If there’s anything like Good Clutter.

Have you ever used Ubiquity for Firefox? It’s quite nice, yet somewhat inaccessible for most people. The idea is that with an easy key combination on your keyboard you can bring up a text field that can understand a large number of commands and bring you information related to them. For example you can calculate stuff, show a google map, translate text etc. It’s arguable how useful such an interface is for the majority of people, in the context of a browser add-on, but Ubiquity won’t be the focus of this article. While it certainly has its merits, it’s cousin, Taskfox, a project aiming to bring Ubiquity to Firefox [as in: the core of the browser] is so bad — even at a conceptual level — that’s raising questions as to whether its authors have a solid grasp of usability and the role of an address bar in browser design.

So what’s wrong with Taskfox [as shown in the prototype]? Well, for starters: it — in many cases — embeds web content in the address awesome bar drop-down window at the same time when a fully functional, familiar interface for viewing web pages exists just pixels below. Take for example, the Wikipedia search, shown on the demonstration video. It strikes me as particularly problematic that the awesome bar drop-down menu is inherently abused, turned into a movable widget that persists even after the text-entry operation is complete. Besides distasteful, it’s also problematic; what is the purpose of the Firefox window underneath the awesome bar if we’re only going to be using its crammed popup windows for an increasing number of tasks?
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