Room for Improvement: Firefox

Here’s something that has been bothering me for a while. You can set Firefox (I use 3.0.7) to ask for your permission to delete the private data that was accrued during the session upon closing the browser. This is what the dialog looks like:

I think this dialog leaves room for improvement. The user options should be Yes-No-Cancel (which implies that there is a question being asked). Cancel normally aborts a current operation and brings you back where you were before invoking the dialog.  Like in MS Word if you hit Close and have not saved yet, you get a dialog asking “Do you want to save? Yes-No-Cancel”. With Firefox Cancel means No and there is actually no way to abort the operation and go back to the browser.

Now, the background of this dialog is that it’s the same one that you get when you want to clear your private data without closing the browser. That seems to be the scenario the dialog was built for. So Firefox just re-uses it when you hit the “Close” button. That’s good thinking, because you want to present something that users are familiar with already. The problem remains that in the context of closing, the behavior is suboptimal.

BTW: what do you think you can do to uncheck the disabled items (Download History, Saved Passwords)? Nothing! These are settings deep in the Tools menu (Tools\Options\Privacy\Settings) but when you see this dialog upon closing, you cannot go back there and change these settings.

So what’s the take-away? The same dialog can provide a good user experience in one context and a bad user experience in another context. Consistency is not always king!