A New Look For Firefox

ben writes "Regular users of Mozilla Firefox may be interested to know a new default theme is planned for 0.9 in preparation for the road to 1.0. 0.9 will also feature new improved theme and extension management, which will make it easy to make Firefox look the way you want it to."

Comments

The new theme

[ptlis]

Here is the thread containing screenshots of the new theme.

Re:The new theme

[linuxci]

This is not informative. That's not the new theme. The article at the top points to the thread with the discussion about the new theme.

This is a port of the Mac Pinstripe theme, although the new theme based on Pinstripe but called Winstripe (the GNOME version is called GNOMEstripe - not Linstripe!) I assume these names won't be used in the finished product though.

Anyway back on track, although Winstripe will be similar to Pinstripe the icons will look more Windows like and therefore not a total Mac lookalike.

Re:The new theme

[CeleronXL]

And here is a complete screenshot of the new theme. I think this is a huge step backwards.

Re:I liked the old look

[Conor Turton]

The preferences importing from Opera works extremely well. In fact I wasn't aware it was there, installed FF 0.9 and fired it up for the first time to set it up just to find it loading up my homepage and my Opera bookmarks were all there.

A welcome suprise and it means I can get shut of my 3rd party bookmark convertor.

Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs

[Jedbro]

Agreed. One of the issues was the license for the grafics, the author has stated he would be willing to change it for mozilla.org.

While the new theme isn't *bad*, it is not nearly as profesional as QUTE is, and a terrible first impression for new users who are coming off of IE.

Sad, sad, sad. Wish this could have been discussed first like in the old days (pheonix).

opera vs firefox?

[zlel]

Just tried firefox this afternoon - but switched back to Opera. Am I trying the wrong thing, or does firefox not expose as may options as opera? I wanna be able to do stuff like set my default encoding, browser id, source viewer n stuff like that... without recompling of course...

Re:opera vs firefox?

[Pahalial]

Extensions, my friend. For example, there's a user agent switcher that you can customize. there's also a lot more on that page of course, and for the other stuff there's the about:config mentioned in another reply.

More pics

[Anonymous Coward]

Some more pics of the new theme, from the author's website.

Re:More pics

[Anonymous Coward]

here are more pics from the actual author's site.

Re:Nope

[FuzzyDaddy]

This issue is fixed here, as well as mentioned on the home page for firefox.

Re:Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons?

[linuxci]

That order is only in Mac/Linux builds.

The reason for it in Mac is because all apps should be that way due to the UI guidelines.

As for Linux apparently it's in the GNOME UI guidelines. However, I rarely use any other GNOME apps in Linux, most things I do are either in browser or in a terminal window - therefore the button ordering is frustrating for me when I'm in Linux because I switch between Windows and Linux more than Linux and Mac.

But technically they're doing the right thing - although ideally it'd only display in that order if you're actually using GNOME.

Re:And what was Firefix was for, again ??

[linuxci]

Firefox was *supposed* to be a *fast* lean-and-mean browser. One reason was given that bundling IE with OS works because people are too lazy to download another browser. That gap WIDENS as the download size increases. Already Firefox is 10+ MB!!!!

Don't be such a troll. The download size for Firefox hasn't been anywhere near 10 meg (except perhaps before they stripped out all the app suite stuff).

If you look at the latest branch builds you'll see that the current download is below 5 meg on Windows.

Re:You need a bigger "but" next time

[Fnkmaster]

I've spent a lot of time on the Mozillazine forums and so have many others who've contributed code, artwork, testing and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of their time. I am talking here about the core developers from Mozilla.org who have actively displayed their arrogance repeatedly to the rest of the community. In particular, I think Ben Goodger has stood out as a tremendous prick. In fact, my original post said "Fuck Ben Goodger" in the title, but I decided it was too much of an ad hominem, when many of the others have stood up far too strongly for Goodger.

Ben Goodger is the strongest anti-advocate for Mozilla I have ever seen. There are hundreds of other developers who have contributed lots of code to the original Mozilla project and the Firefox codebase. Many of these are great people who have quietly contributed tens of thousands of hours of their work over the years to the community. And those people I respect immensely. The ones who insist on repeatedly driving rifts through and disrespecting the fabulous community of Mozilla supporters that have evangelized their product and fought for a better, more standards-compliant internet everywhere else have been done a tremendous disservice to the rest of the Internet, and I have simply lost my respect for them.

Re:great

[linuxci]

You can do so in Firefox but they're implemented differently in Firefox than the suite.

If you click on a link to add a sidebar panel then it'll ask you where you want to file a bookmark, then to open the sidebar you can look in the appropriate place in bookmarks.

