On Sat, 14 Jul 2001 13:15:02 +0100 esteemed Gervase Markham did hold forth
thusly:
> There is a lot of ground between "techies designing something for each
> other" and "the end-user experience is the defining criteria for Mozilla
> 1.0".
I think the latter should certainly be one of the defining criteria for the
release of Moz 1.0. I mean, the idea of not putting some end-user feedback
into it with some sort of standard that has to be met seems absurd to me.
This is not server-side software. Its software that is used by end-users.
> And, leaving the "Mozilla is a platform" point aside (check out
> http://www.mozdev.org), I think the Mail/News and Composer teams would be
> a bit upset to hear Mozilla called a "browser".
The people just using it as a browser vastly outnumber the people who use it
for those other purposes. But more to the point: It is unlikely that people
who are dissatisfied with it as a browser are even going to get around to
trying it as a mail or news client or as a page composer.
People are more willing to try a new browser than they are to try a new mail
program. Getting a lot of mail into a mail program and then deciding it is
too unstable is costly to the user. If the user loses messages its even more
costly. Most people are going to try the browser before they try the rest of
it. Well, if the browser doesn't pass muster then the rest of it is going to
be irrelevant.
> Netscape, and any other Mozilla distributor who wants to, has the job of
> making a browser for the masses. I am sure they will not release their
> product without usability testing. The bugfixes resulting from that will
> find their way back to Mozilla. That's how it should be.
Since Netscape is really Moz+ I don't see why Moz's release should be rushed.
But the advantage of doing usability studies on Moz is that it has nightly
builds and more point releases than Netscape. So progress can be measured
more finely. Also, Netscape is likely to keep their own usability studies
secret. To allow the rest of us to see the results I'd rather do the
usability studies on Moz.
> "mozilla.org is not going to base its release criteria for Mozilla 1.0 on
> usability studies" != "few people will want to use Mozilla 1.0".
Unfortunately few people are going to want to use Moz 1.0 because it is a
slow fat pig. But if you think most users won't react to it that way then you
should have nothing to fear from usability study results holding back Moz
1.0's release.
