NoteMe

What made me think about this as a problem
It is not unusual to find Windows machines with a notification area longer than Golden Bridge. Full of processes running in the background while most of them is not used during an average session at all. Some like to kill all those processes or at least hide them away. I'm one of them. If I have something down there I know I won't be using that day, I will end it for sure. No matter how little (or non at all) power it sucks out of my old machine, it still is irritating to have it there shine in my face while I am trying to work.



On the contrary, using it for notifications sounds like the perfect choice. And for many it is, because we already pay so much attention on the number of icons down there. So one appearing won't pass by unnoticed. But the truth is that a large number of Windows users out there don't know what one single of those symbols down there represent. Neither do they notice a yellow flashing shield or any other important message waiting for them to click. And I can go on about how this notification area has failed notify too many users already. But I will concentrate on the irritating part of it for now, but it still stands as a problem that it fails to notify most users.

Notification area in todays browser?
So what does Windows notification area have to do with todays browsers? Well I have been thinking about this for a long time. First I thought it was just really cool, "what more can we expect". Then I got worried, and now I am starting to think it will become a problem that need to be tackled one way or an other.

I will be using Opera as an example here, but this yields for the rest of the lot too. Earlier the address bar (location bar) was just a simple text box for your URLs. But after a while developers started fiddling with it, adding progress bar, favicons, security certificates, and now the last year or two also icons for RSS, Widgets and the like has started to pop up in the address bar. First one icon, then two, and then, well maybe not too many have appeared as of now, but how far will it go? Will we get a new Windows notification area in our browser? Will we fill up the address bar before we understand it will clutter up the view and do more harm than good? If browsers starts sniffing for any kind of "service", could my address bar end up like this? And still go unnoticed by most users?



Less chrome, more web page:
One way to relief the address bar could be to add icons or some sort of interacting menu on the web page itself. Adding in-line icons on the web page would make sense because they will then be positioned with the information it presents. But it has the negative impact of altering the web page. I can already hear web designers cry in the background when their work of art gets molested like this by some random browser.



One way of handling this could be to not alter the web page before the user hover over the area with his mouse. Then an icon, or even some sort of menu could appear for the user to interact with the information presented by the web page. Many games handle user interaction like this successfully. The drawback with this solution is that missing out on information might become a big problem. The last thing I would find user friendly is to hover up and down a web page to find some information that might be there, or might not be there.

Layout or preferences?
Browsers layout has not been changed a whole lot since early Netscape days. You have more or less the same buttons there, and they are still positioned horizontally on the top. Cutting off the visible part of the screen a few centimeters so I sit back with less than 4:3 in ratio. With all these new wide-screens on both laptops and desktops, you have a ratio that moves even further away from the A4 paper ratio I am used to read. And you know what is worse? That for many people, reading more than 15 words on line starts to become difficult, so we end up with fixed width designs with a whole lot of void on the side not used for anything, while I sure could have used those few centimeters on the top there for something else than tool bars. I can see the implications here since western languages are left to right, but what about all of that stuff that doesn't need text up there, and what about those notification icons, can't we move them over there if there ever will be enough of them? Then users can simply hide the whole tool bar if they want, or maybe we need to make settings for what notifications a user want? Maybe that is the only way to keep users happy with their information stream. Because something is about to go wrong when you see people already removing them* after only two...


*see the "showiconsaslinks.js" USJ.