I agree. Is valuable information see the _rejected_ items.
I make a year list of movies that I personally recommend [1], and that is why I start to add a full list with 1-10 points of all the movies that I watch (the "rejected" or "not recommended" are the 6/10 and below). I think this make the list more interesting and highlight my personal taste.
I understand why this spark conversations about the current Firefox market share situation.
But I also believe that Firefox's dominant past plays against when it comes to analyzing the product right now.
Firefox is amazing, it works wonderfully, it continues to improve, respects privacy, adopts Mozilla's ethical values.
Yes, not many people use it, but criticizing this point so aggressively I think it is also influenced by the culture aiming at hypergrouth, dominance, monopoly, "Move fast and break things".
I am very happy with what Firefox does for me right now. Imagine a situation in which Firefox does not exist and today the product comes to light, it would be a great celebration, and the market share would be zero.
Thanks Firefox, I love you very much, although there are few of us who use you and maybe that doesn't change.
And when browsers will protect users against activity recording without consent?
For example Hotjar [1], I did a review [2] of the product a year ago and I could not believe the creepy surveillance level of this tool.
For me, manually disable JS or install content blockers will not get mainstream appeal for the regular users who just want to browse the web (and didn't know that maybe are being recorded).
This should be blocked by default on every browser.
Not an expert, but if you add "The Best Cheap" [1] at the beginning of every title tag of your product pages I guess Google bot will think is something shady.
I have the same concerns with Google Analytics and tried to install Matomo [1] for my personal website [2] few months ago, seems a more robust tool than Countly [3] to me, maybe I'm wrong.
But I had an error installing Matomo and got not help in the official forum [4], if someone here can help me I will appreciate it, I'm not a developer (I'm also considering get rid of analytics tools for good, anyone?). Thanks.
I ask about renaming the product back in 2016 [1] and the author response was:
I won't change the name -- it is too well established now.
It's unfortunate that ublock.org causes confusion, but in the end he is hurting himself more in the long run than he is hurting uBlock Origin, it's a conscious choice he made to scam people,[1][2] he will have to deal with whatever consequences there is doing so.
Got a cheap HostGator shared hosting and host low traffic websites for some clients (static/WordPress).
As a designer with no advanced knowledge in hosting/IT/domains/backend, it was pretty easy and no complications, I can't complain.
Now planning to move from HostGator to DreamHost because HTTPS is expensive in HG and free in DH (also using the free Netlify plan for static sites, HTTPS free).
One thing that always I feel on discussions about AMP is that is something that is going to happen, and is not, is happening right now, regular users are already having better and great experiences on mobile.
That is the good side that I see of the project, Google was capable of do that in about 2 years. Pushing development best practices seems that was not enough, companies stills doing awful job on the performance side of their websites.
AMP was like force companies to do other version of their websites with limitations that prevent doing stupid development and design decisions like js/css/html bloat, repeat components and more.
You like that beautiful readable and organized Medium post?, is a good experience right?, well, it happens that the editor has a lot of limitations like only let you choose 3 text hierarchies, 3 image sizes, one font family, no colors, etc. For me AMP is something like that but in the development side instead on the visual design side.
The terrifying part is that Google has created a parallel version of the web who fill their needs, a stripped down version[1] that feels like an authoritarian power blocks the freedom that the "native" web always has, also happens that this parallel version has some advantages and people are loving it.
I was just getting to know the world of computers, I think it was the year 97, I had 13 years old and my first PC, Pentium 200mhz with Windows 95, I thought the games were fabulous! Quake 1, Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Moto Racer.
But one day I bought the Diamond Monster 2 with a Voodoo 2 chip and 12MB Ram (3DFX accelerator card), I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling to the future, the games looked amazing and I had a performance boost.
I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2 Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the "Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features.
Moto Racer, Descent Freespace and Tomb Raider 2 come to my mind now as others that I feel huge visual gap between regular graphics and 3DFX.
Then came Quake 3 Arena in 1999 and it blew my mind, I think that in 2000/2001 I upgrade to a Pentium 4 and maintain the legendary Diamond Monster 2 because it was still kicking ass. Awesome card, it has a place in my heart.
I'm not familiarized with "thread communication" term, I mean a carbon copy of email communication: subject, message, a UI/UX that give you peace to write without read checks, "Writing..." and "Online" statuses of the recipients.
I agree that are very different, but in the technical part, for regular users (those who make massive this products), you just have a phone number (email address) and download the WhatsApp app / login to web.whatsapp.com (download Gmail app / login to gmail.com).
This let me think, what happens if you send a WhatsApp message to a phone number that is not registered on WhatsApp? Its saved till the user create an account with that number?
The article does a good job digging on the dev/it details of the story, as a designer, I will love to read about the UI/UX side, I think this field also have lot of impact on how Hotmail history unfolded.
Reading this story I find a correlation between Hotmail and WhatsApp, a simple and free product that introduce to a massive audience a different way of communication (Hotmail = Email, WhatsApp = Messaging).
And seeing how Hotmail lost relevance and Gmail take his place few years ago, I'm wondering, is possible now that a massive product like WhatsApp can be replaced with other that do the same thing in the same way? Why Gmail won?, because the 1GB?, UI/UX?, Google marketing? Snapchat is losing to Instagram because Instagram was a established product that start to mimic Snapchat, but a new player that beat WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger? (not in China [1]).
Also, is WhatsApp/Messaging taking the place of email for younger audiences, casual chat, non-work related communications? Oh, I have an idea, I will love to have a "email" feature on Signal, move the asynchronous way of communication of email to the messaging apps will be awesome to avoid the attention economy / texting fatigue (and have encrypted email without the PGP complexity!). A nice feature to Signal to differentiate from the competition imo. I'm crazy?
It's hard to forgive. I believe that ethical branding exists, and Mozilla was able to create an emotional relationship with many people, that's why this issue hurts deep for many.
When I can't uninstall the Google Plus app from my Nexus 5 I get mad, when Apple put that U2 album on every iPhone I laughed, but this was different, it was disappointing, I feel the same vibes when I do an Ubuntu fresh install and see those Amazon links, but this is even more unexpected, I just can't believe it when I read it, for me, it can be told as a joke on when Mozilla lost his principles, I just can't see it as a silly marketing decision, sorry.
For the people who also get emotional, I encourage to think in all the good stuff that Mozilla did, and try to forgive this big conceptual mistake, but don't try to forget about it.
Note: My English isn't the best and I'm from my phone.
The article put a lot of attention in the visual design of the page, how Stripe "designs" websites didn't rely only in asthetics.
How the Stripe team write the message thinking on explain clearly what the product does to a specific target audience, how they design a solid and organized information architecture of the site to make it simple and fast to find things, how they work on performance to give a good browser experience, how they work on SEO to increase discoverability, this is a really important part of the design too.
The design community sill have the 2000s phantom of "design is to make it look nice", it is, but many other decisions can create a good user experience design that aren't asthetics.
For example, Dribbble, it captures some part of UX design; the visuals, aesthetics, shapes, use of colors, empathy and more can be seen reflected in those little shots. However there is another large part related to the strategy, information architecture, planning, sketching, etc. that Dribbble can't cover, and that's fine.
On Medium you can find some good and complete UX case studies to tell you more stories about design.
Also don't forget that this is a desktop environment analysis of the visual design, phones is a different story, different context and has constraints that sometimes didn't allow you to express visually like in desktop.
I make a year list of movies that I personally recommend [1], and that is why I start to add a full list with 1-10 points of all the movies that I watch (the "rejected" or "not recommended" are the 6/10 and below). I think this make the list more interesting and highlight my personal taste.
[1] [redacted]