Shortcut to Internet
For work, I have a virtual machine serving one little purpose: To run Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, for the rare instances when I have to test a website with it. To make that a little more convenient and a little less painful, I just created a “desktop shortcut” for it, and look what it showed up as:
Haha, “Shortcut to Internet” — this is classic.
Well, actually, it is a pretty good idea me think.
What icon do you think a non-techy user would click on to access the internet?
Agreed, it’s helpful if there is a link named “Internet” which links to whatever default browser the user wants to use.
On the other point of view, blue on blue is not so visible… But the icon name is well written.
I think “Mozillq Firefox” too cryptic. Perhaps time to drop vendor name, and perhaps use a verb ?
That doesn’t look like a shortcut to IE to me, that looks like a shortcut to the “Launch Default Browser” item in the Start menu. (Said item appears on the desktop if you use the Classic start menu.)
Neil: Indeed.
That’s a good one! No wonder IE makes itself ubiquitous..
We should just copy IE..
Launch Internet Firefox Browser
Where IE7 now does this..
Launch Internet Explorer Browser
Shortcuts lead to bugs.
Yeah, looking at a similar setup at the moment… client needs to run some internal web apps that require IE8, but also has some that won’t work (or at least, arent’t certified) on anything newer than IE6. Relegating the latter to a VM is one of the options wer’e looking at…
I occasionally run into a user who doesn’t want to switch to Firefox because they are pretty happy with the Internet that IE provides them (YouTube, Ebay, etc.) They have a mental model of each browser providing a different Internet, similar to the days of Prodigy and Compuserv, or how Cable and Satellite television services each package together different content. Looking just at that screen shot and without any additional external information about the nature of the Internet, it’s honestly pretty easy to draw that conclusion.
Of course, the “Shortcut to…” comes from WinXP’s default behavior when creating a link, but the “Internet” comes from IE6′s default start menu button. I also don’t know if IE8 on Windows 7 still calls itself “Internet”. Can anyone confirm/deny?
Nonetheless, it might be worth some thought if, as comment 3 suggests, the action/verb rather than our brand name may be the right label to use — at least for the default desktop icon. I am personally not a fan of dumbing down everything to the least common denominator (i.e., we shouldn’t alienate the vast majority of users, so that a tiny part of them is happy) but it might not hurt using something like “Surf the Internet with Firefox” (actually, maybe that’s too long?).
Which leads me to a final problem: Obviously, “Internet” is inaccurate in this context. Mozilla uses the Web as their word of choice because this, and not the entire rest of services on the Internet, is what a web browser accesses. If we were to pick a wording similar to IE, we’d teach people inaccurate terminology.
It’s still not IE6′s button. My Start/Internet is subtitled “Netscape 7.2″ because that’s what it starts. I agree that Internet is a bad term for “Launch Web Browser” though that’s less incorrect when you have an Internet suite set as your default browser