It’s midnight here on the Stanford campus, and that can only mean one thing: primal scream. Every midnight of Dead Week—the week before final exams—students at over 60 dorms across campus open their windows wide and bellow the loudest, most animalistic shriek they can muster. Screw the squishy balls; this is the most effective stress relieving technique I’ve ever seen (or heard).

Someone created a website detailing how you can turn Firefox into Opera by installing some extensions.

This is a great demonstration of Firefox’s extension system, and it’s also one of the very reasons Firefox offers such a system: if we can attract the mainstream through our base set of features and catch the long tail through extensions, is there a segment of the consumer market we can’t attract?

(This is part of an ongoing series that seeks to answer the question: What’s wrong with Netscape 8?)

Long time readers of my blog will recall ye good olde days when I used to play “Which is real?” The game was simple: is this an actual Netscape dialog, or is it this one? Is this the real add bookmark dialog? Sometimes the mockery was more blatant (but check out that ancient Firefox screenshot!). Then there was the time I monetized Firefox’s menus for a day.

I sat here tonight wondering how to parody some of the UI in Netscape 8 and I realized that I can’t do better than what’s already there. My biggest problem? Well, although the triply nested tabs that help you manage your “Datacards” and “Passcards” (because “form information” and “passwords” are so 2004) were a strong contender, the real obstacle here is the UI that lets you choose your rendering engine, which is one of the much touted features of Netscape 8.

If you’re wondering what’s wrong with the UI itself, you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. There’s nothing wrong with the actual radiobutton UI; in fact, it’s the only 4×4 rectangle in Netscape 8 that doesn’t contain an arrow you can click on. No, the problem lies in the fact that the option exists at all.

Did Netscape do a poor job in explaining this feature? Yes. But it’s not the tech writer’s fault. The fact is that people are never going to understand what it means when their “Netscape” browser is asking them if they want to use “Netscape” or “Internet Explorer,” or what a “rendering engine” is. And herein lies the point: if it’s impossible for you to explain a feature to your users, ask yourself what the hell it’s doing there.

So I’ll do that now: Netscape, what is this feature doing here? It’s ostensibly for site compatibility issues, but another major site becomes Gecko-compliant every day now as Firefox rockets past 30 million downloads. And even if there is value in a dual engine system, there is a glaring, someone-should-be-fired problem with your implementation that virtually nobody has mentioned: the web browsing experience is completely different depending on which engine you’re using! This, of course, is due to critical differences in the design of each engine. Since Netscape loads a long list of sites in IE’s engine by default, and since it switches engines silently and transparently, users are left wondering why their experience changes “randomly” across different websites.

Consider:

• Finding text on a page. When mom reads a news story at Yahoo and decides to use her browser’s “Find in This Page” feature, she’ll get a Find dialog similar to that offered by Internet Explorer. But if she uses that feature while reading the same story at, say, the Boston Globe, she’ll get the Find toolbar I implemented in Firefox. How is she supposed to understand why the same menu item does two entirely different things depending on which website she happens to be viewing? It’s not in her user model.
• Print preview. When mom chooses “Print Preview” at Yahoo, she gets an entirely different window than the one she gets when she chooses “Print Preview” at the Boston Globe. And as with the finding experience, the difference is more than cosmetic—the two windows offer different features and options.
  
• Autocomplete. As far as I can tell, the autocomplete feature simply doesn’t work in the version of IE embedded in Netscape 8. What this means for mom is that when searches the Boston Globe site, autocomplete will offer recommendations based on past searches. When she searches Yahoo, she’s on her own. Maybe the rendering engine can render her some assistance?
  
• Context menus. The context menu that appears on right clicking Yahoo is not the one that appears on right clicking the Boston Globe. Oops—there goes muscle memory. The frustrating thing here is that if you compare the context menus in Netscape 8’s Gecko to those in Firefox, and the context menus in Netscape 8’s IE to those in the real version of IE, you’ll find that Netscape actually did try to merge both sets to achieve parity. But because Netscape didn’t go all the way, they exacerbated the problem: the fact that the menus are almost the same—but not quite—just plays tricks with your head.
  
• The properties window. The window that appears upon choosing to “View Page Info” from the context menu at Yahoo is entirely different from the window that appears upon choosing to do so at the Boston Globe. But you’ve heard that tune already.
  
• View source. When a developer goes to view the source of Yahoo, why does it open in Windows Notepad, whereas the source of the Boston Globe opens in a special Netscape window?
  
• The little things that drive you nuts. What’s really going to nag at users over time is why Netscape 8 feels so schizophrenic in ways they just can’t put their finger on:
  • Why does it scroll so smoothly at Yahoo and so choppily at the Boston Globe? (Because smooth scrolling is on by default in IE and off in Gecko.)
    
  • Why is selected text black at Yahoo and gray at the Boston Globe?
    
  • Why do the up and down arrow keys scroll Yahoo 4 or 5 lines at a time but only scroll the Boston Globe one line at a time?
    
  • Why is the selection behavior at Boston Globe ever so slightly different from the behavior at Yahoo? When I double click on “Berlusconi’s” in the former, “Berlusconi” is selected; in the latter, the whole word is selected.
    
  • Why do I sometimes get an error dialog when a site isn’t found (in the Gecko engine), and other times I get an error page (in the IE engine)? And for that matter, why does the search link on the error page just not work?
    
  • When clicking on a link with the middle mouse button to open it in a new tab, why does the tab open when I merely press the button at Yahoo, whereas I must release it at the Boston Globe?
    
  • Why does Ctrl+Clicking on a link at Yahoo do nothing, whereas Ctrl+Clicking one at the Boston Globe opens it in a new tab? Why does Shift+Clicking on a link at Yahoo open it in a new tab, whereas Shift+Clicking one at the Boston Globe opens it in a brand new window?
    
  • Why does dragging a link from Yahoo to the bookmarks toolbar create an item with the link address as the title, but dragging a link from the Boston Globe to the bookmarks toolbar creates an item with the link text as the title?
    
  • Why do webpage dropdowns “slide down” in the IE engine and simply “appear” in the Netscape engine?
    
  • Why do I get an RSS button in the address bar when I view Scoble or Mozilla in the Netscape engine but not in the IE engine?

  The big stuff is just embarrassing, and heads should roll for it. But it’s Firefox’s attention to these little details that have always set it apart from Netscape.

The main takeaway here that Netscape missed is that engines themselves have a UI—sometimes prominent, other times subtle, but always important—and that if you’re going to offer a seamless browsing experience across two of them, you need to account for the differences. I’ve had my fun test driving the Netscape 8 rendering engine, but now it’s your turn. What inconsistencies do you spot? Leave a comment with your findings.