Slashdot Mirror
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."
I did prefer the old look, but then again the new one hasn't been finalised yet and is still under active development (it's been checked in but not enabled yet).
Whatever the case, 0.9 will be an excellent release and well worth trying. However, please remember this release will have some major new features (better extension/theme management, migration of prefs from other browsers such as IE, Netscape and Opera) and then focus will be on polish and stability up to a successful 1.0 release.
eh? i use FF loads and don't have to do that, ever. could it be one of your extensions or sommat?
Will Thunderbird be following suite and changing default theme too?
Cheers,
Ian
Yes, Arvid Axelsson, the author of the current default theme (Qute), may have a bit of an ego himself, and may have been reluctant to freely license his artwork under the same MPL terms as the Mozilla codebase. But he's a reasonable person, and he's indicated he's willing to compromise and do a Free license that works for the Mozilla team, because he wants to make sure that Firefox succeeds, and has the best, most aesthetically pleasing look and feel possible.
For God's FUCKING sake you egomaniacs (and anybody who has followed some of these discussions over the last few years knows this is true - see the splashscreen debacle in Bugzilla, the many UI layout discussions, and the naming debacles for examples), we are relying on you and the excellent browser you have created and maintained. We respect immensely all the hard work the Mozilla and Firefox core developers have done, but their lackadaisical attitude towards branding of their product (Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?), the terrible aesthetics of the splashscreens and icon sets they keep putting back in are just unacceptable. Qute was the best thing that ever happened to Firefox and the Mozilla project - compare to the awful looking old versions of the Mozilla browser - ugh.
You are the developers and project leaders of a critical mass-market product. If there is truly an unresolvable licensing issue with the current icons and their author is unwilling to compromise, come out and tell us, and assign a group of artists or other aesthetically inclined technology professionals to consider submissions for a new default. Realize that your contributions, while critical, do not need to include drawing shitty icons or making terrible off-the-cuff aesthetic decisions that have a negative impact on the adoption of a critical product for the entire Internet's wellbeing.
Personally, I'm more of an "I don't care how it looks as long as it works" guy but I agree that the Qute theme looks great and I always felt comfortable using it. I guess variety is a good thing but I'd much rather see them sort out their differences and stick with Qute.
May I suggest you fire up Firefox again, and type
into the address bar and hit enter.More options than you could shake a very large stick at
Also, Character Encoding is in the view menu.
RegardselFarto
"..We respect immensely all the hard work the Mozilla and Firefox core developers have done, but.."
Read your own subject line and then tell me during which part of your response you were respectful of them and their work.
Why oh why do they want cross platform uniformity??
One of the most basic principles of human-computer interaction is consistency. Windows users expect to see Windows-like apps, Mac OS X ppl expect native OS X looking apps and likewise for GNOME, KDE and whatever else.
Anything that breaks that (for example an OS X app that looks and/or behaves like a Windows app goes against the user's expections. And ultimately that makes the app harder for them to use and hence less appealing.
Granted there is a lot of similarity between the various desktop environments but they do each also have their own quirks. For example OS X apps have the toolbar along the top of the screen (not part of the app window) and have that little window-resizing thing in the bottom-right corner of a window (not part of the window's border). GNOME and KDE generally have different standard back, forward, reload etc icons for buttons that all apps should use rather than their own.
If you make Firefox look the same on every platform you will be breaking such little quirks and conventions on some (possibly all) platforms and the users will suffer.
I say make a different, native looking (and feeling) theme for each major platform and ship it as the default for that platform!
As for branding - you've got the name, you've got the firefox icon - they stay the same on every platform - surely that's all that's needed.
Personally I think that's a good thing too. I for one perceive it as really annoying and intrusive when I install an app that insists on planting it's icons all over my desktop, installing a pointless system tray icon and making itself the default player/browser/whatever (eg RealPlayer or QuickTime on Windows) - it feels like I get the branding forced down my throat and that does NOT make me a happy user! Apps that don't feel the need to do that are a breath of fresh air and it would be a real shame for Firefox to go down the road of excessive branding.
Apologies for only just vaguely being on-topic - but does anyone know what the progress is on the Slashdot rendering problem under Firefox (it gets mentioned regularly when Firefox comes up as a topic). I would have thought it would be an important fix for the Slash guys to put in, as I regularly have to refresh a page three or four times before I get any text in the main boxes. This can't help bandwidth...
I don't care about the default look as long there is Plastik for Firefox available which also includes Crystal icons and Cancel<->OK button swap.
I'd be intrigued to hear why you believe GTK is so "fundamentally backwards", seeing as just about every useful Linux app (except for maybe KDevelop, K3B, and OO.o) is written in it.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
..like the CSS rendering. Horrible.
Not to start a flamwar, but it's sad when IE can render CSS better.
Need proof? display: inline; doesn't work. For those that don't know, if you have 3 divs and set them all to "display: inline;" it will align them horizontally similar to TD tags.
display: block; is supposed to align them vertically, much like the TR tag does.
There's a laundry list of other very BASIC CSS styles that will not render properly, and it's very odd that such very basic things don't work or function properly.
Actually, the look of things is about the only thing that even total idiots do change about their computers.
Many, many thousands of machines out there run without having ever been update since install, with every service under the sun enabled, and probably with the default passwords still in place. However, these same machines have custom backgrounds, colour cursors, sound effects and a dozen screensavers.
