Turn Firefox Into A Chrome Clone: Misunderstood Usability
Lifehacker has an article on how you make your Firefox browser look just like Google Chrome using a few extensions. While the article really speaks to the adaptability of Firefox — the results are a close match — there’s one feature about Chrome they failed (or forgot) to replicate.
Chrome has sacrificed the browsers titlebar in favor of pushing the tabs all the way to the top of the screen. Why is this so important? Well, in Windows that means your tabs will touch the edge of the screen, real-estate that in a usability context is highly valuable. Think about it, if you closed your eyes and moved your mouse based solely on memory, which parts of your screen would be easiest to find? The edges of course, because they stop your mouse from getting farther. As such, I’d argue the most important feature of Chrome is that the tabs are so easy to hit. That’s a feature worthy of adoption.
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You’re looking for Fitt’s Law here.
The easiest place to find in any 2d space is the edge. (Corners are pretty good too.)
Corners are excellent. In fact, sometimes they’re too good. My girlfriends mac has 3 of four corners assigned to, consecutively, expose, dashboard and show desktop. All smart features and great when you need them. Really annoying when you’re watching a fullscreen YouTube video and need to move the mouse out of the way; whoop — there’s the dashboard :)
Thats actually spot on there. I use Chrome at work exclusively, mainly because of why I originally started using FF, it’s MILES faster than either FF or IE. It’s unbelievably quick to be honest and you’re right the tabs are exactly that usable. I thought that would have been a problem in the beginning but it was actually a massive boon.
The thing that I’m struggling with is how this is going to be employed onto the mac. By default you’ve got the top menu bar always. But I honestly can’t wait for it to arrive onto the mac.
It is interesting how the tab location will translate to the mac. Mac’ers have always (correctly) cited Fitts law when describing the location of the File menu. Yes, it’s well placed if you want the file menu to be that easy to hit.
But do you really want that?
The default Ubuntu theme does this as well, it has an app launcher in the top and an app switcher in the bottom.
Who would have thought it: I prefer the Microsoft way, and I have done so ever since I saw the potential back when Microsoft released an app called Max . This way Microsoft also uses Fitts law: task switching is easy, start menu is easy, closing an app is easy, and in the case of creative apps such as Chrome and Office 2007, the apps get a slice of the fun.
The article is extra silly, because it’s not the graphical sheen of Chrome that makes Chrome so good, it’s what under the hood. And to make that point I’ve uploaded a screenshot and explained what extensions I would proscribe. Ironic.
Firefox takes the best parts of Safari&Chrome
The thing is, the only four* extensions you need to add to Firefox which nick features from other browsers are:
1) Omnibar - To be able to search from the statusbar, like Chrome.
2) Fission - To get a loading… animation in your locationbar, like Safari.
By itself 2 brings limited improvement, but combined with number 3…
3) Autohide Statusbar - Hides the Statusbar unless you hover a link, like Chrome. Need to change everything to 0 ms delay and turn it off on page-load. Unlike Chrome, it doesn’t fade in&out nicely and isn’t persistent, so you get a flicker when going from link to link.
4) Enter Selects - So you can search or go to the url by JustPressingEnter™. Needs to add a blue-selector-bg to the first option shown to increase usefulness though.
Done! Your browser now works like a Safari+Chrome lovechild.
(well, nearly done - Using a theme from Grapple makes it all look a good deal better)
All extensions mentioned work on 3.0.3 (and all except Omnibar work flawlessly in 3.1nightlies).
*When I started writing this comment it said “only two”…