Firefox 4.0 Goes Chrome, New UI In Q4 2010

sv_libertarian writes "Mozilla recently updated its product roadmap through 2010. According to the first draft, the current browser will see a minor update in Q4 2009 and another in Q2 2010. Version 4.0 is headed for an October or November 2010 release and will bring a new user interface and browser sync integration. 'There is not much information on [what] this new user interface will look like, but the first mockups that have been posted on Mozilla's website suggest that the Mozilla team favors a Google Chrome-like design that integrates Windows 7 graphics features. Overall, window elements seem to be floating over the background.' The mockup page emphatically notes that the design is not final."

Comments

Nice but..

[msh104]

Let's hope this time they keep the user interface the same on all platforms.
Some of the mockups look pretty good though :)

Re:Nice but..

[Shikaku]

http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/7051/tabui.png

Tabs on side, appears on hover of firefox edge. I use the add-on tree style tab. Ignore the colors, I have my theme dark on purpose.

Re:Nice but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why keep it the same across platforms? No, seriously, do you use Firefox on multiple platforms AND are you bothered by the differences in UI between the various Firefox'en? You'll live.

The interface should be native to the platform, adhering to the platform's UI standards. The binaries location and configuration location should adhere to the platform's application development standards. Adhere to standards, they are good for you. (Note; Experts only: deviate from standards when necessary)

Programs that use non-native, non-standard UI (Quicktime on Windows) are quickly (haha) reviled. And for good reason.

Re:Nice but..

[cayenne8]

I dunno...

What is the deal today with trying to get rid of the simple menu bar??

It is so easy and straightforward for finding things you use all the time....

Re:Nice but..

[Joce640k]

You mean so all the windows on my XP machine have a different look and the "minimize" buttons don't line up when I stack multiple windows on top of each other? No thanks.

Re:Nice but..

[bemymonkey]

They seem to want to save vertical screen space, which is a valid argument with current machines (like netbooks) coming out with only 600 pixels of vertical space.

Then again, why not just use full screen mode on those?

Re:Nice but..

[blitzkrieg3]

Amen to that,

I can only immagine not haveing apple+q quit the application in favor of ctl+f4 on mac. Or having ctl+W not work in linux.

Re:Nice but..

[IceFox]

I am not so sure that users actually care that much about standards and fitting into each desktop at the end of the day. If you have a feature they want users will use your application no matter what it looks like. A nice Example is Google Chrome. By default they paint their own window handles/boarders on X11 pretty much guaranteeing that it wont fit into any desktop. This is a case where they are going directly against having a native standard control, actually putting in effort to break it in the name of consistent branding* and users put up with it because they want to use Chrome. * From Ben Goodger: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/b89ab99a0c848b89?pli=1

Re:Nice but..

[Charan]

By having different UIs for each platform, life becomes more difficult for add-on designers. Anything that does more than add a new toolbar button suddenly becomes platform-specific.

Re:Nice but..

[loufoque]

So that all platforms get a win32-biased UI? No thank you.

Re:Nice but..

[sopssa]

Tabs on the side take *a lot* of space, for both that text goes horizontally and because monitors also have more space horizontally. You can argue that you can see more tabs, which is kind of firefox's fault; Opera shrinks them as much as possible, while you still find every tab quickly from the favicon and small amount of the title.

Another thing that also comes with Windows 7 and Chrome is that everyone tries to make interfaces *TOO* simplifistic and losing usability. Browser windows aren't like IM windows, you do not randomly open browser when you want to do something. Browser is always there on the background anyway and with today's tabbed browsing its usually just a one window. This is also why I dont really firefox (standard install anyways). Browser is probably the one program we use the most, it should be powerful but still customizable and *fast*. Gladly, Opera is that for me.

However it can be just me who wants that kind of "environment" from the browser and not just over-simplifistic window that looks like a small IM window. Or is it that Firefox also tries to go for majority, grandma-friendly browser? If you look at the pictures, it looks quite closely to IE too, not just chrome.

Simple interface is nice with programs you dont use lot, but for me browsers along with development tools work a lot as a complete environment.

Re:Nice but..

[Toonol]

I agree. Firefox should use the more straightforward and common GUI standards for the platform it's on. In windows, that means a square window with min/max/close buttons exactly where they should be, a menu exactly where it should be with /file/edit/view/.../help/ entries, a toolbar below that, and content below that. That's the format that EVERY windows program should follow, unless that whole paradigm doesn't work for them for some reason (like a game).

This is why I can't use any media player other than Media Player Classic. Developers think that THEIR app is the special one that should have a 'revolutionary' new UI, which in reality is simply 'nonstandard'.

Ah, well. Firefox is highly themeable, so if they do crazy things, there'll be an add-on to fix it.

Re:Nice but..

[QuasiEvil]

Wish I had mod points, because you've hit it on the head. Seriously, what's the current obsession with getting rid of a simple UI metaphor that's worked very well for several decades, and replacing it with shiny, yet less consistent things?

I will accept the argument that netbooks have less vertical space, so this allows the use as much of it for productive stuff as possible. But still, it'd be nice if it was an option.

Re:Nice but..

[ShieldW0lf]

Why keep it the same across platforms? No, seriously, do you use Firefox on multiple platforms AND are you bothered by the differences in UI between the various Firefox'en? You'll live.

Yes. Firefox on Ubuntu at home should look the same as Firefox on Windows at work. The theme engine is there for a reason. If you want your application to suit your choice of operating system, you need look no further.

Firefox has really gone downhill since Mozilla had all that money thrown at them.

Re:Nice but..

[Twinbee]

QT is probably horrible, but check out:
Artgem, Blender, Renoise, and ZBrush... for some excellent nonstandard UIs.

Re:Nice but..

[sopssa]

By having different UIs for each platform, life becomes more difficult for add-on designers. Anything that does more than add a new toolbar button suddenly becomes platform-specific.