Skins are big with people who don't know how to change the Start menu and believe Linux must be a windos program, because how can something run on a computer if it isn't a windos program?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Parent has a very good point. IE still freaks out with regular use, bloating up to tremendous size and crashing. Opera (which I'm writing this on now) also crashes, perhaps once a day. It's not such a big deal in Opera, because it saves what pages you're looking at, but it still happens. Mozilla crashes. iCab crashes. I can't vouch for Konqueror or Safari, as I haven't spent enough time with either.
In short, while bugs are annoying, FireFox isn't buggier than any of the other browsers out there, and in some comparisons is a lot less buggy. Compared to Opera's break-fix development cycle, FireFox is a rock of gibraltar.
The ______ Agenda
Ok/Cancel or Cancel/OK buttons are fundamentally flawed, and outdated. Both GNOME and KDE use action verbs, just like MacOS X. So instead ok Cancel/OK you can Discard/Save or something.
Before calling someone a troll, please invest a little more time than basic examples.
Proof:
<html>
<head>
<style>
#test, #test2
{
display: inline;
width: 250px;
padding: 0px;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-right: 10px;
vertical-align: top;
border: solid 1px #333333;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="test">
<div class="a">aaa</div>
<div class="b">bbb</div>
<div class="c">ccc</div>
<div class="a">aaa</div>
<div class="b">bbb</div>
<div class="c">ccc</div>
</div>
<div id="test2">
<div class="a">aaa</div>
<div class="b">bbb</div>
<div class="c">ccc</div>
<div class="a">aaa</div>
<div class="b">bbb</div>
<div class="c">ccc</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Now, to me, an important product as Mozilla require a "final answer" from Arvid on such an issue i.e. "The license on Qute have to be changed or we need to replace Qute with another theme. Will you change the license?". A final "no" then, would entitle the Moz devs to change default theme. It seems unfair both to Arvid and the creators of the new theme to not having cleared this issue before.
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
How about firefox native SVG support? Does anyone know if native SVG is included by default install?
Sketsa
SVG Graphics Editor
http://www.kiyut.com
Will this blunder by Goodger & Co. be the straw the broke the camel's back and cause a FireFox fork (FireFork?) to rise to prominence, a la the XFree86 story?
We can only hope.
I hate the way extensions currently work in Firefox, where each one decides where and how to intall itself. In particular, many plugins try to install themselves in the Firefox main folder rather than in the user's profile directory; this is not only annoying for those who want different plugin sets for different users, but it flat out prevents some people from installing some plugins (I cannot install any of the Mycroft quick search plugins because of this, for example).
Not only that, but there is currently no consistent way to remove extensions, either; each one has to provide its own removal method. An extension manager that provides an uninstall function would be nice, but what would be nicer is if I could install a plugin simply but placing a file in the plugin directory, and uninstall it by removing that file. Simple, intuititve, and it doesn't preclude having a nice extension manager on top, either. In fact, this is exactly how the old Extension Manager on pre-OS X Macs worked: disabling an extension would simply move it to a folder called "Extensions (Disabled)" in the System folder.
Mike
But on a more basic level, while Microsoft can work to prevent thrashing, program authors also need to fix legitimate memory leakages. Otherwise, it's like asking the government to step in to regulate something because people are too lazy to fix their own problems (i.e. video game violence, movie violence, fast food lawsuits, etc). It's really not Microsoft's responsibility to "Make Firefox not leak memory." Microsoft's job is to handle the "thrashing" gracefully if and when it does happen.
I still write in HTML 4.0 Transitional and validate it. Why should I be left out? XHTML is unnecessarily complex for my needs. At the end of the day, I merely want a site that looks reasonably good and is functional. I don't really need the wizardry and features XHTML can offer.
> It may be just me but when the 'lean', 'no-nonsense' and 'stripped' version of software requires 27MB to run with two open tags I think it's perfectly fine to blame the developers of that software,
I would agree with you if it still were 1990's. But today, memory is dirt cheap, new computers tend to have 256MB to 512MB fast, real memory and lot's of more virtual memory, which works very well in modern operating systems, like linux and other unix-like operating systems. What difference does it really make if a software requires 27MB to run?
In field of embedded software the thing is different but AFAIK Mozilla is not targeting that field. Actually with a real OS it would not matter the requirement would be double or quadruple. All that memory is not needed all the time, ad as said, virtual memory works fine.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is why Linux will never gain significant market share on the desktop--it's being dumbed down in all the wrong ways, due to arrogant notions like these from smug Slashdotters who insist on looking down on average users. You know the kind. Average users like the doctor who performed a coronary bypass on you last year. Average users like the Pulitzer-winning journalist who wonders why she has to endure a ten-step wizard just to save a document. Is it because she's stupid? Or is it because some acne-faced programmer thought she would be stupid?
I just they'd enable a user to select IE style favorite handling (in .lnk files) if a user wanted it. I prefer the way IE handles favorites.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Except that when you reach the memory limit in Windows XP, the OS often becomes unstable, and remains unstable until you reboot.
Something is wrong with MS memory management, but I have never been able to determine what makes it go bonkers.
You say, "All that you need to do...". That's a good nickname for Windows XP. It's an "All that you need to do..." operating system. Go a little bit deep into how it works, and you begin experiencing its sloppiness.