[cap-talk] Firefox and identifiability, small steps or large

[marcs]

> I should also have mentioned another minor, but not insignificant
> disadvantage: icons/logos take up more screen space.

They often do, perhaps because people kinda like the color and vibrance, but
they don't have to. My wife has a double-line of 16x16 application icons all
the way across the bottom of her 1280x1024 screen. To me, it looks like a
strip torn from a tie-died T-shirt from the 60s. I don't know what 90% of
the icons are. But I can quickly and easily pick out the Quicken icon. These
icons are, in petname parlance, nicknames :-)

We may all be furiously agreeing with each other. I think pet images and pet
texts both have a role to play, and there'll be some interesting
experimentation to see how they play together. One suspects that in the end
the user will get some control over the extent to which the images versus
the text get screen real estate, to accommodate the variations in human
preference. The diverse views available in a modern file manager (large
icon, small icon, list, and detail, to name some choices from one major
vendor) point in this direction. I myself use both large icon views and
detail views, on different directories at different times.

--marcs