I would like to know what does “secret sauce” mean? Could you explain me it in other words??

Thank you very much

Eleonora

I’m sorry if my words distressed you. It was not my intention to malign Windows users. That would be like maligning most of humanity.

My point was simply that for many people, Windows, “the computer,” and “the internet” all sort of blur together as a platform they use to achieve business and personal tasks—a platform they don’t necessarily think about. Just like most of us who aren’t entertainment professionals don’t spend a great deal of energy thinking about, say, television.

We may watch television, we may have favorite shows, favorite actors and news anchors, but we don’t analyze the five acts of the story when we’re watching a sitcom, and we respond emotionally to a close-up but don’t analyze why the director cut to it. Screenwriters, filmmakers and film buffs are likely to watch TV analytically. The rest of us aren’t. It’s just not our job.

It’s not over-generalizing to say people in the film industry likely watch TV in a different way than people outside that industry. It’s not over-generalizing to say a user experience designer probably experiences problems on a website differently than a non-UX designer. And it’s not over-generalizing to say that those who seek minority platforms and browsers have different agendas and different interest than those who do not seek them.

Mozilla and Opera have always appealed to an out-of-the-ordinary web user. And because they do so, to a certain extent they preach to the converted—just as a blog post about web standards is read almost exclusively by people who already care about web standards.

People who enjoy their browser and OS don’t have a compelling reason to try a different browser. But they may well encounter a different browser when it’s time to replace their smart phone. Those who pick up an iPhone will experience Webkit, the open source, standards-compliant browser that powers Mobile Safari, AKA the web on iPhone.

It was that point which I intended to make in my post. If through some clumsiness of word choice I led some readers to infer that I disrespect any group of people based on the computer they use, I regret the inadvertent transgression.

I said most normal people don’t waste brain cells thinking about user experience, operating systems, or browsers.

You never said normal people, you said “Windows” users. Twice in fact.

As a web designer, I put research into every project. So does our whole team. Research includes interviewing people who use a product or website or have a point of view about a service. These aren’t members of an elite group, they’re “normal” folks (for lack of a better word), and I can tell from hundreds of hours of first-hand experience, they mostly don’t care about web browsers and OSes.

Published documentation backs this up as well. (As does common sense.) It’s not elitism, it’s just the nature of things.

Generalizing too much? Certainly not. Knowing the real-world audience? Definitely.

Really now, you have any hard facts to back up Zeldman’s fairly typical elitist statement that Windows users will open whatever they’re spoon-fed? Firefox became a viable platform due to Windows users making it popular, not OSX/Linux, whose Firefox install base is statistically insignificant by comparison.

most Windows users open the browser that comes with their operating system, again without too much thought. This doesn’t make them dumb and us smart. We are interaction designers; they are not.

Zeldman has used “they” in reference to the lowly Windows commoners, so who must “we” knowledgeable interaction designers be? Mac users, naturally.