4 ms·

Dear Steve Ballmer

31 points by sayrer 17y ago

jpwagner 17y ago
open letters are so lame
- dca 17y ago
  Particularly that one.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    My sense of humour might be miscalibrated, but I thought this was a piss-take of the very earnest open letters you see all the time, written as if they are actually addressed to someone that will actually read them. This is just a weird way of pointing out that they don't have a NDK on the new Windows Phones, and if they did then Firefox would get ported (with some gratuitous plugs for ongoing work on competing platforms).
    - davidw 17y ago
      The first lines are actually a ripoff of The Onion's "Jim Anchower": http://www.theonion.com/content/columnists/i_got_some_sweet_new_digs http://www.theonion.com/content/columnists/i_got_some_sweet_...
  - gxs 17y ago
    I agree, something about it just rubs me the wrong way.
  - sayrer 17y ago
    This sure did tick people off for some reason. Sorry. It's just a dinky little two paragraph post I tossed out there while I was drinking coffee.
    - GHFigs 17y ago
      People read "Dear Steve Ballmer (mozilla.com)" and expected something more other than what they got. Even though people are smart enough to understand the context after they clicked the link and started reading, that single line is all you have to set expectations before the click, and in this case expectations were set way too high. The annoyance that causes only amplifies whatever complaint the reader has about the content. Obviously this could have been avoided by not having a personal blog on mozilla.com, or by not writing posts like this on it, or by not submitting it to the srs bzns HN crowd (which by and large can't take a joke)--but really, a more descriptive submission title probably would have been enough.
      - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        If you click through and read the comments this seems to have pissed off a whole bunch of folk (for reasons that are still not obvious to me) from all across the net.
budwin 17y ago
The Mozilla blog is the mouthpiece of the Mozilla foundation right? Unless I totally missed something, didn't the author on behalf of their organization, offended both of their largest platforms owners?
- sp332 17y ago
  This isn't The Mozilla Blog, it's Rob Sayre's blog at Mozilla. His name doesn't even get any hits at The Mozilla Blog. http://blog.mozilla.com/?s=sayre http://blog.mozilla.com/?s=sayre
kogir 17y ago
It's not clear why he'd like native code access. Is it that he doesn't think Firefox performance will be acceptable in XNA/Silverlight, or that he doesn't want to port any of the existing code to the CLR?
- memoryfault 17y ago
  I'm guessing its the first reason. I guarantee you IE has native code running.
- mhansen 17y ago
  Porting the Firefox code base to the CLR would be a massive undertaking
FluidDjango 17y ago
If I worked at Mozilla Foundation, I think I'd hope that the blog had been hacked - rather than that Sayre actually posted that.
petercooper 17y ago
I think a head to head comparison makes you look pretty good. It makes the iPhone UI look like it’s made of ugly jelly beans. A joke, surely. For the Windows phone I'm seeing unnecessarily gigantic type set against irrelevant background images with no consistency amongst the other UI elements. The "head to head comparison" he links to is, itself, based on criticisms of Microsoft's UI by Edward Tufte.
- memoryfault 17y ago
  Gigantic type set? Ok. Irrelevant background images? No consistency amongst other UI elements?! Please explain. All I see is consistency in this UI style. And the background images look pretty relevant to me.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    Irrelevant background images? Non-stroked or unshadowed white text on busy photographic backgrounds isn't good for readability. All I see is consistency in this UI style. It's consistently sloppy, but I don't think that's what you meant.. :-) Perhaps pointing out the inconsistency was a bad choice of term. Really, it's just "bad." I'll use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9F4QJK1wFs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9F4QJK1wFs as a reference walkthrough of the interface for some examples. On "still" screens (that is, not in the middle of scrolling or similar) you end up with the giant typography getting chopped up: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46wk/w1 http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46wk/w1 .. "pictur"? Or http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46w6/w3 http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46w6/w3 "game"? When displays like "pictur" and "game" are scrolled horizontally to show further content, the distance travelled doesn't match the position of the header at all. See here how the headline has moved slightly (now obscuring the "g" of "games") yet an entirely new style of view has appeared (with overly light text, no less): http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ib/w4 http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ib/w4 - Everything seems to move at a different speed in relation to everything else on the Windows Phone. This is inconsistent and "feels" wrong. Front page elements are varying sizes: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ws/w2 http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ws/w2 - some items even embed other items inside. And white on turquoise == poor readability. If you watch the video above around the 11:00-11:30 mark (the "People" screen) you'll see contact boxes randomly changing, pictures popping up inside, etc. There's no indication that this should be occurring. Another problem is that there's also no solid indication that there's anything to scroll to on the right, yet when the guy does so, there's a bunch of stuff over there. Using the truncated title text as a sort of "this page is wider than you think" indicator is a really crappy UI hack. I haven't got time to go through everything that feels wrong about the Windows Phone UI, but I'll leave with the Tufte-derived view that the information density is also poor. In the demo of the photo section, the number of photos shown on screen at once is very low. On a touch device you can't go too nuts with filling the screen up, but Apple has struck a smart balance between too little and too much - Microsoft leans way too far towards whitespace and endless scrolling.
fnid2 17y ago
The latest behavior from Mozilla is making me really uncomfortable with it as a viable platform for the future.
- mhansen 17y ago
  Why?
fname 17y ago
..and he's posted an apology (of sorts): http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/03/20/things-ive-learned/ http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/03/20/things-ive-lear...