And you really want to prefer addon designers in favor of user friendliness? You can keep your nerd card, but that is stupid.

Re:Nice but..

[Korin43]

I disagree. Firefox on Ubuntu should look like it belongs on Linux. These mockups would be horribly out of place on any Linux desktop that isn't set up to look exactly like Vista/Win7.

Re:Nice but..

[izomiac]

Users probably hate it, but don't understand it well enough to know what they hate. If each application's UI is different, you have to learn hundreds of different UIs. Most users would probably prefer learning one system well and sticking to it. IMHO that's the biggest reason for a lack of computer literacy in some people.

Re:Nice but..

[Chaos Incarnate]

I think VLC would also fit your requirements, but I certainly see your point with regards to WMP/iTunes/WinAmp. ;)

The biggest offenders always seem to come from Microsoft, though—Office and WMP. If they don't follow their own standards, why should other developers feel obligated to?

Re:Nice but..

[Provocateur]

I am with you on the dark themes. I wish there was a choice to replace the mostly-white with a shade of gray on webpages, however when I decide to 'Use my colors' in FF preferences a lot of pages start losing buttons (critical ones too) as well as their layout. I have seen this option on one browser (iirc it was opera) but had to switch back to ff.

The tabs on the side would be nice if they had a flip-90-degree option, just like a real-life organizer or notebook. For me, that would be the bee's knees.

Mainly I want page backgrounds not to be white so that any casual passerby would not think I am slacking off and reading slashdot, of all things, or in your case Shikaku, YouTube. For research.

Re:Nice but..

[buswolley]

I dont like the missing File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Tools menu items...It just means I have to hunt through for those again under some other master menu button.

Re:Nice but..

[Shikaku]

I hit windows/super key+n and all colors invert in a window. The reason it's dark gray is because it's also gray inverted ;)

This is something I really like about compiz and makes text really easy to read.

Re:Nice but..

[Anonymous Coward]

...and that is the reason I don't like or use Chrome or apps that have their own "skins".

Re:Nice but..

[dbcad7]

But a pain in the ass for tech support people over the phone who need to check browser settings... "File ?.. I don't have anything that says file..".. And then there are the off flavors of Xp, which has different locations for network settings.. bastards.

Re:Nice but..

[RiotingPacifist]

how often do you use the menubar, even in kde3 they realised that 90% of the time you dont and the few times you do an extra click/key combo won't bother you

Re:Nice but..

[nschubach]

Um, not to beat a dead horse into the ground, but Windows XP Explorer and Firefox 3 did this well. I don't know why Microsoft removed that ability. You could drag your buttons into the file menu and have the file menu + all the navigation buttons in Windows Explorer. Why is this so hard for MS/Mozilla to do again?

image

Re:Nice but..

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem being of course that the hardware manufacturers are pushing low-screen displays through our throats, using deceitful names as "wide-screen", just to make it appear better and save a buck at the same time.

Re:Nice but..

[TravisO]

Warning: I'm standing on a soap box as I type this...

Simple eh? Ask a room of people where mail merge is in Word and I bet 99% people that have used mail merge before have no idea. Is it in the Edit menu, the Formatting menu, or the Data menu (was there even a data menu?) This applies to most features.

Ask any UI expert and they'll tell you the Office Ribbon is the most important UI thing to happens since the GUI. If for any other reason is because the ribbon focused on task based UI instead of technical organization that didn't apply to your average user.

PS: Just because you're use to something and know it well isn't a good reason to invalidate a new mindset.

Re:Nice but..

[NotBorg]

Ok but why piss off the rest of us? If AC above is right shouldn't the absence of the titlebar, menubar, extra buttons, etc be a design choice made when porting to a [mobile] platform? Shouldn't we conform to the UI "standards" of the targeted platform to some extent?

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php puts the percentage of browsers reporting >= 768 vertical pixels at around 85% making the 600 a minority. I don't know what real demand there is for vertical friendly applications, but I do know that developers sometimes optimize the trivial. Also, as others have pointed out, what about full screen mode?

In the end it'll likely just be another setting for me me to change from it's presumptuous default (I'm doing that a lot anyway).

Re:Nice but..

[AlexBeck]

So you don't like it? Then sit down and make the "Native Linux" theme. I don't understand what the problem here is.. Does it say anywhere that FF4 won't have themes support?

Re:Nice but..

[Midnight Thunder]

What is the deal today with trying to get rid of the simple menu bar??

Note sure. If they had moved everything to intelligent contextual menus it is one thing, but I just find the easter eggs easier to find now than the options the menus provided. This is clearly a MS-Windows centric thing, since on MacOS X getting rid of the menu bar in application would sure look odd.

Re:Nice but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap that looks like shit.

Whatever you do, don't get into graphic arts or UI design.

Re:Nice but..

[apoc.famine]

Due to my EEE I went with the Tree Style Tabs plugin. For short & wide screens, it doesn't make sense to cripple the vertical space available. If I could get a legitimate menu on the left, I'd do that too.

Re:Nice but..

[Thinboy00]

If some users have to "put up with" something, that means that other users may not put up with it since they don't value the new features of the application in question very highly, but do value consistency more highly.

Re:Nice but..

[snadrus]

Grayed-out options:
Have you ever worked tech support & tried to explain why some option is there, but it's not really.

Submenus:
Tell someone over 70 to first move your mouse over this, then over that. See how long it takes before they give up.

Checkboxes:
If menus aren't persistent until I dismiss them, how will I know if I correctly clicked that option or just missed?

Option Hiding:
And I don't mean the Office 2003 kind. Any option that's task-specific-enabled that isn't visible when usable is very confusing (Lotus Notes). This is why right-clicking was invented.

