Paul English blogs a plausible theory about why Microsoft drastically changed the placement of controls in the IE7 tool bar:

…maybe Microsoft is trying to quickly (even if painfully) retrain its large market share to use control layout of IE7, so that when that mass-market first tries Firefox (and they will), they will find Firefox the one with the “odd layout”, and thus be more likely to stay with IE7

Is it a conspiracy or just canny marketing? And why is it so often so hard to tell those two apart?

If I had to guess — and I don’t have to but I’m going to anyway — I’d guess that Microsoft did usability studies that favored the new design (once we unlearn the old way, as Paul points out), and they were aware that it’s an opportunity to de-train us on the Firefox UI.

(Yes, someone could and probably has done a Firefox skin that makes it look like IE7. But Microsoft’s ploy — if that’s what it is — is aimed at people downloading the out-of-the-box version of Firefox.) [Tags: microsoft ie7 firefox markeing browsers]

Categories: Uncategorized dw