no wonder i'm not organized

Okay, so I started this blog/journal/whatever the hell it is to rant about software quality, actually, and haven't really done very much of that. Ironically, my originally-conceived rants were going to be backhandedly complimentary to Microsoft (in short: Eudora, and the Mozilla email client, were so crappy that they drove me to Outlook Express), but this one isn't. Or maybe it is. You'll see.

It's almost too simple to hate Microsoft. They're a large, easy target. Their software appears everywhere. They use the most ruthless business practices they can get away with (and some they can't) to hang onto market share. (In fact, the current MS antitrust litigation, in my opinion, is not about the legality of what MS does. It's about the fact that they've been, corporately, assholes. They've been fucking over everyone they can, consumers and competitors alike, for years. They've made enemies of everyone, and now the customers and the competitors are working together with the government to try and pay back some of the fucking over. MS is trying to argue the letter of the law — and antitrust law is so vague that either side can claim anything they want — but they're missing the point: this is now about vengeance, not about justice.)

But I'm gonna ignore their business practices for the moment and just talk about software. Lots of people assume Microsoft software is unadulterated crap. Everyone makes jokes about how bad it is. "Microsoft = Poor Quality" is a virulent mimetic virus. Back during the days of Y2K nervousness, people joked "Apple may not have done everything right, but they knew the century was going to end," implying that Windows was going to have a Y2K problem. Apparently Windows 3.1 does have a Y2K problem, but I never had a problem with my Win95 machines; I suspect that any Y2K problems with Win95 PCs were about the BIOS, not the OS — ironically, PC BIOSes are one of the only kinds of software Microsoft doesn't dabble in (to the best of my knowledge).

Let me just jump out here with a bold claim: Given what the software is supposed to do, the consumer versions of 32-bit Windows — Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME — are really pretty well-engineered. "Yeah?" you ask. "Then why do they crash so freakin' much?" The answer lies in what the software has to do. It has to provide an environment where 16-bit DOS software, 16-bit Windows software, and 32-bit Windows software can all run side by side, interfacing seamlessly with thousands upon thousands of different hardware configurations. I'm not going to go into the deep technical reasons why this creates lots of opportunities to crash the system, but leave it at this: Right or wrong, Microsoft made the conscious decision that backwards compatibility with old apps was more important than system stability. If you can't accept that tradeoff, you're supposed to be using Windows NT or Windows 2000.

In the Apple world, the OS team can work with the hardware team to make sure that hardware device drivers are working and stable. There are a finite number of hardware configurations and interactions. In the open-source Unix world, new hardware takes a while to get supported, and the initial level of support frequently consists of a quick hack to an older driver to make the new hardware limp along without enabling all its features. In the Windows world, the hardware manufacturer, not Microsoft, typically provides the device driver software. If there's a bug in the driver, Windows may crash with a cryptic blue screen of death; it may, in its mysterious way, blame the correct device specific DLL, but most users don't know how to interpret that information. (Why are most DLL names still 8.3? Wouldn't a blue-screen saying "Unhandled exception in module GemstoneSwiftStar400GraphicsDriver.dll" be better than "GSS400.dll"?)

Likewise, most users are, shall we say, unsophisticated, and when some random application tries to access some block of memory it doesn't own due to a bug, Windows catches it and presents the dreaded "General Protection Fault" message (or whatever it's labeled this time around), the user thinks Windows is doing something wrong. It's like blaming a cop who arrests a lot of criminals for the high crime rate. If Windows could speak, it'd probably say "Hey, buddy, I'm just doing my job!" Of course, nowadays, many users are running primarily Microsoft apps, so it's not unreasonable to go ahead and give Microsoft the blame.

Ah yes, Microsoft apps. The reason I started this whole rant was Internet Explorer. You remember Internet Explorer. Wayyyy back in the 90s, this little company called Netscape created a graphical web browser that revolutionized the way people share and access information. Netscape was a "new economy" company that "got it". They were cool. They were the swift clever mammals to the lumbering dinosaur that was Microsoft. Microsoft's response to Netscape Navigator was to clone it: voila, Internet Explorer. So, Netscape was there first; they had a bunch of sharp, energetic kids who were excited about the transformative power of the software they were creatings. Microsoft was following, not innovating, and they started late, and their motivation was, as usual, market share über alles. If this were an American movie, it's pretty obvious who would win. Alas. Microsoft crushed Netscape, winning in the naive consumer market with their anticompetive business practices (installing Internet Explorer with every installation of Windows), but more significantly for my purposes, winning in the informed consumer market by having fewer and less annoying bugs than Netscape. People trash Microsoft for embrace-and-extend, but in truth, IE rendered "standard" HTML better, more correctly, than Netscape did. So people like me who might have been glad to oppose Microsoft on principle eventually started using IE out of pragmatism. (I myself kept on using Netscape, and later, Mozilla, for years, because I was the one person on the planet who actually liked the Netscape mail/news client. Then Netscape 6 finally tripped my bloat-resistance circuit, and Mozilla screwed up the mail client. I'm an IE/OE man now. However, during all that time using Netscape, I kept being glad I had IE handy to view the occasional page that Netscape just couldn't deal with.) If Microsoft couldn't win the browser war by ramming their product down consumers throats, I think they still would have won just by sucking less.

Now, today, using IE 6, I decided to sort my bookmarks/favorites again. And I was struck by just how incredibly bad the user interface for the "Organize Favorites" system was. Aha! See? Microsoft Must Suck! Crappy UI! Yeah, but this stood out enough for me to rant about it, because MS UI is generally, well, adequate, if not good. Sure, lots of MS apps have some UI bullshit that makes them a little bit awkward, but they aren't usually this PAINFUL.

