Usability engineering,Usability issues in firefox

1. Usability Issues in Mozilla
By:
Muhammad
Waleed

2. Introduction
• Nowadays there are several usability problems with
browsers. Mozilla also have many serious usability
problems which need to be fixed.
• Some of them will be discussed later.

3. Issues
 Speed
 Memory Consumption
 Menu Structure
 Migration
 Shortcut Menus
 Validation

4. Speed
 Mozilla takes considerably longer to launch than any
other browser. Opening a new window is
slow, regularly taking between three and ten seconds
(anything over one second is highly frustrating), and
there are similar problems with closing and redrawing
windows.

5. Memory Consumption
 To a large extent the slowness is due to Mozilla’s
memory consumption, which regularly sends it into the
mire of virtual memory on machines which don’t have
large amounts of RAM.

6. Menu structure
 Mozilla is currently heavily lopsided towards expert
users, and people who prefer using the keyboard to
using the mouse: as mentioned above, it has not
enough toolbar buttons, and conversely it has too
many menus.
 Menus are the most difficult GUI control to use, so
you need to keep them as simple and uncluttered as
possible.
 Mozilla, unfortunately, does the opposite.

7. Migration
 Mozilla is woefully incomplete in these regards:
 You can show your Internet Explorer favorites as a
folder in your Mozilla bookmarks, but you can’t
import or edit them.
 You can’t import messages from a Netscape
Communicator 4.x profile after creating a Mozilla
profile, nor can you import your address book without
exporting it from 4.x first.
 And the ability to import information from Mozilla’s
main competitor, Outlook Express, is completely
absent.

8. Shortcut Menus
 Shortcut menus (known as “contextual menus” on Mac
OS) are a method of quick access to extremely
frequent commands (such as “Back” or “Forward”).
 Mozilla’s shortcut menus were too long and to
inconsistent for anyone to be able to use them quickly.
 Mozilla breaks with previous versions (and with every
other kind of menu) in requiring two clicks, rather than
a single drag, to select an item — doubling the amount
of time taken to use the menu.
 The net result is that the menus are much slower to use
than they could be.

9. Validation
 If a site works in Internet Explorer, and even (in many
cases) in Netscape 4.x, but not in their Mozilla-based
browser, without any other information users will
naturally assume that the problem is with Mozilla.
Solution:
 There are already plans to show an icon in Navigator’s
status bar to notify the user if a page contains script
errors, or objects which Mozilla doesn’t have a plug-in
for.
 This would make users less angry with Mozilla when a
page does not render properly.