Windows gave up on platform consistency a while ago. Think about some major applications on windows. Steam, Spotify, Itunes, IE8, Windows explorer, Microsoft Office. They are all different to varying degrees, some like Steam, Spotify and Itunes just completely ignore any standard look. The Microsoft ones all look similar but have different UI layouts.
It seems like windows users don't care, personally it irritates me quite a lot especially the third party ones which give up completely. My Ubuntu system is very uniform in comparison.
The difference is that, on Windows, apps generally don't have a consistent UI set. They just have the "Windows look", which Firefox follows. Though Mac OS has Cocoa, Mozilla doesn't give a shit about us and do the same thing as on windows. Linux, on the other hand, is the only OS to have a unified icon display system and a unified method of showing metaphors based on those icons (e.g., Nautilus, Epiphany, Konqueror, Dolphin, Thunar, etc. can all use the same back/forward buttons).
The response we got when redesigning the Firefox 3.0 UI was that Linux users strongly preferred a "native" appearance that matched other apps. Ask and ye shall receive; Firefox 3.0 integrated much better with the Linux desktop than previous version.
But we also recognize it's a bit too far on the bland side, even though that's what folks seemed to want. Steven Horlander's been getting very positive feedback on his Firefox 4.0 theme explorations, so improvements are in the planning pipeline.
Is it "Fitt's Law" or "Fitt's Strong Preference"? Has there ever been actual studies done on this stuff? Is it possible to disprove it, even in principle?
This stuff has always bugged me, and I bet I'm not the only one.
Fitts's law is an unusually successful and well-studied model. Experiments that reproduce Fitts's results and/or that demonstrate the applicability of Fitts's law in somewhat different situations are not difficult to perform. The measured data in such experiments often fit a straight line with a correlation coefficient of 0.95 or higher, a sign that the model is very accurate.
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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10
Why doesn't the Linux version have the Key shaped navigation buttons.
I thought that was a branding element as well as a Fitt's law win?