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ExpressionToday I was all excited about ditching my VM running Windows XP that I use to test IE 6 as part of my cross-browser testing for our e-commerce website and to use Expression Super Preview instead.
So I fired up Super Preview for the first time. Very cool. I’ll be able to bring up any web site and see multiple views of it in most major browsers and their past and current versions right?
Well, it seemed like a huge productivity gain, until I actually tried to USE it that is…
There’s a MAJOR functional problem with it. YOU CAN’T INTERACT WITH THE SITE THAT YOU PULL UP! Look above, I can’t log in. That means that most of the pages I can’t even view in this tool. What’s the point of even using this tool then?
How am I going to test anything if I can’t even log in or click around? Because you simply can’t! I tried to log into the site and all you get is the DOM elements shown at the bottom of the screen.
Any serious non-static website these days require an auth before you even get to 80-90% of the pages! So this tool is only good for at looking at the Homepage, an About or Legal static page on any website? It’s pretty limiting don’t you think?
So, sadly, MS pushes what could have been a very useful and cool product to production that nobody else really has (at least not that I am aware of) but we can’t use it in a realistic web world.
It’s our job as customers/consumers of MS products to point these things out and challenge the usability of what they push to production. Hell MS should already be doing this but in my observation of this tool alone, it’s still an issue…usability and therefore practicality to the real-world and daily process of a graphic designer or software engineer is really not being considered.
Clearly they did not think about usability or practicality because so far, this Super Preview Tool (even the IE plug-in) is of no use to real business based developers & designers at this point which is really just amazing to me that the product is even being marketed as something that us usable in a real business environment.