Dropdown menus benefit neither power users nor newbies. I'd personally prefer them replaced by a mini command line and a tutorial button ... it works great for AutoCad.

Re:Nice but..

[bemymonkey]

Uh, wut? Could you maybe explain further? I'm not quite sure what you mean...

Re:Nice but..

[bemymonkey]

Never mind, I overlooked the link to the screenshot.

Yeap, that looks pretty good to me - although in this case you'll probably run into the problem that 1024px width isn't wide enough :P

Re:Nice but..

[Shikaku]

Some webmasters have spent years tweaking their layout and designing their site, and very few get any traffic. This site, as shitty as it looks, gets over 1 million visits per month. I use large fonts also as a protest against all the stylish garbage you see out there. When I go to a web site, I WANT TO READ THE CONTENT. Trust me, that micro-font everyone uses isn't nearly as original as they think. I've chosen a black background for most of my text because it's easier on the eyes than staring at a white screen. Think about it: your monitor is not a piece of paper, no matter how hard you try to make it one. Staring at a white background while you read is like staring at a light bulb (don't believe me? Try turning off the lights next time you use a word processor). Would you stare at a light bulb for hours at a time? Not if you want to keep your vision.

Also negative filters on command by window. I like my eyesight, thanks.

Re:Nice but..

[Shikaku]

I have a compiz command that can negative a window or the entire screen. It's Super/Windows Key+ N or M respectively.

Using a word processor like this or reading is very easy on the eyes.

Re:Nice but..

[nschubach]

Yeah, after re-reading what I wrote, I realized i left out "in the same toolbar." Most PCs I work with on a daily basis are 1600-1920px wide, but that screen capture was just 145 pixels wider than 1024 which is easily made up by getting rid of the windows logo, the "back" text and maybe shrinking the address a little if that's not enough. The part that irks me about Windows Vista/7 is the additional bars used for navigation that you have no control over. That's what that screen cap was originally made for. (Hence, the notation of lines in the tree view which is another complaint I have for the direction Microsoft is going.)

I actually run Firefox 3 in a similar manner with the address bar in the file menu. The exception being the additional toolbar for the tabs which doesn't bother me at all. It's when you get into 3-4+ bars of tools that it gets out of control.

Re:Nice but..

[Golddess]

Indeed, I can't tell you how many times I've closed Chrome because I was just clicking the minimize button over and over and that fat-ass [X] button is large enough to overlap over half of where the minimize button should be in Windows classic mode.

Re:Nice but..

[BikeHelmet]

I like having my Back, Forward, Reload, and Stop buttons left of the address bar. I can't believe they're considering adopting an IE-esque interface.

Their Chrome-like tab examples really fail, since they don't touch the top of the screen. That means not only are they not where you expected them to be, but you also can't click them by ramming your cursor to the top of the screen.

(This is a big one for me - I hate those X buttons that are in the top right, but are several pixels out, so that you actually have to look and see where your cursor is)

In short, I agree that non-native = bad. Windows has always had easy to click buttons, scrollbars, etc. on the edges - I hope they don't screw that up. ;)

Re:Nice but..

[shiftless]

Holy shit! That is a really neat feature, thanks for pointing it out. Slashdot looks much better with the text inverted.

Re:Nice but..

[shiftless]

Not only that, but what the hell did people do back when 800x600 (or worse, 640x480) was the norm?

Re:Nice but..

[cayenne8]

"Simple eh? Ask a room of people where mail merge is in Word and I bet 99% people that have used mail merge before have no idea. Is it in the Edit menu, the Formatting menu, or the Data menu (was there even a data menu?) This applies to most features.

Ask any UI expert and they'll tell you the Office Ribbon is the most important UI thing to happens since the GUI. If for any other reason is because the ribbon focused on task based UI instead of technical organization that didn't apply to your average user."

Not a feature I've used very often I'll grant you, but I have needed it, and while that placement is strange, I can find it in a second or two by clicking each menu open.

The ribbon?? Honestly, I can't find SHIT in that thing, and most people I know that have been using computers for > 5 years have a bitch of a time finding what should be simple things to find. I'm trying to get used to it, but, when I need something other than a simple thing, it takes me FOREVER to find it. In word, just to find where to turn off auto-caps....which used to be a click on the menu, right to some preferences window.

I had to get help for this one.

You have to click the big button on new ribbon flavored word. From there, a little button at the botton of that screen (more of a link than a button) for "word options". -> Proofing menu option on that screen, then from there click the button for AutoCorrect options.

If that is at all intuitive for you to find...more so than with a simple menu bar to preferences....I have to tip my hat to you.

Honestly, the first time I opened MS word, it took forever for me to find the fucking "Save As" option...I mean, there was nothing intuitive there telling me the big button on the top rt was anything more than a windows logo...until someone told me, I'd have never thought to click it for such options.

I gotta disagree with you. I like tree views, I like to see the file structures in windows explorer, I like simple menu bars. I like things to look like a computer or at least have that option.

I'm still with XP when I have to used windows....at least with it, I can still set my views to be classic mode on most things still...wish I still could with office, I'd be SO much more productive.

Re:Nice but..

[thatkid_2002]

I'm not trying to defend Vista/Win7 or trying to pay out KDE - but it is likely that it would integrate reasonably well into a KDE4 environment - but the problem is that Firefox is GTK and not Qt and so it would be very hard to make it look Windows-ish compared to Qt.

Re:Nice but..

[thatkid_2002]

QT is probably horrible

No, Qt is not horrible and there is no reason at all to say so.

How about you spend a few minutes researching before you make such idiotic and baseless comments

Re:Nice but..

[Twinbee]

And how about if you read my parent's post for context which said "Quicktime".

You guessed it, I'm referring to Apple's mess, not the excellent cross platform toolkit.

Re:Nice but..

[arekq]

My thought, too.
I also uses the bookmark toolbar a lot so hiding them in a bookmark button sucks.

