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"When I first got involved in the Mozilla Project, and realized just how bad Mozilla’s interface design was intended to be, I determined to see it as an opportunity. Okay, I thought. Here is a chance to improve the user experience for hundreds of millions of users, by helping to reverse some of the more egregious design decisions which would otherwise make their way into Netscape Communicator 5.0.
And that’s what happened, except for two minor details: the 'Netscape Communicator 5.0' thing, and the 'hundreds of millions of users' thing. I had not expected to discover, in Netscape’s contributors to Mozilla’s interface and feature set, an inverse relationship between power and cluefulness which determined that future Netscape releases would never be compelling enough for huge numbers of people to install — in the same way that huge numbers of people installed RealPlayer, for example, or even Netscape Communicator."
Matthew Thomas? "I’m a 24-year-old Forrest Gump lookalike with two university degrees and a fondness for thinking too much. By day, I work for a pittance at an Internet cafe in Christchurch, New Zealand. By night, I construct grandiose schemes for saving the world." As an interface designer, he maintains a strong love-hate relationship with Mozilla.
OTHER MPT STORIES
In search of the perfectly designed browser, including the top ten usability problems in Internet Explorer
The top ten usability problems in Mozilla