Irrelevance of the debate: (was "Epiphany versus Firefox" etc ad nauseam...

[John Nilsson]

On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 17:02 +1100, Peter Garrett wrote:
> Epiphany or Firefox? They would not know the difference! And that is not
> because they are stupid - they are wiser than those who indulge in these
> petty debates. ( including me, of course ;-))

While most of your criticism was directer to others than me, you did
reply to my post. So I feel I should clarify what "usability flaws" I
meant.

The most obvious is that Firefox doesn't behave like a Gnome
applications, and sometimes surprisingly so. Thus breaking the rule of
least surprise. My biggest gripe with this problem is choosing
applications to handle downloaded files. The user you described wouldn't
know to look in /usr/bin, but might on their own take a stab at "Movie
Player" and succeed.

The second flaw is not so big but warrants a mention. When Firefox
crashes (yes is does happen) there is no way to restore it (without
extensions). Epiphany OTOH handles this situation gracefully.

So, not having been presented with Epiphany, they wouldn't know the
difference. But given the choice I think they'd take epiphany, exactly
because it's mostly equal for all other purposes (ignoring the power
features of Firefox).

Regards,
John