Bruce Tognazzini:

These bugs aren’t necessarily fatal. They are all at minimum highly irritating, and they have all survived for a minimum of five years or five product release cycles, whichever came first. In some cases, the bugs have outlasted the original developers, persisting so long that their successors may not even realize they are bugs—they seem the result of ‘natural laws.’

Tognazzini is one of the world’s best known human-computer interaction designers.

Navarik’s web applications work with all modern web browsers, but we recommend Mozilla Firefox to our customers because it better supports web standards, is more secure, and offers some better features than Internet Explorer, which is the default on Windows computers. Information Week agrees in its review:

Firefox 1.0 […] offers everything most people need to browse the Web, in a way you’re apt to like better than Internet Explorer.

A single-page printable version is also available.

Charles Miller:

Computer programs are complex. We manage this complexity by dividing programs into manageable pieces that can be isolated and scrutinised closely enough to find the errors of logic that will inevitably sneak in. We then create complexity by having each of these systems interact with each other. The more points at which these pieces can interact, and the more variations in that interaction, the more chance for some chaotic, unwanted behaviour.

So, making computer programs more modular does not necessarily make them less complex.

An interesting analogy for software usability design: if users are like lab mice, do you offer them cheese, or do you try to get them to avoid electric shocks? Quick summary: avoiding shocks is more important. In other words, software must be extremely compelling if it is not going to be easy to use; or, if the software isn’t compelling, it must be easy to use.