Re:Nice but..

[thatkid_2002]

Right you are, oops. I mega-failed.

Re:Nice but..

[k8to]

I think tech support is a kind of weak argument, but it hints at a strong argument -- if you can't DESCRIBE how to use the interface, you probably can't FIGURE OUT how to use it either.

Re:Nice but..

[Hucko]

I actually like idea of ?Microsoft?s to add the text menu bar under the ubiquous application icon in the top left corner... once I worked out where it was. But then, for universal options like file/open/close, edit, view help, etc, I like pie menus...

Re:Nice but..

[zobier]

It doesn't have to if there's a common widget toolkit API.

E.g. 'Give me a new window with a tabbed interface', the toolkit can worry about the platform-specificity.

Re:Nice but..

[orngjce223]

What I do: have Stylish around and use per-site adjustments. It's a bit of a pain hunting down userstyles for everything, but it's significantly more unified in appearance when I do.

Re:Nice but..

[Tekoneiric]

I work tech support and find it much easier to take people thru normal menu bar options rather than the ribbon thing. Office 2007 was installed on my machine and it drives me totally nuts. It's fine if people want to use ribbons and follow MS with OS design but make it optional, don't force people to use it. Not everyone likes it.

Re:Nice but..

[TSPhoenix]

Because it takes up a lot of space and is used rarely. The only time my mother uses it is for printing.

Currently I'm using the Personal Menu extension and it really makes you aware of how few menu items are actually used with any frequency. So I have one "Menu" button, with File, etc inside it, and below that the dozen items I actually use. So its not only quicker to get to what I want but I've saved space too.

For trouble shooting, well its the button in the top left. That is fairly straightforward.

Re:Nice but..

[Anonymous Coward]

They browsed an internet that was designed for 640x480 resolutions.

Re:Nice but..

[electrosoccertux]

Yeah. But tabs at the top in the bar is awesome. Why did nobody ever think of that before?

Re:Nice but..

[shellbeach]

Tabs on the side take *a lot* of space, for both that text goes horizontally and because monitors also have more space horizontally.

Er ... that's the point. Tabs on the side maximise the vertical space available for webpages (which generally have a fixed horizontal width and are longer than they are wide) and at the same time use some of the wasted horizontal monitor space for tabs.

The fact that you can get a hierarchical layout of tabs with tabs on the side (such that child tabs are indented, and trees are collapsible) is just a bonus :)

Re:Nice but..

[dbcad7]

It sounds simple.. but try asking someone.. Are you running XP or Vista..?.. "I don't know, it's Windows..".. Ok what browser are you running ?.. What's a browser ?".. OK What version of Internet Explorer are you running ?.. "I don't know"... Ok.. at the top are 'file, Edit, view. etc.. "I don't have anything that says file..".. Do you have one that says Help ? (the normal way to check version).. "um no..".. It's nice and all to have more real estate for browsing, but my statement stands, it's a pain in the ass to help people on it.

Re:Nice but..

[Provocateur]

Hmmm, is the action called Negative window or something, I don't think my compiz has that yet :(

I might have to get a FF plugin, if not 'Use my colors'. I'll ask around if this distro will let me upgrade compiz itself...

Re:Nice but..

[Waccoon]

They seem to want to save vertical screen space

That would be true only if it were optional. Instead, it's just trendy. I remember when Photoshop was redesigned with a horizontal brush palette, which make absolutely no sense given the rise of wide screens and dual displays. Predictably, however, many other paint programs copied the new design. It did get a lot of attention, after all, for better or for worse.

It could be argued that menus have been a part of application design for decades because they work, at least if they are executed well. Getting rid of them because the focus group said it's the new thing is just fucking stupid.

I hate Chrome with a passion, and I do not want to see Firefox or anything else go down that road of forced minimalism. Let me configure the interface the way I want it, please.

Re:Nice but..

[master5o1]

Provided they find a useful replacement, I don't see a problem with not having it. The only option I ever use in the file-edit-view bar is Preferences. The others aren't quite as useful to me.

Re:Nice but..

[clone53421]

You can argue that you can see more tabs, which is kind of firefox's fault; Opera shrinks them as much as possible, while you still find every tab quickly from the favicon and small amount of the title.

There's an addon called "Tab Mix Plus" that lets you specify the minimum width of a tab. If more tabs are open than can be displayed at that minimum width, you can also choose whether to have them overflow to multiple rows or scroll horizontally.

Re:Nice but..

[clone53421]

Grayed-out options

I really don't see how that would be difficult to explain. Maybe that's just because I've never tried. The option is only available if you first do X. It's visible now so you can remember where it was and not go looking for it after you've done X.

Submenus

Again, how difficult is that to explain? Just tell them to click each option as they navigate down. The real problem with submenus is that they tend to disappear too quickly... slow users end up opening the wrong submenu in the process of moving their mouse onto the submenu they just opened. (Or it disappears altogether.)

Checkboxes

Agree. Even worse: Checkbox menu options that also change depending on their checked status. If there's a checked menu option labeled "disable X", does it mean that X is disabled (because it's checked) or does it mean that clicking it again will disable X (leaving an unchecked option that now says "enable X")? Absurd.

Option Hiding

Totally agree.

Re:Nice but..

[Erinnys Tisiphone]

I agree. Why fix what's not broken? I use Firefox over Chrome for the user interface - I will not argue that Chrome loads pages more efficiently. The lack of standard menus and buttons is really frustrating for me - same exact reason I don't like Office 2007.

Re:Nice but..

[badkarmadayaccount]

Anything but the dumbest "database frontend"style app should use its own unique interface suited for the task at hand. Chrome rules because it is centered at the task at hand - browsing. the only people who regularly use the menus are power users who know the key combos by heart. And all those File/Edit/etc. menus are usually littered with pointless entries, just for the sake of existing. That's retarded.

