I was actually thinking about these principles today, and I think we need to
do a better job of conveying some of them to our users. Frequently I see
requests such as "can't you just add an option for X?" in bug reports. The
answer is most often "No," but it'd be great if we could point users to
something that explains the rationale behind that answer. I think it'd be
beneficial for both developers and users to have a less-technical document
(or an expanded paragraph, at least) explaining our philosophy on options
and why we take such an aggressive stance against adding them. I think your
summary is a good start at that.
rsesek / @chromium.org
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 7:33 PM, Peter Kasting wrote:
> A while ago, Ben Goodger (our fearless tech lead) wrote up a set of core
> principles around Chromium. If you have not read and pondered these, please
> do:
>
> http://dev.chromium.org/developers/core-principles
>
> In particular, as we've had more contributors both inside and outside
> Google over the past year, I feel there have been an increasing number of
> debates about things like adding more options and prompts, or making the UI
> more complex in other ways. One of our design goals is never to present
> users information and choices they don't understand or care about, and to
> make the browser automatically do the right thing, so that it's "a natural
> extension of your will" instead of "a piece of software" (in the words of
> the document). While this presents us with hard choices, and we can't
> always accommodate every user (including some of us developers!), it's
> important that we share a unified vision of what the product should be. Ben
> once mused that he'd love for us to be able to _remove_ options and prefs in
> each subsequent version.
>
> My own summary is this: trying to please everyone results in a product that
> doesn't perfectly please anyone; we should be willing to be bold, be
> arrogant, and create a product that is unsuitable for a few users, if that
> means it is exceptional for most. There are many good choices in the
> browser space today, and it's perfectly fine if an individual finds that
> Firefox, Safari, or any other browser is a better fit for him--as long as we
> understand and accept the tradeoff that triggers that decision.
>
> I hope you're passionate about making something great, and that whatever
> you're working on is focused around these core principles.
>
> PK
>
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