This bookmark approach also means you can turn any bits of HTML into a sidebar panel. Just bookmark a page, go to properties and check "Open this bookmark in the sidebar"

Re:Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons?

[marq00z]

It's not a bug, it's a feature. The Cancel|OK order appears only in Linux and Mac OS X and it's done this way to be compliant with Gnome and Apple Human Interface Guidelines. If you want to have the Windows-like OK|Cancel order, just add these lines to your userChrome.css in your .firefox//xxxxxx.slt/chrome directory:

.dialog-button-box {
-moz-box-direction: reverse;
-moz-box-pack: center;
}

.dialog-button-box spacer {
display: none !important;
}

Re:Why bother?

[linuxci]

I've just had a look at the bugs mentioned and they're both being worked on. Therefore it's unlikely you'll see them when 1.0 comes out. However, like I said previously, the type of person who can design a good theme is unlikely to be able to help with the other bugs

Caution 0.9 will break ALL your extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

do not install 0.9 until (if) the extensions have been updated as it will break

once again backwards compatibility has been sacrificed (and we are not even at 1.0 yet) we had now 200+ extensions have to be updated and some have been abandoned as they worked, now they will be broken and useless

i hope all this aggro was worth it, or you might find a lot of people just give up with it and go back to IE while its got a lot of failings at least you know where you are with it and it doesn't keep breaking every month

Re:Caution 0.9 will break ALL your extensions

[colinramsay]

0.9 will FIX the extension system in Firefox, which has been one of it's weakest points thus far. After 0.9 there will be no further major shifts in the way extensions are handled, and so this is the first and only time that extensions have been broken in this way.

It's a necessary change.

Re:How about...

[sgarrity]

Actually, a reader pointed out only this morning that the MSNBC This Week in Pictures feature now does work in Firefox.

Re:ow, new design :D

[Ruediger]

according to the firefox roadmap it should be out this month.

It is fixed...

[WD]

Assuming you're talking about this bug:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id= 205893

here's a link to the theme itself

[reeb]

It looks very nice!! (a work in progress, and this maybe an older version).

save to disk: pinstripe theme

use the tool here to install it.

I reported the leak on October 17, 2003:

[Futurepower(R)]

I reported the memory leak on October 17, 2003:

Firefox 0.8: All instances crash. Memory leaks.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222660

(Copy and paste the link to view the bug report.)

Please add your experiences to the report.

I reported the same bug in Mozilla browser, a long time ago. Huge memory leaks have existed since Mozilla version 1.0.

A recent experience: After two days of opening and closing instances of FireFox, with two FireFox instances open and maybe 5 tabs total, the FireFox memory usage in Windows XP was 374,656 kilobytes. When I closed one of the instances, the memory usage went UP to 385,868 kilobytes.

When you reach the limit of installed memory, Windows XP has to do its terrible disk thrashing thing. If Bill Gates weren't so poor, he could fix that. The advantage of open source is that there is at least a chance that the FireFox bug will be fixed.

Re:I reported the leak on October 17, 2003:

[Anonymous Coward]

Blatant MS bashing gets you mod points aparently. When you reach the upper limit of memory, this "disk thrashing" you speak of is the cache being resised. All that you need to do to stop that is set your cache minimum size the same as the maximum. No more disk thrashing. Or you could just hate on M$, that might be even easier.

Re:I reported the leak on October 17, 2003:

[Alexis de Torquemada]

Blatant MS bashing gets you mod points aparently. When you reach the upper limit of memory, this "disk thrashing" you speak of is the cache being resised. All that you need to do to stop that is set your cache minimum size the same as the maximum. No more disk thrashing. Or you could just hate on M$, that might be even easier.

Poppycock. In order to shrink the cache, only dirty pages have to be flushed. However, dirty pages have to be written much earlier than that in order to reduce the damaging effects of system or power failures anyway, so most of the cache will very likely not be dirty at that time. Cache pages which are not dirty, i.e. identical to the version on disk do not need to be written out, but can simply be discarded. So shrinking the cache should typically involve little disk I/O. Exceptions would be times where you do write lots of data to harddisk (e.g. downloads over a fast connection).

Btw, Linux may write "anonymous" pages (e.g. application memory) that haven't been recently accessed into swapspace before it actually runs out of physical RAM, but keeps them in RAM as "not dirty". That way, it can also just discard them once memory conditions get critical, and thus avoid a lot of disk I/O delays.

Re:Slashdot Rendering

[marq00z]

This bug has been fixed recently. (bug 217527).