So what's wrong with Organize Favorites? Okay, when you select it, you get this tiny window that shows, in my case, 12 items in your favorites tree. If I only had twelve items I wouldn't need to organize it, would I? It looks like a fixed-size dialog -- it doesn't have the "resize triangle" in the lower right that most resizable windows do, nor does it have the normal "grabbable border" visual. It doesn't have minimize/maximize buttons. Most users would be forgiven for assuming it was fixed size. But no, it's resizable, thank goodness. Just grab any edge or corner like you would a window with the appropriate visual indicators and resize the sucker. Great! Okay, start going through the list of links. Hm, this one is called "The Master Lists". What the hell was that again? Double-click to open the link. Nothing happens. Sigh. Right-click to see if there's an "open" option. No. I can select "Print" (and does that print the list of links, the name of this link, or the contents of the linked page?), or "Make Available Offline", or "Send To" various apps (and again, does that send the link or the contents?). I must use these operations oh so frequently, to understand them so well, right? Where the hell is the Open option? Okay, fine, I'll just open it from the main browser window, so I can see what the heck this thing is so I know where to file it.

PING. PING.

I can't go to the browser window, because this is a freaking MODAL DIALOG BOX — it prevents its parent window from being selected as long as it's up. Modal dialog boxes are, shall we say, strongly out of favor these days. Modal anything is considered bad in the UI world, because the principle is that things should respond consistently whenever possible &mdash if clicking on a window brings that window to the foreground sometimes, it should bring it to the foreground every time, because the user has that expectation. A modal dialog that prevents the browser window from coming up confuses the user. The machine pings at you and foregrounds some other window that isn't the window the user wanted. In this case, I determine that I can start another browser session to let me browse the links as I sort them, but it still sucks.

It continues to suck in other ways. Even with the Organize Favorites dialog filling my screen, I have more links than will fit. If I drag a link up to some folder off the top or bottom of the list, it automatically scrolls — but slowly and jerkily. If I drag a link over a folder, the folder does eventually auto-open to let me go into subfolders or place the link in a specific place in the folder, but it takes just a bit longer than I expect, so I keep thinking it's not going to auto-open. If I have three links in a row that all go into the same category — common enough, because I'll be surfing for a while on one topic and find multiple keepers on that topic, right? — my UI expectation is that I can select one, shift-select or control-select the others, and drag them together to the target folder, because every other list control or tree control in windows apps does this. Not this one. No multiple selections allowed. This is not a standard list/tree control, which is why it's so sucky. (I think the standard tree control doesn't let you sort items on a single level of hierarchy, is why they couldn't use it here, but I'm not sure.)

Okay, next problem. When I select an item, then drag it into a folder, after the drag, the next item down in the list from the one I initially selected is the one that remains selected. No big deal, except that it's different from expected tree-control behavior — nothing remains selected in a normal tree. So I've got some item selected now, but I want to move a different item next. So I click-drag that item to its new home, but during the drag, the originally selected item remains highlighted the whole time, even at the end, even though it didn't participate in the drag, which did work properly. Half of my brain is warning me that I'm dragging the wrong thing, half of my brain is complaining that the highlighted item didn't get dragged to the destination I selected.

I have folder names that aren't quite right, or I've got some link names that don't tell me what the links are about (so I go into my other browser session, as noted above, to see what the hell they are). I F2 or select Properties to rename them, and at the end of the rename, the link GOES AWAY. What the fuck? Did I delete it? No, it moved it to the end of the list. The whole point of this funky custom control is to let me sort things the way I want to, and it winds up moving things without my say-so. Wrong, wrong, wrong. When I drag an item into a new folder, it takes about a second and a half to update the display. This is on an 800MHz machine. What the hell is taking it so long? I don't have more than 100 or so total links here. That's 12 million CPU cycles per link being spent on something. I can't really conceive what it might be doing that would take that long. Even if it's written in Visual Basic.

I close my folders in the display so I can see more as-yet-unfiled links. I drag a link onto a folder, not caring where in the folder it goes, so I don't wait around for the folder to open before the drop. It doesn't let me pick where in the folder the link goes, this way, but it automatically pops the folder open after the drop so I can see where it went. Which scrolls my next target off the bottom of the list. Except sometimes, when it doesn't auto-open the folder. Dunno why.

There's a folder in here called Links. Well, see, everything in my Favorites should be links, right? So I delete that folder, it's redundant. As soon as I open another browser session, it recreates the folder. I don't know why.

Oh yeah — when I imported all my bookmarks from Mozilla into IE, it kindly alphabetized them all for me. Not devastating, but either the sorting of favorites/bookmarks is significant, in which case it should never override my sorts when I import or rename, or it's insignificant, in which case use the default tree control which works as expected and works at a reasonable speed.

I'm not sure if IE 5 had these problems. I don't remember it being this bad. IE 5.1 on the Mac certainly doesn't have these problems.

I was about to say that there is no excuse for this kind of crap, but as a professional software developer, I think I know what happened. The Kid got the job of writing the Organize Favorites control. Lots of software development teams have The Kid. The Kid is the programmer who has a lot to learn. He's not stupid. He has potential. He's just good enough that he's not actually a detriment to the team's productivity. Everyone else on the team is so overworked that no one has the time to teach him to reach his potential. And in this particular case, the kid hasn't learned about Windows user interface standards, such as they are. As it is, this bookmark organizer is so incredibly painful to use that I'm doing a halfassed job of sorting my bookmarks. Once I get them into the right folders, I'm going to stop, instead of sorting them within the folders the way I'd like them to be. It's just not worth the time and effort.

The creepy thing here, is that the Organize Favorites problems I describe here are actually a credit to how usable — as opposed to great — Microsoft's UI code actually is. It's pretty consistent on the whole. It makes some effort to not fuck the user over constantly.

Posted by russell at June 22, 2002 03:37 PM