Minh’s Notes

In honor of the inaugural Run Some Old Web Browsers Day, jwz’s valiant efforts at keeping the memory of the original, mid-90s Mozilla alive past Netscape’s demise, and the tenth anniversary of the Mozilla Project, I’ve gotten some ancient versions of Mosaic, Netscape, and the like running on my Mac via Darwine.

Although Mac versions of these browsers were generally made available, I had to emulate the Windows versions instead, since most of these browser versions were released before Apple released Mac OS X and made the switch to Intel-based processors. Although things mostly work, there are some kinks preventing you from seeing these browsers as they were intended to appear. For instance, the emulated programs don’t recognize my computer’s copy of Times New Roman, so they instead default to Marlett, the font that contains Windows’s “close” and “maximize” symbols. This problem is most apparent in NCSA Mosaic (below the fold), since it offers no way to change the default font from Times New Roman to, say, Tahoma.

(Your teacher may forgive you for handing in your homework typeset entirely in Wingdings, but you just try that with Marlett, and said teacher may choose to apply the clue-by-four procedure.)

Here’s NCSA Mosaic 3.0, precursor to the commercial browser that would eventually become Netscape Navigator:

Here’s Mosaic 0.4, from before Mosaic Communications was renamed Netscape Communcations:

The first usable versions of Netscape Navigator came from the 1.x series:

I started using Navigator at school at around version 2.0:

When my family finally got home Internet access, Fuse provided us with Netscape 3.0 Gold. (The “Gold” meant Netscape Editor was bundled.)

Jumping ahead, since I can’t get Netscape Communicator working on this machine, Firefox began its eventful life codenamed mozilla/browser and quickly renamed Phoenix:

Phoenix was renamed Firebird, due to trademark conflicts, and swapped the catchy orange look for a drab, metallic theme called Qute:

About the same time Firebird was chipping away at the Mozilla Application Suite’s usage in the Mozilla community, a few developers began writing a Mozilla-based browser specifically for the Mac. Originally codenamed Chimera, it too had to be renamed, this time to Camino:

Hope you enjoyed the trip down Memory Lane. Now it’s time for me to clear some room on my hard disk.

Thanks to Simon Willison for the scoop about Run Some Old Web Browsers Day.

Entry №1175, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 4:50 PM | Edit | Permalink
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A water treatment plant supervisor in Emporia, Kansas, declining to state whether the water had been tested for pharmaceuticals:

Well, it’s because of 9/11. We want everybody to guess. … We’re not putting out more information than we have to put out.

That just gives the bad guys a 50/50 chance of getting it right. Thanks a lot. (See also: security through obscurity.)

Entry №1173, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 11:35 AM | Edit | Permalink
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I often hear from people who didn’t realize that each Wikipedia article maintains a comprehensive list of everyone who’s ever edited it, along with every version of the article. The button to display this list is displayed as the History “tab”, sitting prominently above the page contents. It’s so obvious, yet even experienced computer users miss it and cite its absence as their main beef with the site. A similar situation exists for the ever-important Edit tab, which many experienced users never notice.

But in this case, the problem doesn’t lie between the keyboard and the chair. Rather than fault the user, I find issue with MonoBook, the default skin for sites that run on MediaWiki, notably Wikipedia. MonoBook relegates the important history and edit links to a tiny, non-descript row of tabs at top, whose labels are all lowercase. At the time, it seemed like a neat way to deal with the sea of links that had been crammed into the Standard skin’s left sidebar, but MonoBook ended up being so minimalistic that everything but the current article text and the unnecessarily prominent list of translations got marginalized.

Speaking of minimalism, I tolerate Facebook for two reasons: it provides me with an audience and it has a really clean, efficient interface compared to comparable sites. (And it’s blue. I like blue.) Now the second reason is about to go away, as Facebook looks to reorganize its profile pages. They’re going the way of Wikipedia and adding tabs to separate the profiles into three sections: Wall, About, and Photos. Near as I can tell, these tabs will be utterly easy for newcomers to ignore, and the rest of us will notice them only because we’ve grown accustomed to our friends’s half-hearted attempts at being photogenic and writing witty “About Me”s.

Don’t get me wrong: I love tabs. Tabs make Web browsing bearable these days, and it makes using Internet Explorer 6 nothing less than torturous. But other than the occasional 300-pixel tabbed box, tabs belong in full-fledged desktop applications, like Web browsers, not in websites. It’s far too easy for visitors to ignore tabs in websites, because they’re not really discoverable unless they’re accompanied by ’90s-style rainbow-swirling effects as you hover over them, and by then you’ve been scared away.

Though I usually find his brand of usability unnecessarily strict and bland, usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s guidelines for tabs are worth taking a look at. If the tabs are right above the small content box that is affected by them, they’re quite discoverable. But place them at the top of a webpage, and the visitor’s eyes will immediately drift down to the heart of the page, the content.

Not all of Facebook’s redesign is so problematic: I like the idea of combining the wall with the poorly-named “Mini-Feed”, because you’ll often get wall posts in response to changing your profile picture or status, actions that are currently displayed out of context. But I still don’t know about continuing to call it the “Wall”. It was a Wall when you could devowel every Wall post that your friend had ever received. (The old version was kept around in the “History” section, of course.) It was a neat concession to Facebook’s otherwise orderly site. Now it’s just a corkboard: all your changes have to be fully contained within, basically, a boring little sticky-note.

As for replacing Wikipedia’s tabs, I don’t have a solid answer. I would however suggest adding an “Action box” to – of all places – the bottom of each page. Given a generous amount of space there, the action box would list in large font a few key ways for users to interact with the article: edit the article, discuss it, view its authors and history, and cite it. Any other actions, like renaming the article, can be listed below that in smaller text. As it is right now, a visitor is likely to see the article’s title up top, think that’ the beginning, and read down from there. A list of what to do next makes sense at the end of an article. After all, do you tell your friends to comment on your latest adventure before you even tell them the story?

Yes, I’m making a big deal out of a trifle, but it bugs me when websites are more tedious to use than they have to be.

Entry №1172, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 6:30 PM | Edit | Permalink
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