Taking a survey is easy.
Interpreting the results of a survey is not.
For example, the Opera developers recently posted Reality Show Results… wherein they showed what settings were commonly used or not used.
NOTE: Opera is not spying on anyone, these users were asked explicitly if they would be willing to share this information.
Huibk wrote:
Not all of the data tell us much, but some are clear enough to draw conclusions:
Under that, the second entry is:
A preference we added by popular request, the ability to turn on Fit to Width by default is used by 0.0%
Conventional wisdom might make you think: “Well, they added a preference, but no one is using it, therefore they should just remove the preference which shouldn’t bother anyone since no one is using it.”
That reasoning, however, is completely flawed.
What the data doesn’t tell you is why no one has it enabled by default.
It is because they don’t want to use it…
…Or because it fails horribly on a regular basis?
Let’s just take one example of a relatively popular page such as Apple’s iPhone page.
This is what it looks like on my ridiculously large 1600x1200 screen (note the image has been scaled down, but you can click on it to see its full overblown glory):
Looks pretty good, eh? Plenty of whitespace on either side, and no horizontal scroll bar.
One would assume that this would mean that applying “Fit To Width” would not change the look of this page at all.
Well, behold the power of assumption. Here’s what the same page looks like with Fit To Width enabled:
So we shouldn’t assume that Fit To Width will act logically, and Opera shouldn’t assume that the lack of anyone using Fit to Width by default means that no one wants to use it.
It may mean that they’ve discovered that this feature just doesn’t work very well on a large number of sites.
Improve the feature and maybe more people will use it.