Thread: Fennec Alpha 1
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Posts: 41 | Thanked: 18 times | Joined on Jun 2008 @ Toronto
#94
Originally Posted by allnameswereout View Post
With intended audience I refer to people who do not wish to mimic their desktop browser experience on their mobile device. Instead, they will use the pros and cons of the mobile device and adapt the mobile browser to that.
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Back in the 90s we had some of the above restrictions but we usually simply used thin clients, and we had synchronisation with LDAP. Microsoft won the browser war and didn't implement LDAP in their browser.
[Disclaimer: I'm not trying to fan any flames or anything. I haven't tried fennec yet, but I'm interested in it]

I'm one of those "open everything in a new tab" people. Back in the 90's, I was using a 486SX notebook with 32MB of RAM, a 640x480 greyscale screen and a 19200 bps modem. I regularly had 10-20 tabs open in Opera. (They weren't called tabs back then; they were called MDI windows - but it was the same idea).

Using tabs is actually a very good way to compensate for limited network and CPU resources. Go to Google, open the first 10 links in the background and then click next. Then switch to each window as it renders.

Obviously, web pages were a lot smaller back then, too. But I've got more memory in my n810 than I did in that old notebook.

I think that interfaces optimized for small devices are great. And they should definitely be optimized for the common use cases. But truly great user interfaces are deep: they only look simple on the surface. They reveal more to the user as the user learns more about the application.

Gestures are a great way of hiding more advanced features. A gesture for "open page in new tab in the background" is invisible, so it doesn't confuse new users.

Michael