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Mozilla.org Redesign Beta

While I’m talking about web site redesigns I may as well post my thoughts on the new Mozilla beta site which was redesigned by Dave Shea of Mezzoblue.

Overall I think it is terrific. Finally they’ll have a site that is good looking and easy to use for the user, rather than having the whole thing focused on the developers. There are now clearly labeled download links, support links, and products links. Along with one link for developers, which takes you to all the nerdy information you could ever want. Now if they could just get rid of any mention of nightly builds and all that crap off the front page they would be doing pretty good.

It would also be nice to see an installer for Firebird and Thunderbird soon, since right now you just have to unzip the files to a directory somewhere which is not the way you normally install something on Windows and probably confuses quite a few people. The default home page on Firebird is also really bad. The last time I installed it it brought up a page saying “HEY! You’re using a build of Mozilla that is older than 6 weeks” or something like that, and told me to upgrade. First of all don’t say “HEY!” to someone that just downloaded your product, even if you aren’t getting paid for it. Second, don’t tell me to upgrade after I just downloaded and installed your product. The homepage should just point to Yahoo or something and get rid of all this technical stuff altogether. The technical people know how to find the technical information, but the newbie computers users don’t care about it, and don’t need to know about it. They just need to know that they can use this browser just like IE, only without all the pop-ups, security flaws, and completely stagnant feature set.