Re:Nice but..

[ShieldW0lf]

I disagree. Firefox on Ubuntu should look like it belongs on Linux. These mockups would be horribly out of place on any Linux desktop that isn't set up to look exactly like Vista/Win7.

So, you're cosmetic sensibilities trump my desire to cultivate muscle memory and work efficiently, to a degree that functionality that meets my needs should be gutted out so you can have something pretty to look at?

Fork, please...

Re:Nice but..

[Korin43]

That's the whole point. Windows applications should with Windows. Linux applications should fit with Linux. Just because you're used to using the Windows version doesn't mean that should be the default on every platform..

Re:Nice but..

[Shikaku]

http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/5798/screenshotcompizconfigs.png

Install the Compiz effects thing and mess with that plug-in highlighted.

Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Commander South]

DO IT, I use chrome for the UI, and love FF for the plugins, if they go with the tabs on top and no titlebar, if only as an option, I am back on board with them...

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[EvanED]

Just as a counterpoint, I decidedly don't like the tabs-on-top design, don't use Chrome in part because of that UI, and would probably switch to Opera if Firefox didn't make tabs-on-bottom an option. ;-)

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[zevans]

Tabs should be down the side. A monitor (even 4:3) is too wide to read comfortably all the way across, ergo, tabs and toolbars should be on the side where they are not using screen estate that can otherwise be used effectively for browsing.

Yes, I know Firefox does it with plugins, but I don't understand how this basic mistake can have stayed with us for what, 10 years+ of tabbed browsing...

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Commander South]

Which is why I am all for the either/or option :) While I do acknowledge the issue with window resizing and whatnot, I feel the trade off is worth it.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[EvanED]

The problem with tabs down the side is you either get (1) vertical text or (2) tabs that are as wide as they are above the window in which case the tab list takes up a HUGE proportion of the screen real estate, virtually all wasted unless you actually have a couple dozen tabs in one window to start eating up the available rows.

Neither of these options are very good IMO; I'd rather spend a few pixels of vertical height then have to read sideways text.

(Incidentally, this is why I never liked the taskbar on the side of the screen either. Maybe I should give it another shot with Windows 7 now that the taskbar is a little more icon-based and less word-based.)

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Tabs should be diagonal. The obvious advantages of this are so obvious that I don't need to mention them. It can be mathematically proven, too, that diagonal tabs are the most aesthetic and comfortable layout. If you weren't so educated stupid by evil educators, you would realize the power of the four-corner diagonal tab.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Shikaku]

http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/7051/tabui.png

These tabs appear when you move the mouse to the screen edge.

I know I posted that earlier but I'm mentioning it again just for you =p the add-on is tree style tab by the way.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[chord.wav]

Indeed. Also, you can read more of the page title that way and avoid having 10+ tabs whose title starts with "Slashdot Com...". For those who don't know, you can do this in Firefox using "Tree Style Tab" plug-in right now.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Jezral]

Tabs on top is horrible...one of the key reasons I dislike Google Chrome.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[EvanED]

Definitely. There are a lot of people out there (like you) who really like the Chrome UI, and a lot of people out there (like me) who really dislike it. Probably more than anything else, UI preference is a very personal thing.

There are definitely costs with making new options, but this is the sort of option that would make FF much more attractive to quite a number of people but be so contentious I don't think making it default would be a good idea, so it's a good thing for an option.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[EvanED]

Ugh, I hate UI elements that appear and disappear like that. I had the taskbar on auto-hide on my laptop (which only has a 1024x768 screen) and decided it wasn't even worth it there, even though that would have been present in every application.

Browsers have the added problem of me using ctrl-tab/ctrl-shift-tab to change between tabs a lot, but doing that non-blindly requires seeing where the tab is that you want. A hidden tab list would slow that down.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[CaptnMArk]

That's the only thing that I'd take from Chrome: tabs-on-top. Everything else is fine in 3.5.

But I'm using TreeStyleTabs anyway.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[k_187]

Yup, as someone who auto-hides the start bar at the top of the screen, Chrome is basically unusable with the mouse with my setup. At least I'm pretty sure that this would be an option with firefox.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Shikaku]

The tabs also appear when you press ctrl if that helps any.

But I'm just showing you an alternative. Don't take it too seriously. Also the tabs can be permanently stuck on the side, and it doesn't have to hide.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't use firefox on a netbook.

Tabs on the side is a horrible idea.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[EvanED]

Agreed... I'm all for configurability, so making something like the tabs-on-top or your tabs-on-left options being a choice would be fine and dandy. But making either the only choice is a good way to get me to stop using Firefox. ;-)

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

....And the horse you rode in on. I have a widescreen monitor an in a few years so will everyone else. My three rows of 100+ tabs are, frankly, optimally placed in Firefox 3.0

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[DarKnyht]

I would like them to get whatever it is that makes Chrome usable on a Netbook. Firefox on it runs like a dog (even without flash) while Chrome functions more or less as it does everywhere else.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is just the right ratio with my monitor turned vertically.

I tried this about 3 years ago, seeing how it felt and I haven't gone back.

It turns out that for me vertical real estate is more valuable than horizontal real estate.

Of course this is different if most of the use of your monitor is for running video, but I would venture that this isn't the case currently.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why people don't like the tabs on top of the location bar. The location bar (and all the navigation buttons) pertain to the currently loaded TAB, therefore, it is logical that they are nested below the tab. Each tab has a different location, therefore, they get their own location bar.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[dword]

DO IT, I use chrome for the UI, and love FF for the plugins, if they go with the tabs on top and no titlebar, if only as an option, I am back on board with them...

DON'T do it, seriously, I hate having the tabs on the titlebar. If they go with the tabs on top and no titlebar, I'll switch to Opera.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[DirePickle]

No, god dammit! Tabs stay where they are now! Tabs go near content!

