Slashdot Mirror

There's something better than noscript: quickjava. Noscript works, but it's a pain because it insists on making exceptions to what I assumed meant "absolutely no javascript until I turn it on". I don't want to think about anything, I just want to be able to turn it off/on with a single click. It also requires several annoying clicks to disable/enable javascript.

Quickjava, on the other hand, is exactly what I envisioned when I wished I could turn javascript off/on with a single click. No questions asked, no surprises, either completely on or completely off.

Ok, I just wrote a lengthy reply, and then by accident hit "refresh", and all the text was gone :-(

You're welcome.

Any organization smart enough to do that should be smart enough to replace IE6 with Firefox, and configure it to use IE Tab for the internal site.

Nonsense. Aside from the retrieval of a page, rendering said (static) page will be instant in almost all cases, regardless the browser. If it doesn't, either the page is way way way too complicated or you are using an antiquated machine.

Or you are using Firefox and hitting one of its bugs. And of course the whole browser UI often freezes for a few seconds while downloading a page in another tab.

Not that I usually like to hawk extensions/apps on /., but since it's kind of on the current sub-sub-topic...

When I looked at your screen shot I initially thought you were using Tree-Style Tabs (link) with only one tab open. Its a larger* extension than the one you're using, but it deafults to (and works best when) showing the tab section as a vertical bar that looks very similar to the one in your screen shot.

* By which I mean, does a lot more stuff but is less likely to play nice with other tab-related extensions you might be using.

I think what people object to is not being consulted about UI changes. Mozilla are particularly bad for removing features people use every day or breaking their workflow somehow, and unless you are willing to download and try every beta version you as a user have absolutely no say in any of it. Even if you do get the betas, all you can really do is submit bug reports - once Moz has decided they are doing something, it is impossible to change their mind.

A small example:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469082
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477746
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503805
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509664
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324164

All that over 1 single about:config entry which could easily have been restored and not break anything for anyone.

I think what people object to is not being consulted about UI changes. Mozilla are particularly bad for removing features people use every day or breaking their workflow somehow, and unless you are willing to download and try every beta version you as a user have absolutely no say in any of it. Even if you do get the betas, all you can really do is submit bug reports - once Moz has decided they are doing something, it is impossible to change their mind.

A small example:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469082
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477746
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503805
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509664
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324164

All that over 1 single about:config entry which could easily have been restored and not break anything for anyone.

I think what people object to is not being consulted about UI changes. Mozilla are particularly bad for removing features people use every day or breaking their workflow somehow, and unless you are willing to download and try every beta version you as a user have absolutely no say in any of it. Even if you do get the betas, all you can really do is submit bug reports - once Moz has decided they are doing something, it is impossible to change their mind.

A small example:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469082
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477746
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503805
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509664
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324164

All that over 1 single about:config entry which could easily have been restored and not break anything for anyone.

I think what people object to is not being consulted about UI changes. Mozilla are particularly bad for removing features people use every day or breaking their workflow somehow, and unless you are willing to download and try every beta version you as a user have absolutely no say in any of it. Even if you do get the betas, all you can really do is submit bug reports - once Moz has decided they are doing something, it is impossible to change their mind.

A small example:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469082
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477746
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503805
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509664
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324164

All that over 1 single about:config entry which could easily have been restored and not break anything for anyone.

I think what people object to is not being consulted about UI changes. Mozilla are particularly bad for removing features people use every day or breaking their workflow somehow, and unless you are willing to download and try every beta version you as a user have absolutely no say in any of it. Even if you do get the betas, all you can really do is submit bug reports - once Moz has decided they are doing something, it is impossible to change their mind.

A small example:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469082
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477746
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503805
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509664
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324164

All that over 1 single about:config entry which could easily have been restored and not break anything for anyone.

Sadly, I am completely serious. As far as I know Firefox doesn't use the native UI elements for anything much - all the window contents are drawn with XUL. I could be completely wrong here and it might turn out that Firefox does use native Windows controls for things like menus and scrollbars; would any Firefox hacker care to comment?

+1

"Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon(now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key."

The quote is from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback

It talks about the menu bar getting replaced with the ribbon IN WINDOWS AND OTHER MS APPS! Not adding the ribbon to firefox!!!
They DO plan to make a new "menu-less" UI, that would need LESS space than the current one.
For the actual design plans check the wiki link.

Just a stupid fail article, nothing to see here, move along.

