Re: why are there no themes for galeon? and is galeon 1.3 cooler than 1.2, let's vote

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 17:52 +0100, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> Le mardi 15 mars 2005 à 09:45 -0700, Michael L Torrie a écrit :
> > I realize that most OSS software exists to service the needs of the
> > developers.  But if you intend your software to be used by others (and
> > in OSS this definitely need not be the case) then ignoring them and
> > calling them idiots is not a very wise thing to do.  
> 
> What I think Adam meant is "if you listen to every feature request
> formulated by 'users' in bugzilla or on this mailing list", galeon would
> be a huge disgusting pile of garbage. The wishes of 3 people on a
> mailing list or a web site aren't necessarily representative of what
> people not even knowing there's a galeon mailing (and not caring about
> its existence) want.

Yes, and add to that the "inspiration" set off by that big Eugenia snafu
that's been slashdotted and blogged and emailed around for the past few
days....

Truth is, users most often don't know what they want. And most feature
requests reflect this. Take a completely unrelated example: when I was
working full-time, I was often asked to do SQL queries on our company
database, for reports. Someone requested to add an extra column to a
report 1000 pages long: each row would get a certain dollar figure. Why?
So that somebody could MANUALLY look over those 1000 pages and HIGHLIGHT
(i.e., with a yellow highlighter) the columns which have a dollar figure
above a certain value (about 2 per page). When I said I could just
filter out the proper 2000 rows in 30 seconds, the requester said, "oh,
I didn't think of that."

A more Galeon-related example: in Epiphany there is no "Quit" feature.
Why not, even though people have asked for it? Because no user has come
up with a valid reason for putting it there. All it does is closes every
window when you hit Ctrl-Q by mistake. The *real* issue is that users
don't know that logging out of GNOME will automatically save their
session, including all open browser windows. (I don't mean to start a
flame war about this particular issue. I know Galeon is often used
outside of GNOME and I don't know if "Quit" is important to those
users.) The simple fact is that users are trying to solve their *real*
issue (logging out and back in without destroying their session) by
coming up with a wrong solution.

Users are certainly not idiots. But just about everybody, when
approaching a problem, comes up with some solution. And most often that
solution is grossly inefficient. Good developers take on a difficult
role. They must:

- Discover what it is the user *really* wants.
- Find a way to get the user what he wants in a painless manner, without
disturbing the experience for users who *don't* want it.
- Say "no" when he doesn't want to do something.

These tasks are incredibly difficult. Add to this the complication that
a massive proportion of the user-base doesn't even know how to give
feedback or make feature requests. In such a situation, it's impossible
for developers to know the best way to do things.

As for my personal attitude: I'm not a Galeon developer and I don't even
*use* Galeon. I just hang out on this list. I'm often blunt, but I never
mean offense to anybody. So I'm sorry if I've offended.

-- 
Adam Hooper <[email protected]>

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