On run­ning Fire­fox 4 for the first time I was shocked to mouseover a link and appar­ently not be able to see where I was going. Had they ban­ished the sta­tus bar? Of course, everyone’s just play­ing catchup to Chrome’s UI, and its sta­tus bar isn’t really a bar at all — it just appears as and when it’s needed. Perfect.

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. ;-)