Killing Choices Is Not All That Good

I love Silverlight. If you are reading this text, you know why. Looking at the various demos makes me want to work in Silverlight. When Microsoft.com offers me their download center in Silverlight I click the yes please option.

The eye candy makes me happy to be a user. Even the moving backgrounds are subtle enough and I don't feel dizzy or ready to rant. All the effects make me feel special and loved.

And then I hit my middle button.

No, it must be me. The Silverlight wouldn't do that to me. Look at it, it loves the dev me and the user me. I hit the obviously malfunctioning middle button again, and the one on the side too (mapped to act as middle click) - just to be sure.

No tab appears.

Apparently, while starting work on a competitor product to Flash, no one cared to think about the usability of the user experience. Or think of the various user habits. Or look at all the mistakes Flash made.

So I have to wonder - after playing catch up in the "tabs are good, people want tabs" game, why kill them again? What is so wrong about people opening links in new tabs? Is no one on the Silverlight design team loves tabs a bit too much? And why do they hate me using a context menu? I though Windows loved the context menu.

Please stop me before I move on to the dreaded JavaScript link...

And while I am at this choices thing, I'd like to know why Live anything doesn't allow me to set the language of my choice?

Seriously people! I have it in my IE languages options, right there at the top. So you chose to be smarter than I and read my location, color me impressed. But I have a profile, don't I? And I can't set my preferred language? Why? Please let me know why me telling your site what language I like to read stuff in is bad.

Published Wednesday, March 12, 2008 10:24 PM by Ranko
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Comments

# re: Killing Choices Is Not All That Good

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 4:44 PM by Dave

I don't think that because the middle button doesn't open a tab, "no one cared to think about the usabilitiy of the user experience."

You are aware that this is a beta, right?

# re: Killing Choices Is Not All That Good

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 5:59 PM by Ranko

This was supposed to sound more rantish, maybe a bit less serious than it came out.

Point was that Flash already made the mistake of introducing a web technology that ignored some basic, common user actions - like my pet favorite the whatever method of opening stuff in a new tab.

I am aware that it is in beta. OTOH if I were a betting man, I'd bet that it will not change that feature in RTM.

# re: Killing Choices Is Not All That Good

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 6:30 PM by Dave

Keep in mind too, that there are some serious browser issues that MS has to work with. For example, Safari does not expose mousewheel events to the DOM. There is a workaround but it's an example of the difficulties that one can run into building a browser plugin.

It may not be in RTM, but I'm pretty sure that a developer could make it happen in the code.

# re: Killing Choices Is Not All That Good

Thursday, March 13, 2008 10:04 AM by Peter

My sentiment exactly; here's my rant list:

1. I hate cleartype; makes everything blurry -- let me see those pixels. I have disabled cleartype in Windows and SilverLight is only happy to ignore it

2. Selecting text (this is a problem with Flash as well); it just so happens that I'm very used to selecting (copy + paste) text from a browser and when a part of the page won't let me do just that it's a sore thumb. I lose control and I'm not happy.

3. Back button; everything happens in that page, there's no going back or forward (or at least I haven't seen SL app that would do this)

4. The link issue you just mentioned.

5. Performance; it is quite slow compared to flash. I looked at the control demo and adjusting some sliders jumped my CPU to 10-15%. Needless to say that's ridiculous. With a regular Windows slider I can move it up and down all day and it would not move the CPU above 0%.

In summary, there are lots and lots of issues that need to be solved. Eye candy is just a small part of the whole story. You'll be wowed for a few minutes and then you will start getting annoyed.

# re: Killing Choices Is Not All That Good

Thursday, March 13, 2008 3:46 PM by John Dowdell

For what it's worth, when Opera and Firefox introduced tabbed windows, I don't think they offered a programmatic control, only a user action, to initiate a new tab.

(And if they did, Microsoft's take would likely be to introduce a variant handling.... ;-)

Searching on "open a new tab in javascript" still reveals lots of requests, but no solutions. Maybe next year's browsers will offer this. But then I'd guess we'd need "background tab blockers" just like we've got "popup window blockers" today.... ;-)

The selection and copying of text is up to the content creator in SWF files... it's easy to choose to allow such textfields.

The browser's back button has always been a significant cognitive problem to resolve... most think of it as a navigational aid, but some insist it should also control a single page's undo stack. I think a well-designed app would offer its own "undo" type of mechanism, and I've been leery of past attempts to overload the browser's UI elements. There's no widespread agreement here yet, though.

jd/adobe

# re: Killing Choices Is Not All That Good

Saturday, March 15, 2008 9:15 PM by Ranko

It's not about the tab - it is about usability and my options as a user. There is a rant to write about Google too, like why it chooses to default to a language it read from my browser once, but does not allow me the <i>user</i> to change it or remember it?

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