But they DID want those features!. MS realised users didn't find the functionality when they asked for functionality that was already in Office since long ago. The Ribbon was their take on trying to solve that, and personally I think they are on the right track,

Anyway, this whole discussion seems bit unneccessary since I cannot find anywhere on mozilla.org where they say they will use the ribbon, they do however give some examples of how they think future firefox will look and whgile it's not the ribbon, it quite pretty, although one can see they looked quite a lot at Chrome and ie 7/8:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback

Yes. And TFA is taken initially from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback, which is discussing the direction of *applications* written for Vista and Windows 7 that don't use the menubar, but use a contextual strip (Windows Explorer) or Office Ribbon (Paint and Wordpad). That paragraph is about the rationale for not showing the menubar on Vista and later in Firefox, not on adding a ribbon to Firefox (it is under a Hiding of the Menubar section).

It seems as though a blogger misread this paragraph, and everyone on the interweb has been taking this as fact, without actually RTFOA (Reading The Friendly Original Article).

From the pcpro article referenced in the /. summary:

"Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menu bar is going away," notes Mozilla in its plans for revamping the Firefox user interface. "[It will] be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon, [which is] now in Paint and WordPad, too."

From the Mozilla page:

"Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon(now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key."

Note that here they are talking about Vista and Windows 7, not Firefox (and also note the "Many apps ..." bit in the last sentence).

Here's what actually happened. In the original Firefox design document, there's this:

Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon(now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key.

TFA quotes this passage, but omits the part I've emphasized above, which makes it clear that this is not a statement of intent for Firefox, but rather an observation on how modern Windows applications behave. The intent for Firefox is made clear in the following passages:

Hiding of the menubar by default would only occur on Vista and Windows 7. Windows XP would retain the menubar by default as would Linux and of course Mac. Holding Alt on Vista/7 would show the menu (which can also be toggle on).

They also talk about adding "Tools" and "Page" buttons to the navigation bar, and putting the most commonly used commands there.

In other words, this is the exact same behavior as seen in IE7/8, and is also pretty close to Chrome and Opera.

To be frank I was horrified when I read the title, but when you look at the mockups, it's doesn't seem to be as bad as the Office 2007 Ribbon.

For one thing it doesn't try to be "context aware" and it doesn't move everything into (partly) illogical categories/tabs. It also retains much of the menus, but moves them to a couple of buttons at the end of the address bar.

To quote from the MozillaWiki article (emphasis mine):

Firefox isn't the type of application that necessarily has contextual actions in the same way Windows Explorer does. So how to handle the functionality of the menubar if it is hidden? Chrome and Safari (and to a lesser extent IE7 & 8) have solved this by sorting, trimming and collecting the menubar functionality into two separate buttons. One of these buttons has items that apply to the webpage and another to the application itself. Now they don't always agree on which item should go in which menu, but the general principal is sound. This is a good solution.

So it would seem that Firefox is moving more toward Chrome or Safari than towards MS Office. This is a good thing, I for one think that the Chrome UI is pretty slick, despite the fact that I'm a Firefox user.

So you're going to switch to Chrome, which works exactly the same as the firefox proposal you're trying to avoid?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback

1. Look here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback
Does it look like the ribbon to you? Me neither. Ribbon is a tabbed toolbar. In the Firefox mockup they have no tabbed toolbars, they just removed the menu bar, and turned the two items that are actually used from it into toolbar buttons. PC Pro calling this a ribbon is disingenuous and misleading.

2. I have an impression that this is MS astroturfing that they deployed in order to justify spending a ton of money on an interface that is less usable that 15 year old menu bars, and loathed by a significant portion of their userbase.

But simple applications like Firefox do not actually suffer from this problem

Which is why Firefox isn't adding Ribbon. They're just remaking their interface to work more like IE8 (in that menu bar is hidden by default, but shows if you use Alt to activate it). Please have a look at the actual screenshot, and I dare you find any resemblance of Ribbon there. Also read the actual primary source. The only place where it even mentions Ribbon is this bit:

Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon (now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key.

which is not a statement of intent regarding Firefox, but rather an assessment of the present state of affairs in Windows UI design guidelines. Where TFA has gotten the idea that Firefox will have "Office 2007's Ribbon", I don't know, but it's simply bullshit.

But simple applications like Firefox do not actually suffer from this problem

Which is why Firefox isn't adding Ribbon. They're just remaking their interface to work more like IE8 (in that menu bar is hidden by default, but shows if you use Alt to activate it). Please have a look at the actual screenshot, and I dare you find any resemblance of Ribbon there. Also read the actual primary source. The only place where it even mentions Ribbon is this bit:

Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon (now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key.

which is not a statement of intent regarding Firefox, but rather an assessment of the present state of affairs in Windows UI design guidelines. Where TFA has gotten the idea that Firefox will have "Office 2007's Ribbon", I don't know, but it's simply bullshit.

Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon(now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key.

I think the point was that Windows is getting rid of the menubar, in favor of the contextual strip or Office Ribbon, not that FireFox is going to use the ribbon in their design. They are simply trying to improve the interface and make it more like the competitors, IE and Chrome (who have come up with some novel ideas to improve the interface). If Windows is not going to have the menubar, then FireFox will look completely out of the times if they continue with it (whether the users on here like it or not).

To wit, I've been using TinyMenu to get rid of the menu bar completely (replacing all the menus with one small button which I have placed to the left of a search box, itself to the left of the address box, all above the bookmarks bar) for years now.

Do people actually use the menus much? And the navigation buttons? Seriously?

I can't remember the last time I used the file, view, edit, or history menus in firefox, but they are always there, taking up space. This is about re-organizing the browser menu to be more minimalistic.

Just download the Menu Editor add-on and you can hide anything you want.

You can also re-arrange anything, and I like the layout and grouping I use.

Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.

The Slashdot summary doesn't really make this clear, and the article of course assumes everyone is running on Windows, but this is incorrect. This is a Windows theme decision only; the Linux and OS X themes will still fit in with their platforms. You can see this here, the actual development documents linked to in the article.

That said, I find it hard to see how anyone can argue with Mozilla choosing to conform to the UI design standards of the Windows platform for the Windows version of Firefox. Seems to me they're making the correct decision. Would we want them to keep the OS 9 Firefox theme for the OS X version of Firefox?

It looks more like IE7 or Chrome than it does any version of Office.

They:
- hid the menubar.
- condensed common menu items into Page and Tools drop-downs, to apply to the current page and whole app, respectively.
- merged the search and address bars (which imo should never have been separate--I always hide the search bar).
- merged some other buttons (stop/reload etc.).
- plan to simplify the 4 different ways to access bookmarks.

Full description of mockup here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback

Other than a brief mention of possibly adding ribbon styling, none of the above looks much like Office ribbons to me.

The quote verbatim from Mozilla's wiki (found here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback)

"Starting with Vista, and continuing with Windows 7, the menubar is going away. To be replaced with things like the Windows Explorer contextual strip, or the Office Ribbon(now in Paint and Wordpad too). Many apps still retain the menubar as an option to be pinned or to be shown briefly by holding the Alt key...Firefox isn't the type of application that necessarily has contextual actions in the same way Windows Explorer does. So how to handle the functionality of the menubar if it is hidden?"

They are just using the ribbon as an example of an interface that has eliminated the menu bar. If you read further they have mockups of the 3.7 and 4.0 interface, it looks absolutely nothing like the ribbon.

It's called Stylish, and it has a public repository for user made styles at userstyles.of.

Mozilla is all about the bling, and usability is a secondary consideration.

Check out this usability bug about resizing the add bookmark dialog. 30 votes, 88 comments, 17 duplicate bugs filed, and still no one has done anything about it.

This fancy new "add bookmark" dialog also broke a pile of screen readers and other accessibility software (although this has mostly been fixed now, AFAIK).

What about just using Tiny Menu? I can really recommend it if you have a laptop screen with a height of 800 pixel. I've removed the "Navigation Bar" and the "Bookmarks Toolbar" as well.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback They're not saying that they are going to be using the Ribbon style interface. They only say that the menu bar will be replace with things like the ribbon style interface.

I'm guessing some Microsofties tried to push this under firefox. I sincerely hope they don't do this either, as this seems pretty stupid and the arguments seem kinda MS-ish. I also don't want this and anxiously wait for a theme to get rid of it, if this change even occurs.

Examples: there are already aero addons

I'm guessing some Microsofties tried to push this under firefox. I sincerely hope they don't do this either, as this seems pretty stupid and the arguments seem kinda MS-ish. I also don't want this and anxiously wait for a theme to get rid of it, if this change even occurs.

Examples: there are already aero addons

The gallery in the original announcement makes it look like they're taking a page out of Chrome's playbook, especially for their 4.0 proposal.

Just as more context as I couldn't believe it myself : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback#Hiding_of_the_Menubar However this is a dumb move ... For me, the ribbon bar is a non-intuitive piece of eye-candy which does not serve any purpose other than to assist in confusion. Then again - I'm old school.

