Re: autocompletion

<quote who="Philip Langdale">

> As for your assertion that there isn't a sharp divide and that I'm the
> wierd one here, I think it's worth pointing out that no one who has got
> themselves stuck in this thread has actually said that they like the auto
> dropdown.

I personally like the auto dropdown. However, I don't feel that my personal
feelings on the matter are at all relevant.

> Some have made the argument that we 'need' it for newbies who would fret
> and nash their teeth were it not on, but still have reservations about
> using it themselves; heck, you fall into this category.

Hrm, I didn't see anyone talking about the dropdown with regards to newbies
in this thread. I mentioned affordance, which helps everyone.

Providing the list of matching URLs is very helpful when navigating sites
that you visit often - mail.gnome.org is a great example of that for me.
Being able to see what I'm doing is very useful.

What I haven't heard is why the automatic dropdown is a usability concern,
rather than a benefit. It offers enough benefits, which have been mentioned
here and in previous mails, but I don't see any negatives.

So, it comes down to:

  What should be the default behaviour?
  Is this behaviour preferential?
  Does it warrant a user-visible control?

I would answer 'auto-dropdown enabled' (for the reasons stated above and in
previous mails), 'no' and 'no', but there's obviously some disagreement with
that.

To answer 'yes' to the second and third questions, a similar back up case
should be presented for them. Of course, you could say 'no dropdown at all'
for the first - which would require some backup too.

> And mozilla is a bad example for you to bring up. It has rather nice
> prefs for autocomplete, including a little 'this is what it looks like'
> diagram. I'll happily follow the mozilla model. :-)

Mozilla is an interesting experiment in usability abuse and preference
overload. It is not a good benchmark for Galeon... Surely Galeon is not
meant to be Mozilla with GTK+ bits? If so, we may as well all use the
Mozilla Classic theme with GTK+ rendering.

I thought one of the aims behind Galeon was to use the really awesome
components provided by Mozilla, but without sucking rocks in the user
interface department! :-)


  ... and now for something completely different ...


Anyway, there's a lot resting on the maintenance of Galeon. I would dearly
love to see a *real* *GNOME* web browser shipping with GNOME - and the
distros.

The distros don't want to support Mozilla - it is far too painful for "real
users" to use (I'm not talking about newbies, I'm talking about people who
use computers but don't really care about them). Look at the difference
between Netscape and Mozilla - that's not done because AOL/Netscape are
duffers... They know their market.

Right now, the best bet for major distributors (think Red Hat, Sun, etc) is
Phoenix. It has the Mozilla project behind it, and they're working hard on a
usable and slick browser based on Mozilla. That's annoying - I mean, Phoenix
is great, but it's not Galeon!

I don't want Phoenix to win. I want Galeon to win.

- Jeff

-- 
     "Everyone's a little queer, why can't she be a little straight?" -     
                           Weezer, Pink Triangle                            


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