updating the page DOM can still be slow so the requirement to provide feedback to the user remains. Google Mail, for example, displays a little indicator in the top right of the page:

GMail loading indicator.

Google Reader provides something similar:

Google Reader loading indicator.

Wouldn’t it be better if the browser UI provided this feedback? Given that the browser provides the implementation of the underlying XHR (XMLHttpRequest) API it knows when XHRs are in progress. The browser could also enable the Stop button to allow the user to decide to cancel current requests.

Seems like it would be a useful enhancement to me…

aehso ajax, browsers, firefox, usability, xhr

If you regularly need to cite sets of web pages (URLs) and annotate them with references (perhaps to ask questions or offer opinions) then you should check out Trailfire. It allows you to create a single URL that leads the reader to a subsequent set of pages, each annotated with balloon text with your comments.

No need for screenshots, here’s a trail I just created about Web Service API Keys that spans Amazon, Flickr, Google and Facebook API signup pages. Trailfire also host a trail view/summary page for each trail.

I created the above using their Firefox extension in just a minute – quite nifty! A small UI usability suggestion for the Trailfire folks though – don’t automatically add buttons to the main Firefox navigation bar by default! That is sacred screen real estate that people don’t want to have to clean it up after installing an extension. This also applies for the del.icio.us extension folks by the way! A dedicated Trailfire toolbar that I can hide the 99% of the time that I’m not building trails would be far more appropriate.

aehso firefox, internet, web2.0

Via the excellent TamperData plugin I just noticed that my Firefox browser was sending a HTTP request (with a cookie!) to http://toolbarqueries.google.com for every page my browser loaded, even when the toolbar is not visible.
It is bad enough that a user interface component would remain active even when not visible, but even worse that it is silently doing so. And what’s that cookie for?

Isn’t it diffucult to trust a software vendor that produces a component like this, no matter how they justify what it is doing? Bad, invasive, sneaky, dishonest software. Uninstall the Google Toolbar (if you have it installed) by making it visible (briefly!), clicking on the Google logo on the toolbar, choosing Help and then Uninstall…

aehso firefox, google

Johnny K recommended using Mint for site stats ages ago so I’ve been playing with it for a while – it’s an excellent package, simple, extensible, readable. I don’t normally pay much attention to the metrics but I do keep an eye on the trend in Firefox usage showing in my User Agent Pie. Today, that balance reached what I hope is the point of no return:

I should point out that the data set only spans back to last Nov when I upgraded to Mint v121, accidently clobbering my stats db in the process – maybe that’s why it became more noticeable to me. Anyway, this is well ahead of the trend (probably because of the geek-ish audience) but it is good to see. Keep spreading the word…

aehso firefox, internet, software

If you use the Adblock extension for Firefox, then you might want to install the Adblock Filterset.G Updater plugin – it periodically downloads and installs the Filterset.G list of filters into Adblock. (Note: it does preserve your personal list of filters.) For the regexp-aware readers, here’s the current filter set – there are quite a few ad servers out there!

Why isn’t this integrated into the Adblock plugin itself? My suspicion is the license is restricting integration. Shame that.

aehso firefox