UsabilityBlog - Latest Comments in A Mini-Rant About Firefox

Re: A Mini-Rant About Firefox

David — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:18:32 -0000

I disagree. Users are keenly aware that sometimes things just crash and burn. When a job simply disappears, instead of reporting the outcome, people are likely to wonder whether it has actually succeeded. Until software is much more reliable than it currently is, confirmations like this are very helpful to distinguish between successful termination and silent failure.

Re: A Mini-Rant About Firefox

Asa Dotzler — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:55:01 -0000

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39...

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Re: A Mini-Rant About Firefox

Paul Sherman — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:43:15 -0000

Good points, Jeff. I especially like the one about it being important to the code, but not necessarily to the user.

Re: A Mini-Rant About Firefox

Jeff Garbers — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:36:22 -0000

I'd imagine the button is there so that there's a confirmation / recognition step in case something went wrong with the upgrade process, but you're right - if everything worked, why bug me to tell me about it?

Maybe we see so many messages and pop-ups to tell us things worked because (1) too often they don't, and (2) developers are sometimes under the impression that if something's important to the code, it's important to the user.