About the yellow and white lettering in your “leave a comment” fields. It’s still like that for me. When I type in my email and URI in their boxes the lettering is white, making it very difficult to see. I come to your site originally from a link on the WP support forum, not from a search engine. I still think you should change that white lettering in the email and URI field. It’s annoying but hey, maybe you youngins don’t get annoyed as easily as us old goats.

After much contemplation on this subject, I think I know why I think the way I do and why there is a disagreement. And it is this: I’m 22 years old.

When I was in elementary school my favorite activity was when we got to to to the computer lab in the office and play on the computers. When you were in elementary school, did you even know what a computer was? Odds are, no. And that, I think, is a fundamental separation between us. I have grown up with computers my whole life as has nearly everyone my age. I don’t know any one even remotely close to my age who hasn’t at one point or another, used a computer. The lay-person for my age group is considerably different from that of anyone a decade older than me. Even worse as the age increases.

You would be very hardpressed to find someone my age who doesn’t know what a browser is. For my generation, the internet is pandemic. Not only that, but for many people it has become so fused with our lives that we’d hardly know what to do if it were to one day just disappear.

As for the yellow and white, those words are automatically highlighted when you come from a search engine, as they are your keyterms. I don’t really know why you would have used them as keyterms to come here, but I do agree that the colors may not be the best. I think I changed them already actually, that or I thought about changing them. Whichever.

It may be hard for you (James) to believe that the average Internet user does not know what a browser is but I can assure you that it’s true. Its not that the average user can not use a browser but they have no clue what it’s called or what it actually does, nor do they know that there are different browsers available. Many think it’s a search engine or whatever their home page displays when they get on the Internet. Most don’t know that they can change the page in their browser’s window.

I’m not a computer geek but most of the people I interact with think that I am, simply because I know more than they do. And what I know would seem to be very basic computer knowledge to a computer geek. I don’t even ask people what browser they use anymore. Instead, I ask them what they click on to get on the Internet. 99% click on the big E. The 1% that use a different browser, do so because their computer geek friend downloaded and installed it for them. Don’t ask them why because they don’t know. All they know is that their friend said to use it and they trust their friend.

I’m not commenting on the viability of Firefox or if it’s a good browser for the lay-web person. I suspect that it’s all about what the user gets used to using and IE is the most common browser because of how MS has marketed their products. Anyone with a web presence can look at their logs to see that IE is by far the most common browser used when viewing their site(s). I have seen an small increase in Mozilla users and every-once-in-a-while I get an Opera user but the vast majority are still IE users. I suppose there might be a different log assessment if you have a tech site, not sure since I don’t have one and don’t know anyone personally that does. But most looking at a tech site would not be a lay-web user anyway.

I used IE until about 4 months ago. Yes, I knew about its security issues and did try other browsers but I always went back to IE because I was used to using it. I finally changed to Mozilla and will not go back to IE. I haven’t tried Firefox but may someday.

I just wanted to comment on the lay-web person and how surprised you might be to know how little they know about their computers and the Internet in general. I know that it surprised me and continues to surprise me to this day. So, don’t be so quick to judge Adam’s comment, he knows what he’s talking about in this case.

One more thing - about your comment field or specifically, your email and URI fields - the yellow background with white text is impossible to read. I had to highlight them to be sure I didn’t make a mistake while typing in the information. I’d change it if I were you. Your users will find it very annoying. But I do like the overall design of your blog.

Until now! (or perhaps not, I don’t really know)

Anywho, on to the response…

Your comparison of internal motor gaskets to a computer browser is horribly off base. Motor gaskets would be comparable to something as equally technical like the Northbridge chip on your motherboard. A better comparison would be say, the parking break. Can you drive without knowing what a parking break is? Certainly, however it’s certainly helpful to know a little about it. Not knowing anything about your motor gaskets won’t affect you, ever (in most cases at least). Not knowing anything about a browser can certainly adversely affect you. Such is the case with credit card usage online.

Although Mozilla is actively marketing it’s browser, it’s not trying to market it to the lay-person, they’re marketing it to web-saavy people. If that weren’t the case, you’d see advertisements for Firefox on websites like Yahoo or CNN, but you don’t. You see it on blogs about web culture, design, standards, etc.

As for upgrading versions, I’ve always installed a new version in a separate folder, that’s just me though, I’ll admit that. However, since we’re sticking with people who don’t even know what a browser is, what are they going to be doing downloading extensions and plugins for a browser? They wouldn’t be, so what does it matter? An even greater point is this, since the release of Firefox 1.0 this seems to be have been fixed, what now?

And you never answered my question. I wonder if Firefox 1.0 changes things…

And I didn’t say that my wife doesn’t know what a browser is. But when the IE logo was suddenly missing, she didn’t know which icon to click on. And instead of wondering where the browser was, she wondered how to get to the web site she wanted.

This is the mentality not of an idiot or uneducated person. It’s the mentality of a person who views the computer as an end to a means. Of a person who uses the computer as a tool instead of a lifestyle.

Quick, point out on your car the manifold gasket, the head gasket, and the valve-cover gasket. Now explain the function of each. If you can’t answer that it doesn’t mean that you aren’t smart enough to drive a car. It means that you don’t view the internal components of a car interesting enough to care.

I’ve spent hundereds of hours observing users doing everything from shoppin online to searching for houses to reading articles. I’ve spent even more time learning how people use software and — more importantly — why people use software. It’s what I do for a living and what I’ve done for the last ten years.

My observations of the browser and the problems with marketing it to Joe Browser are based on reality. Mozilla is trying to drive traffic to their web site, presumably so they can convince users to switch to Firefox. Many will try the software and not understand it. Do you think there’s a chance that you’ll ever get that user to come back once the browser’s perfected?

It’s important to understand the distinction between not wanting to push random people towards an imcomplete product so they can be underwhelmed and suggesting to people that I know that they use the browser.

After I install the browser for someone they’re fine. But I also fix the URL filetype problem in Windows for them. And I install the plugins that are required to complete the browser.

And apparently if you’ve never had an upgrade problem with Firefox you haven’t been using it long enough. Since 0.6 every version required you to delete your previous installation including your profile, and re-create your profile. The move from 0.8 to 0.9 changed the plugin architecture so that many extensions no longer worked. Browse the lists of extensions and you’ll find that many plugins have a 0.9 version and a version for previous releases. This is the sort of stuff that drives people away.