The way it’s meant to happen!

As and when typically just means “right before you click on a link”, with the whole thing triggered by mouseovers. The first page Firefox loads when you start the browser is available here — http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0/firstrun/ — can you see what’s wrong with it?

I love event-listenery JavaScript as much as the next guy, but the icon on Step 2 suggested I’d be going to another page (c’mon, that’s just what right angle quotation marks have been co-opted to mean on the web!) while the browser wouldn’t say where.

Before visiting any actual pages in Firefox, not much trusting it at this point, I did some quick Googling and discovered two things:

1. That you can bring back the status bar by simply typing ⌘ + / or Ctrl + /, and
2. That, not knowing this, people have created at least one browser extension to do exactly that.

Fail.

Of course, if I’d bothered to actually USE Firefox for 2 minutes–trusting it even though it wouldn’t tell me where links were pointing–I’d have discovered that ordinarily it does. Pie-faced, I retreated to blogging angrily about how Mozilla’s first run screen is a great HTML5 page but a horrible initial demo of the browser’s capabilities.

A few observations from this:

• Browsers need to tell you where you’re going next. Users don’t[/shouldn’t] trust the Internet enough to find out when they arrive.
• None of this would’ve happened had the team creating the landing page used progressive enhancement and unobtrusive JS technique.
• The team probably didn’t because they wanted to show off how well their amazing browser does fancy “HTML5” (in the Jobs-ian CSS/JS inclusive sense) stuff. Fine, but also link to a page that has the same content.
• Browser vendors are responsible for keeping user’s trust from the very start. This is a weird issue because it’s actually nothing to do with the browser’s functionality itself, but it temporarily impacted my opinion on how seriously Firefox take user choice/security/usability in a significant way.
• No-one actually uses Firefox anymore, so it doesn’t matter. It is a pain while using Firebug to test my own sites, though. ;-)

The blue in the image above is actually a deep red!

Accordingly, while the colours are totally out of whack, there are no other artifacts in the image. Normally this just looks weird — sometimes, in the case of logo variants, it looks plausible but utterly incorrect! My guess is they’re using an older version of PIL (we all know how much Google loves Python) prior to this March 2009 patch. Sounds like the same phenomenon.

Still, those people emailing CMYK JPGs has to be a little bit niche, so I’m not heaps hopeful of this getting fixed too soon! The main reason I care is because web interfaces are so much faster than retrieving large attachments from IMAP stores.

Notably, the site is very wide (>1200px). As the web evolves we are observing an ever increasing standard width for desktop versions of websites — for some, this poses current issues as individuals gradually shift to widescreen platforms. For others, it represents the inexorable march away from old technologies towards the new!

While this poses certain problems for mobile clients, etc., even these devices are increasingly capable of either linearising or providing useful interfaces (multi-touch, etc.) for making screen content accessible in mobile contexts. Here, the need for good information architecture cries out even louder than technical considerations. Browsing the Internet mobile is an arduous task on even mobile websites, so the best thing you can do as an author is reduce the necessary depth of content to make information rapidly accessible for all user agents.

In the case of the EvolvedHD website, the inclusion of contact details at the top left of every page effectively fulfills all likely applications of their website in a mobile context.

Consider more than just the desktop when designing your website. Increasingly, even low-depth websites are being called upon for mobile access as people seize the convenience of anywhere, anytime Internet. Stop making your users jump through hoops, and start giving them what they want, sooner. It’ll do wonders for your Internet-based business.