Re: [Usability]preferred applications dialog

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sat, 2003-02-15 at 17:01, Mathew Johnston wrote:
> > This I agree with.  It's a *lot* simpler to select "A web browser" than
> > select "an http handler, an ftp handler, https handler, webdav handler,
> > ...".  I wouldn't even expect a user to understand what a protocol is -
> > almost everyone I know who isn't a tech-geek don't know what the whole
> > "http://"; thing is at all.
> 
> You're right. A non-technial user wouldn't know what the hell those are.
> But would a non-technical user be creating new applications that use
> those protocols? Installed applications would register themselves, so a
> user wouldn't have to deal with that. Only developers of newly written,
> custom applications, would need to worry about it. 

Assuming Linux/UNIX stops sucking for home-users and gets easy
application installating, I could see users doing this.  Say a distro
ships with Mozilla normally, and the user install Galeon or something,
they'd want to use it - then when it gets all buggy on them and what
not, they need to easily be able to switch back.

Secondly, it's a *hell* of a lot more convenient to select a "web
browser" than 3 or 4 different protocols.  ("OK, change HTTP, now change
HTTPS, now change mailto, etc.")

> 
> The only way to not have to worry about where the data is comming from
> is to have all apps use a VFS that can access data via any protocol that
> the system supports. Somehow, I think that this is less realistic at
> this point.
> 
> If we want to inelegently handle URL schemes, we're going to end up
> trying to open URLs with applications that don't understand the schemes
> of the URLs, resulting in errors and forcing the user to be aware of all
> of these schemes.
> 
> Mat.
> 
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