Asa Dotzler - Firefox and more: firefox is too complex

Asa Dotzler - Firefox and more: firefox is too complex

Over the last few months I've been at several geek conferences -- Gnomedex, OSCON, FooCamp -- and a couple others. One of the questions I got a lot of was 'what kind of new features can we expect in the upcoming Firefox releases?' My answer was something like 'I'd be pleased as punch if we could remove a couple features for the upcoming Firefox release. A feature is a flaming hoop we make our users jump through and if we're doing our jobs -- writing software that actually works for people -- we'd be removing those hoops, not adding more.'"

(via Asa's blog)

Ah, a software developer with a wonderful point of view. This is why I support and love Firefox - the focus is very solidly on the user. It's not on how it'd be cool to ___, it's on making everything easier and better for the regular user. This was the original vision with the computer and the internet, but we've gradually gotten so wrapped up in computing that now "power users" expect to be able to play with and do all kinds of cool things with software, when they really shouldn't ever need or want to be power users to begin with! The software should get out of the way, and let you do whatever it is you're trying to accomplish!