Designing for the Ideal

As the submitter of this article, I should stay on-topic, but as an aside — I find it fascinating that this article shows screen shots of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome’s new-tab pages with a “grid of favorite sites” interface, and not Opera’s, even though Opera invented this interface (as “Speed Dial”).

I’m not sure if there is a deeper lesson in this observation than the obvious one about market share yielding mindshare or the truth that good design can make an impact even if it doesn’t lead to “success” for the innovating party (in this case, Opera).

Opera’s implementation is worth looking at for a comparison. Unlike Chrome, Opera allows you to manually set and order pages in Speed Dial. (Less of an echo chamber and more of a designed starting place.) It also literally lets you use numbers on your keyboard to navigate to your favorite sites.