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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.
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.
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
Can I configure Firefox back to the sane Ok/Cancel button order?
No or Yes?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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)
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
Here is a screenshot of the new theme.
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
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!
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.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
once again backwards compatibility has been sacrificed (and we are not even at 1.0 yet)
Uh, hello? How did this get modded up?
Rather than feeding this relatively obvious troll, I'll simply remind folks that the whole POINT of the pre-1.0 development cycle is to break things. And nobody's forcing anyone else to use Firefox, stable or not. End of story.