And if only developers understood UX.
The "lie" the author was complaining about was that Firefox is miscommunicating what it did: It warned that a concrete file was containing malware when it actually found a suspicious domain.
Depending on context, that might make a huge difference - e.g., if a user got such a warning for a file they uploaded themselves, they might get the wrong impression that their system is compromised.
As the author noted, simply describing the actual threat would clear this up.
> Sure, there are some costs to false positives, but they are dwarfed by the cost of false negatives.
This strategy has blown up a number of times already. If you present too many false positives, users might lose trust in you and ignore your predictions altogether.
The "lie" the author was complaining about was that Firefox is miscommunicating what it did: It warned that a concrete file was containing malware when it actually found a suspicious domain.
Depending on context, that might make a huge difference - e.g., if a user got such a warning for a file they uploaded themselves, they might get the wrong impression that their system is compromised.
As the author noted, simply describing the actual threat would clear this up.
> Sure, there are some costs to false positives, but they are dwarfed by the cost of false negatives.
This strategy has blown up a number of times already. If you present too many false positives, users might lose trust in you and ignore your predictions altogether.