Screenshot of the New Default Theme

[sgarrity]

Here is a screenshot of the new theme.

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using firefox, and it does not omit the 'referer'.

Screenshot of the new theme

[Anonymous Coward]

The author of the new theme, Kevin Gerich, has posted a screenshot in his blog:
http://kmgerich.com/archive/000062.html

Re:And what was Firefix was for, again ??

[Jugalator]

Firefox download size becomes 4.6 MB

Re:Yay

[eyeye]

Firefox devs make their decisions (e.g name changes!) behind closed doors and the first you know about it is when they have already made the change.

I am glad he released this info.

Re:How about...

[xandroid]

A thread I stumbled upon at MozillaZine mentioned that these resource issues won't be fixed in 0.9, or even 1.0.

(Not sure if this is gospel truth, but I sure hope not... kill -9 firefox is getting old...)

Re:Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, basically, the decision is because they didn't think about it.

No, they made the decision because they're smarter than you. There is a well known tenet of UI design that says the default choice should be the least destructive one available. That almost always means the Cancel button. Putting it to the left of the Ok button makes it fall naturally in the default spot in the tab order, and also puts it where people expect the default to be.

Considering what a disaster the OS has always been, it amazes me how many people consider something to be the "right way" because that's how Windows does it.

Re:You act like IE is stable...

[farnsworth]

It's not such a big deal in Opera, because it saves what pages you're looking at

If I understand you correctly, there is a way to do this in mozilla as well. Set the pref browser.startup.page to the integer '2', and mozilla/firefox/et al will start up on the page last loaded.

Re:SVG Support

[marq00z]

SVG support is in the CVS, but it's not considered stable at the moment. It won't make it into the 0.9 release of Firefox (it's not even a part of the "aviary" pre-0.9 branch).

So, if you want to have an SVG-enabled Firefox you have to pull the trunk source from the CVS and then add these lines to your .mozconfig before building the browser (I assume you're using GNU/Linux):

ac_add_options --enable-svg
ac_add_options --enable-svg-renderer-libart
export MOZ_INTERNAL_LIBART_LGPL=1
mk_add_options MOZ_INTERNAL_LIBART_LGPL=1

Some people from the MozillaZine "Firefox Builds" forum are creating their own builds. If you've got luck, you may find an SVG-enabled build there, too.

Re:It's just Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the browser named "Dillo"

For those curious, here's a Pinstripe gallery

[Overly Critical Guy]

Here's what Pinstripe looks like. Goes to show OS X still has the most beautiful, pleasant, and clean-looking GUI around; no wonder everyone tries to rip it off yet fails:

Pinstripe Firefox Gallery

Re:How about...

[TheSpoom]

I have only ever experienced this with Tabbrowser Extensions installed. Once I disabled it, Firefox was VERY stable again. Could this be the same with your issue?

Re:You need a bigger "but" next time

[STrinity]

Oh, come on. TBE's context menus are stupidly huge.

And 100% customizable. Tab->Edit Context Menu

Personally I wish Firefox had a similar option so I could get rid of useless options like "Send Link" and "Copy Link Location" without having to edit userChrome.css.

Re:How about...

[nwbvt]

Yeah, I have had some problems with the Tab Browser Extensions plugin but I havn't seen this problem with the browser itself.

Re:It's just Windows

[E_elven]

XHTML is a misleading name. Essentially all XHTML is is simply an XML document type -it has a schema, and, yes, it is theoretically extensible just like any XML document. The extensions are known as releases -XHTML 1.0 vs. XHTML 1.1, which have different schemas.

The individual web developer will not extend XHTML in any fashion (he can, but then it's not of the same document type anymore and will therefore not work with the clients (browsers)).

XHTML is mostly a subset of HTML (although one or two new tags are defined also). See here for all XHTML 1.1 tags.

The reason for XHTML's existence is that HTML concentrates (heavily) on presentation as well as structure, and it was felt that this should not be. So XHTML defines the structure of a given document and leaves any presentation of that data to some other entity (like any good XML document)*. The presentation layer is called CSS or Cascading Style Sheets.

* I don't mean that an XML document can't define presentation per se -what I mean is that a good XML document does one thing and one thing only: presents some data in a structured manner (for example, this post contains a MemberName, Subject, Text, ModerationScore and so on). There's nothing that prevents using XML to describe presentation, but it should not be presentation -that's a very important distinction. So theoretically an XHTML file describing the structure of the document could be accompanied by another XML file that described how it was to be presented, but at least for now that task has been given to CSS. For information about XML as presentation description, you can take a look at XUL from Mozilla.