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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."
...They leave everything as it is, and fix the resource leak in windows? It's hard to try and convince people to switch to my browser when I have to "end process tree" the thing once a day.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
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.
Will Thunderbird be following suite and changing default theme too?
Cheers,
Ian
Qute was a great Default theme. It looked great as a default theme, and really made switchers from IE feel comfortable. This new theme just doesnt fit in Windows or Linux... it looks good for OSX, but just not in other OSes.
in the browser market, you'd be looking to take it from Internet Explorer (duh). That's Internet Explorer on Windows ... not the Mac. I think that it is important to have a default theme that makes it easy for the mums and dads to identify with (because they are not likely to change it). I think the current default theme does this and the proposed change is a mistake. But what do I know?
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.
The important things like fixing the preferences, the weird, fatal bugs can wait! We want fun eye candy!!!
Yeah, right.
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...
They are changing the name!
It's now known as ThunderFox.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
This is why I like open source software development. Just look at that forum thread. Inside a company like IBM or Microsoft, a debate like this would be kept covered up out of PR fears. Open source developers more often than not do not give a shit about PR (which is a good thing), they just want to make the best possible program. They also don't have to be afraid of losing their jobs, getting their salaries lowered, or whatnot. So we get to see the nitty gritty details of intra-project disputes and arguments from the front row, even silly things like what theme ships with Firefox as the default.
Gotta love it.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
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.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
...poor forum server is screaming...
Consistency across platforms or within platforms is quite a non-issue to us KDE users : the Plastik and Keramik themes for Mozilla and Firefox are beautifully integrated in the KDE desktop, so whatever the default themes becomes, we'll still be happy.
As long as skinning is avaible, everybody should be happy.
Can I configure Firefox back to the sane Ok/Cancel button order?
No or Yes?
"..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.
Now I know you can just download themes to your heart's content. I'm using a tiny theme because that's the way I like it. However there's no reason not to have several default themes to choose from at install time. I would suggest the themes be "Default", "Internet Explorer", "Netscape", "Opera" and perhaps a Macish theme. As long as it is explained that this is simply the look and feel and has no real functionality differences (explained in a calm and simple manner), things should be less scary. Previous posters are absolutely right-- the more different it looks, the more scared the user will be, even if everything is in exactly the same place.
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.
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.
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"
Please don't end up like the XFree86 developers, and completely ruin your project. Listen to the users, just give it a try. Now that wasn't that hard now was it?
I love Firefox, without doubt the best browser yet, and it isn't even 1.0. Keep it fast and light, bloat is what made regular Mozilla suck, face it.
The Mozilla devs did the right thing and asked about having Qute freely licenced 6 months ago. They were apparently told no and have therefore taken the only reasonable course left to them, sourcing another theme.
The new theme might not be brilliant but it is a work in progress and rather importantly is freely licenced so other people will be able to tweak it over time.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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
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've seen IE barf on pages before. No browser is going to be perfect and I think explaining to people that you may have to close and restart a browser during the day (if they keep it open THAT long) is a lot easier than saying "ok, if you close those 5 pop ups and uninstall CometCursor, you'd see the page you're lookin for."
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
according to the firefox roadmap it should be out this month.
"...personality goes a long way."
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.
Assuming you're talking about this bug:= 205893
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id
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.
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.
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
Ok so who's gonna be the first person to write an IE look alike theme ;-)
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>
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=22266
(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.
Here is a screenshot of the new theme.
The author of the new theme, Kevin Gerich, has posted a screenshot in his blog:
http://kmgerich.com/archive/000062.html
And here is a complete screenshot of the new theme. I think this is a huge step backwards.
Firefox download size becomes 4.6 MB
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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, even if there were no extra resource leaks.
I hope someone will write a browser that will parse only valid XHTML 1.1/CSS and nothing else. Would cut the executable in half not to try to support the horrible code people put on the web a few years ago.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
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.
write his OS so that applications that aren't in use get put out to swap and stay there. I'll admit I don't really understand the technical aspects here, but the complaint seems to be that the this is 'thrashing'; which usually means _sustained_ memory swapping for no really good reason. I've had plenty of instances of that in WinXP, and a lot less of it in Linux (and I've heard great things about the BSD's but I'm too lazy to install them right now). Anyway you cut it though, I think we'll all agree the memory management in WinXP (and probably every other OS on the planet to be fair) could use some work. The grandparant is just ticked off that with all the money XP costs, something as basic as memory management isn't a top priority.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And here is a complete screenshot of the new theme. I think this is a huge step backwards.
Remember that to gain market share, you have to design the product for the average idiot. Yes, you know the one; the guy that thought his CDROM was a cup holder.
To win the average idiot, you need simple layout, bright colors, and hand-holding wizards.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I have no idea what you're talking about with regard to Firefox CSS rendering, but it's fairly clear you have little idea how the box model works.
display:block and display:inline have nothing to do with how elements are aligned. They control the behavior of an element within the document flow. An inline element, such as an anchor, does not disrupt the flow. A block level element has breaks before and after; as such, it will interrupt the flow.
Your perceived alignment comes fromt this. When three inline elements follow each other, the act line words in a sentence and flow one after the other. When three block level elements follow each other, the breaks before and after the element cause each block to appear under the preceeding one.
Just a quick lesson. If I were you, I'd read up on CSS and prepare some testcases with a well written bug report before you talk about rendering issues. From your post you appear to be fairly ignorant of what's really going on.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
... That looks like my OS (GNOME)! Firefox isn't too bad atm, infact its amazing that they have got as much looking like native, but its still not right, infact its still not anywhere close, my highlighting in the menu bar is a dull blue white text in sinks into the menubar. the items selected are rounded dull blue with white letters in firefox they are square edged. Sure its mostly there, but its not quite, and in UI issues not quite is not a great deal better than nowhere near! That's why i use Epiphany as my browser, but I use Firefox for developing (it really doesn't matter for that coz i use jEdit which is Metal Themed so that is nowhere near either)
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.
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?
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
"Sufferin' succotash."
To win the average idiot, you need simple layout, bright colors, and hand-holding wizards.
To win the average idiot, you need to do two things:
1.) Make something fun to use. That encompasses everything from a pleasant visual look to a simple yet powerful interface. Something most OSS lacks.
2.) Don't call them "idiots." They're not idiots just because they have enough of a life to not treat browser and operating system wars like religious crusades, like we do.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
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.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!