The Fruits of Usability Testing - Firefox Beta 3

I just upgraded to the most recent release of Firefox Beta 3 on the Mac (which is a phenomenal improvement over version 2), and in version 4 there was quite the startling difference in the navigation buttons in the toolbar.

As you can see above, the back button is now gigantic in comparison to forward, and infinitely more clickable. This is something anyone upgrading is bound to notice, both for its asymmetric design, as well as how much more usable this control now is.

If you think about how much you actually go back while navigating the Web in comparison to going forward, you’ll probably notice you’re going back probably 9 times out of 10. Only through studying users’ behaviour and looking at ways of improving the efficiency of their day-to-day use would the Firefox team have picked up on this.

March 14, 2008 | Filed Under Writing

Comments

Jan on March 16th, 2008 2:19 am

Intersting. So, is the Beta stable enough to update to it?

Adam on March 16th, 2008 4:19 am

For sure it’s stable enough, but it’s still in early beta so the extension support isn’t all there.

I haven’t really tested how fast it is in rendering pages versus Safari yet, but this is the first version of Firefox on the Mac that has actually felt like a real Mac application.

It’s hard to describe, but it finally has somewhat of that polished feel to it that I enjoy while using Apple’s Mac apps.

A. Noni Mousse on March 16th, 2008 9:38 pm

Such a cutie. =)

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