The Difficulty of Simplicity
We popped into Mozilla’s offices in Mountain View for a visit last week, and we were lucky enough to have a long chat with Asa Dotzler, one of the driving forces behind Firefox and co-founder of the SpreadFirefox community marketing website. He told us an interesting anecdote about the early days of Firefox that has great relevance to any project that aims to simplify an existing application category.
As some may remember, before Firefox there was the Mozilla Application Suite, a powerful but complex set of internet applications that included a web browser and email client. As Mozilla struggled to regain market share in the teeth of Internet Explorer’s increasingly entrenched dominance, the drivers of the nascent Firefox project realized that mass market adoption meant radically simplifying their web browser product.
As Asa recalls, Firefox was a huge success in terms of trimming the fat from the Mozilla browser, but met initially with a lot of negative reviews. The reason is straightforward: the kind of early adopters who are likely to be the first to try a new product are also those who are most keen to have slews of bells and whistles at their disposal. If you’re making a consumer-oriented product in an area dominated by geeks, you can therefore expect to be slammed at first for missing any number of “must have” features. Of course, once Firefox adoption went through the roof, it became evident that the Firefox developers were right to stick to their guns and resist the temptation to add features merely to appeal to early adopters.
We’re certainly seeing some of this dynamic with AllPeers. One frequent critique has been the lack of such-and-such feature, and in many cases these comments are perfectly legitimate. In terms of functionality we’re still on the light side. However, it’s important not to lose sight of our primary goal, which is to popularize powerful sharing technology so that it is accessible to the tech savvy and tech challenged alike. We’ll continue to neglect certain features if we think that they add too much complexity, and focus instead on streamlining our user experience.
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Happy to hear that from… a geek
Comment by Mauro — 9/7/2006 @ 9:21 am
Might be, but how about publishing a roadmap, so we have something concrete to look forward to?
Great job on AllPeers!
Comment by Lulu — 9/7/2006 @ 11:53 am
Please…AllPeers has a long way to go before it can start comparing itself to Firefox.
The beauty of Firefox lies in its expandability. The extensions community allows any user to configure his/her browser in whatever way is desired, so that while the browser at its core avoids bloatedness, as a user, I can make it as bloated as I want.
Allow me to install an AllPeers extension that would let me cancel downloads, see what a user has taken from me, or see ‘items shared with [user]’ and ‘items shared by [user]’ in the same window, then you can start self-aggrandizing.
And the roadmap is a good call.
Comment by ZenBug — 9/7/2006 @ 4:03 pm
i’ll ‘third’ that. or thrice that. whichever it is.
Comment by J — 9/8/2006 @ 1:50 am
I whole heartedly agree. Hold the line! It’s always a harder choice, what to leave out, than what to add. It’s good for the development community to continue to encourage simplicity and defer “advanced” features.
Comment by Alan Kleymeyer — 9/8/2006 @ 4:00 pm
I’d have to see that Zenbug is right. Firefox is successful because everyone who absolutely *needs* something can get it.
Heed the words of Linus Torvalds, who said something to the principle that, many of the features in KDE are needed by very few people, but almost everyone needs at least one of them.
Comment by Malician — 9/9/2006 @ 3:43 am
I think its just not the kind of application that I want to install and use, because of:
1. It UI is terrible, theres no user notification and no feedback on what I am doing
2. Its hogging firefox, when I close firefox i really need it to close because either I am not using it or I am restarting it to install an extension. All peers doesn’t allow me to do so. why? for some weird reason I have to right click and shutdown allpeers !!
3. Using Allpeers makes my system slow if I am doing 5 file transfers.
4. Its better if you make it a desktop application. I will most likely use it with a better UI.
Comment by Justin — 9/9/2006 @ 7:24 am
I absolutely agree with ZenBug. I don’t use Firefox because it’s a simple and small program. I didn’t like IE (which is, in my opinion, also a simple program), because it had too much security holes and I don’t fully trust Microsoft
The reason I switched from Opera to FF was that I had full control over it by installing plugins! That’s also the reason why i loved Miranda IM. So for me and most of the people I know is full control over a program among other things the most important. Maybe there are a lot of people using FF because of it’s simplicity, but I don’t believe that they are so many. Why not optimize the standard settings of the program, so “normal” users don’t have to change something, but give the “geeks” the option to do so?
Comment by neo — 9/12/2006 @ 2:14 am