Lazy Developers
In Firefox there two examples of lazy developers.
The first example is users cannot stop only a page autorefresh or autoredirect. The only option is to enable or disable both. The associated preference is accessibility.blockautorefresh.
The GUI control to disable the latter is in the preferences: Advanced->General:
Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page.
Enabling that option then results in an annoying banner at the top of any affected page with the messages:
Firefox prevented this page from automatically redirecting to another page.
or
Firefox prevented this page from automatically reloading.
An example of the first banner message can be seen when visiting news.google.com. An example of the second message can be seen when visiting www.upi.com.
The banner includes an Allow button.
There is no option to disable the banner.
The distinct banner messages indicate developers are aware of the underlying detection scheme and know the difference. Therefore the correct usability design is to provide the following preferences:
accessibility.blockautorefresh
accessibility.blockautoredirect
With the respective GUI controls:
Warn me when websites try to refresh the page.
Warn me when websites try to redirect the page.
While redirects often are necessary, automatic refreshes usually are annoying and are abused to improve advertising click rates.
The second lazy example is users cannot clear only the browsing history or downloads history. The only option is to clear both.
In a college class an instructor would tell such developers to try again. Never combine two distinct features into one widget.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Firefox, General
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