Dear Steve Ballmer

31 points by sayrer 17y ago

jpwagner 17y ago

open letters are so lame

dca 17y ago
Particularly that one.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  My sense of humour might be miscalibrated, but I thought this was a piss-take of the very earnest open letters you see all the time, written as if they are actually addressed to someone that will actually read them. This is just a weird way of pointing out that they don't have a NDK on the new Windows Phones, and if they did then Firefox would get ported (with some gratuitous plugs for ongoing work on competing platforms).
  - davidw 17y ago
    The first lines are actually a ripoff of The Onion's "Jim Anchower": http://www.theonion.com/content/columnists/i_got_some_sweet_new_digs http://www.theonion.com/content/columnists/i_got_some_sweet_...
- gxs 17y ago
  I agree, something about it just rubs me the wrong way.
- sayrer 17y ago
  This sure did tick people off for some reason. Sorry. It's just a dinky little two paragraph post I tossed out there while I was drinking coffee.
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    People read "Dear Steve Ballmer (mozilla.com)" and expected something more other than what they got. Even though people are smart enough to understand the context after they clicked the link and started reading, that single line is all you have to set expectations before the click, and in this case expectations were set way too high. The annoyance that causes only amplifies whatever complaint the reader has about the content. Obviously this could have been avoided by not having a personal blog on mozilla.com, or by not writing posts like this on it, or by not submitting it to the srs bzns HN crowd (which by and large can't take a joke)--but really, a more descriptive submission title probably would have been enough.
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      If you click through and read the comments this seems to have pissed off a whole bunch of folk (for reasons that are still not obvious to me) from all across the net.

budwin 17y ago

The Mozilla blog is the mouthpiece of the Mozilla foundation right? Unless I totally missed something, didn't the author on behalf of their organization, offended both of their largest platforms owners?

sp332 17y ago
This isn't The Mozilla Blog, it's Rob Sayre's blog at Mozilla. His name doesn't even get any hits at The Mozilla Blog. http://blog.mozilla.com/?s=sayre http://blog.mozilla.com/?s=sayre

kogir 17y ago

It's not clear why he'd like native code access. Is it that he doesn't think Firefox performance will be acceptable in XNA/Silverlight, or that he doesn't want to port any of the existing code to the CLR?

memoryfault 17y ago
I'm guessing its the first reason. I guarantee you IE has native code running.
mhansen 17y ago
Porting the Firefox code base to the CLR would be a massive undertaking

FluidDjango 17y ago

If I worked at Mozilla Foundation, I think I'd hope that the blog had been hacked - rather than that Sayre actually posted that.

petercooper 17y ago

I think a head to head comparison makes you look pretty good. It makes the iPhone UI look like it’s made of ugly jelly beans. A joke, surely. For the Windows phone I'm seeing unnecessarily gigantic type set against irrelevant background images with no consistency amongst the other UI elements. The "head to head comparison" he links to is, itself, based on criticisms of Microsoft's UI by Edward Tufte.

memoryfault 17y ago
Gigantic type set? Ok. Irrelevant background images? No consistency amongst other UI elements?! Please explain. All I see is consistency in this UI style. And the background images look pretty relevant to me.
- petercooper 17y ago
  Irrelevant background images? Non-stroked or unshadowed white text on busy photographic backgrounds isn't good for readability. All I see is consistency in this UI style. It's consistently sloppy, but I don't think that's what you meant.. :-) Perhaps pointing out the inconsistency was a bad choice of term. Really, it's just "bad." I'll use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9F4QJK1wFs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9F4QJK1wFs as a reference walkthrough of the interface for some examples. On "still" screens (that is, not in the middle of scrolling or similar) you end up with the giant typography getting chopped up: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46wk/w1 http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46wk/w1 .. "pictur"? Or http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46w6/w3 http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46w6/w3 "game"? When displays like "pictur" and "game" are scrolled horizontally to show further content, the distance travelled doesn't match the position of the header at all. See here how the headline has moved slightly (now obscuring the "g" of "games") yet an entirely new style of view has appeared (with overly light text, no less): http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ib/w4 http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ib/w4 - Everything seems to move at a different speed in relation to everything else on the Windows Phone. This is inconsistent and "feels" wrong. Front page elements are varying sizes: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ws/w2 http://skitch.com/petercooper/n46ws/w2 - some items even embed other items inside. And white on turquoise == poor readability. If you watch the video above around the 11:00-11:30 mark (the "People" screen) you'll see contact boxes randomly changing, pictures popping up inside, etc. There's no indication that this should be occurring. Another problem is that there's also no solid indication that there's anything to scroll to on the right, yet when the guy does so, there's a bunch of stuff over there. Using the truncated title text as a sort of "this page is wider than you think" indicator is a really crappy UI hack. I haven't got time to go through everything that feels wrong about the Windows Phone UI, but I'll leave with the Tufte-derived view that the information density is also poor. In the demo of the photo section, the number of photos shown on screen at once is very low. On a touch device you can't go too nuts with filling the screen up, but Apple has struck a smart balance between too little and too much - Microsoft leans way too far towards whitespace and endless scrolling.

fnid2 17y ago

The latest behavior from Mozilla is making me really uncomfortable with it as a viable platform for the future.

mhansen 17y ago
Why?

fname 17y ago

..and he's posted an apology (of sorts): http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/03/20/things-ive-learned/ http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/03/20/things-ive-lear...