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the screenshot the other guy posted or check out the "tree style tab" extension. I think all your complaints about side tabs are adequately addressed (not saying that means you should use it, but I love it). I shrink the width of the tab bar based upon how much screen real-estate I need on a given day, allowing me to choose how much of each tabe to see. I find I really end up with more screen real-estate than with horizontal tabs because most pages don't use the full width, but they almost all use the full height.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why you would want to waste a 100-200 wide pixel column compared to a 20-30 pixel tall row. Even on a widescreen monitor that's a lot more wasted screen space.

Besides, people use the web for more than "reading" webpages, and not everyone maximizes their browser window. Some people even keep two browser windows open side-by-side and need to see the tabs on both. Now that would be a ridiculous waste of space with tabs down the side.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Shikaku]

Notebook.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

A monitor (even 4:3) is too wide to read comfortably all the way across

Get your eyes checked.

I, for one, detest websites that don't make full use of however much width I give them. I find it much more comfortable to read if I have to scroll less.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[PainKilleR-CE]

I usually use multiple applications side-by-side on a widescreen monitor, or multiple MDI windows side-by-side within a larger window maximized to the screen. While I can understand the use of the vertical space, I find it more useful for using applications full-screen than for my personal use scenarios, and when I do full-screen an app it usually is to run video ;)

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[bigtomrodney]

Tabs should be down the side

Amarok has had tabs down the side pretty much since it first launched and has suffered nothing but abuse and admonishment from a lot of users.So much in fact that the latest development builds have eliminated it completely. I don't think that most people like reading vertical text and as I understood from the feedback that having both horizontal and vertical UI elements made the application look cluttered.

I can't say I agree but there was a continuous whine about it in threads like this across all of the usual sites.

On a side note, from the screenshots provided does anyone else feel that we're being given the choice between IE7/8 and Chrome? I quite like Firefox the way it is now. And a little less of the Vista look please, I use Linux!

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your approach still takes valuable screen real estate.

Tabs should be invisible. Until you close one you can't get to the other.

Problem solved. You are welcome.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[DMUTPeregrine]

I have Tree-Style Tab set up to be a static size. It does truncate the text, but mousing-over it shows the full text of a tab. And because it keeps track of parent/child tab relationships browsing is much easier. Collapsing/expanding tab groups is simple. No need for different-coloured groups, just make the group members children of a parent tab.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you like the tabs on top there are actually plugins for FF to do this. The glory of add-ons.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[clone53421]

Yes, they should use as much horizontal space as they're given, but it's been proven that it's easier to read a narrow column of text than a wide one (google). That's why newspapers use small columns.

If scrolling messes up your reading then perhaps you need to enable smooth scrolling or use the middle button to scroll slowly while you read.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Hurricane78]

I'm shocked by the stupidity in this thread!

There is no either or! That's the very point of Firefox!

You can have it as you like it! I can *right now* put the tabs on top, on the very bottom, on the right or left side, hide them and replace them by a dozen different ways of navigation, etc, etc, etc.

If you are a serious UI designer, and you first priority is not *C*H*O*I*C*E*, then you are a failure at your job and have so stop working *right now*.
(Second priority is good *defaults*. But never hard-code stuff!)

Yes, I know *exactly* what I'm talking about!

Sorry for getting angry. But I just can't stand this limited thinking. It's hurting us all!

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[commodore64_love]

Just as a counterpoint, I decidedly don't like the tabs-on-top design, don't use Chrome in part because of that UI, and would probably switch to Opera if Firefox didn't make tabs-on-bottom an option. ;-)

QFT (quoted for truth). When I finally abandoned Netscape Navigator, it was because version 6 had a completely different appearance and button positions and made the software less usable. I don't want Firefox to change how it works now, because I'm used to it:

- row 1 is the title/drag bar
- row 2 is the menu
- row 3 has the tabs

That's nice and compact. Plus the tabs are directly above the userspace, so each to access with minimal mouse movement. It's just about perfect. If I wanted a Chrome-like interface than I'd be using Chrome. To make Firefox look like Chrome - well you might as well kill-off Firefox. Why have two separate browsers that look the same?

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[vodevil]

I think mathematically and aesthetically, tabs should be placed in a fibonacci spiral.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Sloppy]

Tabs should be down the side

I have two problems with your solution.

A monitor (even 4:3) is too wide to read comfortably all the way across

1) I would rather turn my monitor 90 degrees, than turn my head 90 degrees to read a window title. If we are constrained and required to have a relationship between monitor size/shape and window size shape, then the best way to fix our windows is to fix our monitors.

But..

2) We don't have any requirement for there to be any relationship between the shape of our monitors and the shape of some particular application's window. We were talking about about the shape of the Firefox window. If your window is too wide, put your mouse on the size control and make it narrower. If you are having "screen real estate" issues with your window not being tall enough for the title bar, put your mouse on your size control and make the window taller. What's the problem? I don't get it. I have a lot of Windows open right now, and none of them just happen to be of a shape even approximating the shape of my monitor. The only time the shape of my monitor ever does actually correspond with the contents, is when I'm watching a video full-screen.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Fael]

If diagonalization will solve Firefox's halting problems, I'm all for it.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Menus squeezed next to title is good. Tabs, not.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[bemymonkey]

Same here. For instance, right now my web browser is taking up the left 1050x1050 quadrant of the screen, while my e-mail inbox is open on the right 630x1050 quadrant.

Aero Snap should boost the popularity of this habit, and as long as I've got 1000+px of vertical space, I'm happy. I just hope all the laptop manufacturers don't regress to using 1600x900...

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[JoelMartinez]

Yeah! tabs on top! I would switch back to ff if it had that

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like a mac-doc style tab bar, where I can easily see the current tab, or a zooming tree style tab container.

