The Erotics of Experience - Reply to Asa Dotzler

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It's always cool when a "somebody" reads a "nobody's" blog and comments about it. Asa Dotzler is a "someone" when you're talking about browsers and Firefox in particular, since he's actively involved in the thing itself. I mean he's got his own wiki for fuck's sake. I (as anyone who's watched "Anne", the season premiere of Buffy season 3, would recognise) am nobody. More specifically I'm a nobody who happens to be a writer rather than a technology expert.

What I know is perception, and what I understand is how things are percieved, and the erotics of experience. To be fair I should be more careful about tailoring my prose to my audience, but I writes the way I writes. And that includes nuance in phrasing. To quote myself via someone else:

"the paradox of features is also that you always want to make things better, to add more - and yet the more you add the more complicated a thing can get - and the more you can contribute to an impression of clutter"

Again, you might not know that I write/wrote either academic prose or fiction (more or less) for a living, so you might not approach the writing with that in mind. But there's a reason why I say "and yet the more you add the more complicated a thing can get" (meta-me's italics). When Opera added a very prominent new mail client, things got at least a little more complicated - what I'm saying is not so different from what you're saying; sure there are times when new features just work, but more often than not, new menus are added, more options are available etc.

Even a simple thing like RSS - it now pops up in Opera's address bar, just as it does in FF's status bar (as a livebookmark). Now, is that clutter or is that the impression of clutter? That depends on what you definition of "of" is. People are complicated fuckers - some people might argue there is an objective notion of clutter, while others might well say that clutter is a function of the one percieving it. I was writing about perception (hence the focus on the marketing), so I'm just necessarily pointing out that bloat/clutter need not necessarily be either to anybody, unless wishing makes it so.

But my larger point was this - when you announce features, whether they are as you say things that just work, or things that add clutter, people are often going to conflate the two - hence the title "The Unfair Impression of Bloat". Features means you have a new version number, which is when marketers/evangelists go to work. But when they pimp mostly about the features (ie: press releasing the equivalent of a feature changelog) people are going to assume that the new components add bloat/clutter whether they do or not.

I wish I was a UI expert - but I'm not, I'm a bitchy end-user who has eyes.

As for my boo-boo about the size of Firefox, that's just me not having paid attention to file sizes since 0.8 or something - I was wrong, bad me - but in my sneaky way I'm going to suggest that it makes my point about how with broadband, download size is a lot less of a deal that it used to be.

But really what I was trying to do was write around the issue rather than lambast Opera for what you rightly point out is the relative clutter of their default install in relation to almost any other browser. I've (fairly, but more often not fairly) lambasted Opera before, and this time I was just pointing out that the new version number was a step towards simplicity rather than version-and-feature-bloat. "The Unfair Impression of Bloat".



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When it comes Linux and Mac, Opera definitely has a size advantage - the disk image for Firefox 1.0.3 for Mac is 8936 KB while Opera 8.0 for Mac is 4780 KB.

It still puzzles me how they get Firefox for Windows under 5MB.

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This page contains a single entry by subtitles published on April 24, 2005 3:16 AM.

What is a Browser? - Reaching out to people who don't know what a browser is, apparently was the previous entry in this blog.

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