That's why there's chocolate and vanilla

It’s fascinating to me how changes to something that people use frequently can be so polarizing. Marco criticizes some of the changes in Firefox 3. I won’t comment on the OS X UI changes, since I’ve become a poor and forlorn lost soul, but I think his take on the Awesome Bar and bookmarking changes are interesting since I have such an opposite opinion. I think those are both big improvements.

Marco says:

They want me to input “tags” everywhere (honestly guys, nobody except geeks knows what tags are). The Awesome Bar is a disaster.

I’m going to take them in reverse order because I think the Awesome Bar is…well, awesome, and there seems to be no ambivalence about it. People either wholeheartedly love it or fanatically hate it.

I use it a lot like I used to use Quicksilver. When I want to get to the Tumblr dashboard, I just enter dash, the down error and Enter. It’s already ingrained in my muscle memory. In Safari I have to enter tum and then arrow down through all the results to pick out the dashboard from the list. The Awesome Bar learns all the shortcuts I like and gives them preference.

I think it’s awfully useful that it searches through bookmarks, particularly their titles, as well. It’s one stop shopping for navigating to a site, whether I want to enter the whole URL, or find the site out of my bookmarks or history with a search term that makes sense to me.

When it comes to bookmarking, I agree with Marco that most people probably don’t understand nor care for tags, but I think the new interface takes that squarely into account. They’ve streamlined the way you deal with bookmarks.

In the new system, to bookmark a page, you just click the star in the location bar. If you want…that’s it, you’re done, no tagging whatsoever. I think that’s a great simplification from the previous system, which brought up a dialog box forcing you to decide, then and there, where to drop the bookmark in your hierarchy.

I reckon that a whole lot of people (many of the same people who don’t care about tags) don’t care to organize their bookmarks much. This interface is simple for them. Those folks who do want more organization, to tag or move the bookmark somewhere in their hierarchy, just click the star a second time to add that information. It seems to me they’ve struck an excellent balance between those two types of bookmarkers.

That’s my take, but regardless, it’s intriguing to see how different people are reacting to these changes. Incidentally, both of these features were borrowed, at least partially, from Flock, a terrific and, I think, visionary browser.