Maybe something like FacetZoom

Of course, even with tree-style tab I'm running into the problem that I keep so many tabs open my Firefox memory usage goes up to the point I just bought more memory for my laptop.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[93 Escort Wagon]

... if they go with the tabs on top and no titlebar, if only as an option, I am back on board...

Just as a counterpoint, I decidedly don't like the tabs-on-top design...

Tabs should be down the side...

I think tabs should be smack dab in the middle of the page.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Arthur Grumbine]

Tablet PC. Check, and mate. Now king me!

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree. row 1 and row 2 can be merged. but not tabs on top

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Almonday]

These are all great features of Tree Style Tab, not to mention the ability to place the tabs on either the left or right-hand side of your screen as well as manually resize the pane if you want to see more/less of the page titles.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[mounthood]

Tabs should be diagonal.... It can be mathematically proven, too, that diagonal tabs are the most aesthetic and comfortable layout.

Just get the Cantor Diagonal Tab add-on. It lets you have more tabs then you can count.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[MadFarmAnimalz]

I can see how diagonal tabs might seem sensible, but have we become so mired in the UI design rut that we're unable to take the concept of tabs to its logical conclusion?

What is needed is for the tabs to be split out of the application and handled by a hardware peripheral. Something with tactile feedback when you activate tabs. Mozilla International have conducted research (I lost the link but you can Bing it) that shows that people with alternating yellow and black tabs are paid 12.5% more on average.

So, yellow and black, and hardware. Caterpillar, fill this market need!

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[omnichad]

Well said. And I'm not even particularly a fan of tabs-on-top. I want a title bar on top, and that would solve the logical order, and the too close to hidden start menu problem. But doesn't save vertical space. I have plenty of vertical space, I don't mind scrolling either. I'll gladly trade vertical space for being able to see the title of the page I'm currently on without hovering my mouse over the tab.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[hairyfeet]

And to me the fact that you and he can have this little disagreement is one of the reasons I choose the Firefox over Chrome and Safari. Thanks to the easy additions of plugins and themes you can have it your way, he can have it his way, and I can have it my way. I just can't go back to the "one size fits all " UI of IE, Chrome, and Safari, as the one size fits all never fits me.

I just hope in FF4 it is as skinnable as FF3, so I don't get trapped in that bling bling nightmare or I may have to go back to one of the other Gecko based like Seamonkey or Kmeleon. It is bad enough that they screwed up dialup access in the 3.5.x branch, so now I have to keep the 3.0x and Seamonkey on my flash for my dialup customers, but if FF4 makes it too hard to change the look (and they stick with that "Chrome wannabe" look) I'll just have to go elsewhere, because frankly I hate the Chrome UI. With as much time as gets spent in a browser I want it MY way, not what some designers deems is best for me. Is that too much to ask, or is the future doomed to be dominated by browsers and OSes that have more bling than a 14 year old's cell phone?

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh god no. Tabs on top is horrid! It's a major reason I can't stand the Chrome UI, and I'm so glad that Apple dropped it for Safari 4. It looks stupid. I wouldn't mind it being an OPTION, but as standard? Hell no! Of course Chrome doesn't really give you any options. It's next to useless for me. Even Opera kicks its ass. The only reason Chrome is gaining any traction is because it's a Google product, and even that hasn't helped it much.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[JSmooth]

Sir,

As a non-programmer but serious interface tweaker, Thank you!

Other people were driven way by Microsoft by the crappy software they produced I've been driven away because of their insistence to remove my ability to customize with their latest round of crapware (Office 2007, vista/w2k8, exchange, sql, etc.)

Have whatever defaults you want but don't force them down users' throats. I finally over came the last forced default in FF recently using KeyConfig to remove the default FF shortcuts which are... Hard Coded! D'oh!

-Joe

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Twinbee]

Before you rant further, some of the best GUIs I've seen have little in the way of customization. But because they're designed so well, it doesn't matter.

Choice is okay, but there is often a 'best' design, and it's lazy for the developers to go thinking the user should be forced to choose their own settings.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[mirshafie]

If you like Firefox, why don't you install Personal Menu or similar addon that replaces the Menu bar and remove the Search box and all other un-needed elements? The first time I saw Chrome I was psyched because it looked exactly like I've been configuring Firefox and Konqueror to look like for years. Except the tabs-on-top, which is cool but not really necessary on a standard monitor.

I used Chrome for a few months and I love it as a project, however I actually find it to be about as slow as IE when the number of tabs go above 10. Big no-no.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Lord Ender]

Your post contains twelve sentences. The majority of those sentences (seven) end in exclamation points. This is in a post regarding tab placement in computer software.

You really need to switch to decaf. Seriously.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[EvanED]

I don't understand why people don't like the tabs on top of the location bar. The location bar (and all the navigation buttons) pertain to the currently loaded TAB, therefore, it is logical that they are nested below the tab. Each tab has a different location, therefore, they get their own location bar.

This makes sense. At least for me, it's not mainly the tabs-on-top specifically I don't like, but rather the cannibalization of the title bar. It becomes narrower and harder to hit, it doesn't blend in with the other programs, and it doesn't show the title of the current page.

It'd take some getting used to, but tabs-on-top with a full title bar would probably still be okay. That said, there is one other benefit: most of the time when I use the mouse to interact with a non-page element of Firefox, it's the tab bar. Putting that closer to the main page means it's slightly closer.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[lwsimon]

I don't need that addon, I can count now!

I'm not sure how an addon will help someone who can't count suddenly be able too, either.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[osvenskan]

If you are a serious UI designer, and you first priority is not *C*H*O*I*C*E*, then you are a failure at your job and have so stop working *right now*.

Just to play Devil's Advocate, I'll point out that having too many options can be just as bad a having too few. It's easy to overwhelm people with too many choices. Some Linux distros could be accused of having too many options (although the newer ones like Ubuntu do a pretty good job of making things simpler) whereas Apple's OS X leans toward the other end of the spectrum.