It is clickable. Haven't you installed the Linkification plugin?
Here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/190

For example, however much you may hate advertising, you might be willing to go to a source with lots of ads and great journalism

Or you could just go to the source with lots of ads and great journalism...without the ads thanks to Adblock.

You can get the latest version of Firefox for OS/2 too. ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest-3.5/contrib/firefox-3.5.3.en-US.os2.zip Nathan

I'm not going to go into the security implications of it, but you could always use this to script the the website and bulldoze through all of the javascript, flash, etc. You can write a script that will take you all the way through logging in, clicking on the "pay my bill" button, fill in your credit card info, everything. Of course, you shouldn't do this.

But you can.

Did you miss the point about Halo 2? (Or any of the Jak games, for that matter.)

Yes, I missed this point. I have never played Microsoft Halo 2 or any Jak game.

It's got eval.

Not once sites start enabling Content Security Policy. From that page:

eval and related functions make trivial the task of generating code from strings, which commonly come from untrusted sources, are loaded via insecure protocols, and can become tainted with attacker controlled data.

Which would be similar to watching a YouTube movie and getting the little spinner.

Except in a "multiplayer and online" game, other players would be shooting you while the spinner runs.

With enough bandwidth, you'll already have that room buffered before you open the door.

Provided that the game can successfully guess what room the user is going to enter next. Or did you mean "prefetch all rooms that the player could enter from here"? In that case, "with enough bandwidth" looks like wishful thinking to me.

Well having a somewhat small "close" button is reasonable in the sense that it is a UI element that is less frequently used and which you don't want users to click accidentally (for many programs such a mistake is irreversible or at least annoying).

By comparison, site navigation elements should certainly be big and easy to click on, since users will need to click on them very frequently, and there is very little cost associated with a mis-click (just use the back button and you're fine).

By the way, you (and other powerusers like you) may be interested in checking-out Auto-Pager. It's a Firefox add-on that automatically loads the next page, inline, when you scroll down on a page. So instead of clicking ">>", the next page just appears. It has definitions for lots of sites (search engines, news sites, forums, etc.) and makes reading long lists of entries much faster and smoother.

One thing that annoys me is when the ads have to be served from external links and those links don't work.

This happens because ad serving companies are cheap. Too cheap in fact to pay for servers and bandwidth to actually serve ads quickly. So instead they let their low end servers strain under crushing loads 24/7 hovering just on the edge of crashing because wasting your time costs them nothing. Yet another reason to use Ad Block Plus. Go ahead, use the nuclear option; the ad companies don't give a shit about you so why should you give a shit about them?

Would that be this one? That's pretty darned old. Reminds me a bit of the title text display bug that used to hit XKCD et al.

link is highly germane to the discussion

Would that be this one? That's pretty darned old. Reminds me a bit of the title text display bug that used to hit XKCD et al.

If you think they all suck, how is it FireFox's killer feature then?

Because I'm not talking about the built-on one, I'm talking about the Session Saver Extension (thought it appears to have been renamed Session Manager).

The whole thing is a giant fuck-up. On all the Moz web sites (e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ ) they are referred to as "add-ons". In Firefox they are under "add-ons" on the menu, but then the window that opens lists them under the "extensions" tab. If you go to the "Get Add-ons" tab you get a list of things which end up in the "extensions" tab. Just in case you are still somehow grasping this, they also added tabs for "themes" and "plugins". Themes are on the add-ons site but it isn't clear if they are technically add-ons or not, and plugins have nothing to do with add-ons at all.

I don't think even Moz know what they are supposed to be called. The developer docs can't make up their mind either.

try IE Tab for firefox?

There seems to be an interesting Firefox add-on what is quite much like Facebook but p2p. All the data is shared with your friends but only with your friends. No server at all.

Handier that trying to encrypt via Facebook.

https://addons.mozilla.org/fi/firefox/addon/12054

Mozilla's Electrolysis project aims to change that. The first bootstrapping step was completed 15-July-2009.

"The Mozilla platform will use separate processes to display the browser UI, web content, and plugins. The working name for this project is Electrolysis. "

Check this Fx bug, for instance. Fx has been unstable and unresponsive since 3.0. It's got problems with its database (grows huge, too many accesses, etc). There are many Fx bugs related to responsiveness and crashes.

Are we talking about the searching, or just the look and feel of it? If it is the latter, I've always just run the oldbar addon to revert back to the FF2 feel. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227 YMMV though