OS X has a good reputation for ease of use, and in part it is because one doesn't have futz with a lot of configuration. That said, if OS X makes a non-configurable choice and you don't like it, there's not much you can do about it. As I said above, it's a balance.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[EvanED]

If you are a serious UI designer, and you first priority is not *C*H*O*I*C*E*, then you are a failure at your job and have so stop working *right now*.
(Second priority is good *defaults*. But never hard-code stuff!)

This is an extremely one-sided viewpoint. There is a point where you should stop giving customization options (at least without writing code or using code someone else wrote as a plugin). Suppose I want the toolbar diagonally across the screen. Should there be a customization option for that? Or a rainbow across the background of the URL text box?

No, the job of the UI designer isn't to provide choice to the user... it's to determine where it's appropriate to provide choice to the user.

In this particular case, it's probable that "tabs-on-top" or "tabs-on-bottom" is an appropriate choice unless for some reason it would take an inordinate amount of effort to actually implement that for some reason.

So I don't want to argue that this is the case here, but I would say that, in fact, it can be very easy for a designer to use "the user can change this" as a crutch for bad design. (Of course, it can also be very easy to go the other way.)

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. In fact, the argument against tabs and toolbars on the side is even stronger on widescreen monitors. As it stands, Firefox wastes some vertical space but essentially no horizontal space at all. The alternative would be to waste some vertical space and some horizontal space. That would clearly be less efficient. Less horizontal clutter means more room for stacking windows side by side (yes, sometimes tabs aren't though). It'd be even better to have maximal free space in two dimensions, but one is good enough (better than zero), and the advantage is even bigger on widescreen monitors.

Also, having nothing on the sides makes windows and the desktop feel more airy. The first thing I do in Ubuntu is to remove the upper app/taskbar (sometimes the lower one) to get infinite "space" in that direction.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonym1ty]

I hate it when crap disappears. I like having the consistency of knowing what the hell is going on.

I don't mind any changes as long as I have the option to put them the way I like them.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[prockcore]

and row 4 is the location bar, and row 5 is the bookmark bar, and look at that, you have tabs on top.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Mister_Stoopid]

You're all wrong. Tabs should be placed according to the Golden Ratio! Take a design class, nubs.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[gbarules2999]

And it's idiotic to think that the users should be locked in to whatever crap you come up with. Solid defaults only bolster the elements of choice, but they don't replace it.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[CopaceticOpus]

I'd like to see easier configuration for the options that people most often want to use. Switching between [tabs on top] / [tabs on bottom] shouldn't require googling for an obscure browser setting, or finding a checkbox from a list of 50 settings.

When I go to settings, there should be a tab for "layout". I should be able to select between [tabs on top] / [tabs on bottom], and see a small preview of what this will look like.

It may be possible to do tabs on top now, but I couldn't find any way to do it in the options. Does it require an add-on?

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[commodore64_love]

(turns on location bar and bookmarks bar)

Nope. The Firefox tabs are still on the bottom, where they can quickly accessed with minimal mouse movement. Moving them to the top above all that other crap seems bass-backwards to me.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your thinking is too binary, and too typical of a programmer. You're comparing hard-coding a UI to having tens of options.

A more reasonable route needs to be taken. FIRST have a default UI, SECOND add a few configurations that can be used. How many people are like you and enjoy their tabs sorted by second letter, aligned vertically, colored based on binary value of the string? They should pick one of the two designs, go with it, and eventually add support for switching to the other. Otherwise it will either never be done, or look like shit like your "awesome tabs".

Remember that UI is absolutely critical to getting downloads and keeping users. Having an incredible amount of options to modify the interface really isn't so important to most users. A few minor tweaks would be good, like simple skinning or the tabs above/below, but not much more.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Furmy]

Ahhh, that made my day.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[zevans]

Then we're not all wrong. The parent says we should have a Fibonacci spiral, which makes him right by your logic. :-)

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[rolfwind]

I am using chrome now. I don't use chrome for the UI. Indeed, I miss the the clear "File Edit...." horizontal list. I also miss plug-ins, specifically adblock-plus and noscipt (yes, I could kludge them on, no thanks). I also don't like I can't right click on pictures and find their properties, specifically file size. Now I have to inspect element and it still doesn't have this info. Also, clearing my tracks (delete everything) takes forever and a day.

I am neutral about the home page which shows sites most visited. I guess I could make an edit list to keep some sites off, but then that itself will be in a list somewhere on the computer.

I do like how I can move the tabs around and even make a tab into a new window (although I find this happens way too often by accident). But the feature I really dumped Firefox for was that each tab is a seperate process, no more hangups or spinning wheels. No more sudden crashes that were becoming all too frequent on Firefox. I have a lot of tabs open, I really don't feel like one page hang (or take down) everything.

If Firefox does this, I'm going back. If Google, as announced, implements a plug-in API and those two plug-ins I mentioned are ported, I'll stay. It's as simple as that.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[zevans]

1) I would rather turn my monitor 90 degrees, than turn my head 90 degrees to read a window title.

It's amazing how little of a tab title you need to see in order to disambiguate, especially if there is a tool-tip to help. When you have the tabs across the top you STILL have this problem anyway - so this is a matter of degree.

If we are constrained and required to have a relationship between monitor size/shape and window size shape, then the best way to fix our windows is to fix our monitors.

I concur. But I can't afford that right now, and Firefox is free.

We were talking about about the shape of the Firefox window. If your window is too wide, put your mouse on the size control and make it narrower. If you are having "screen real estate" issues with your window not being tall enough for the title bar, put your mouse on your size control and make the window taller.

The point is, when the window is vertically maximised at a comfortable reading width, such as you describe, I have lots of spare space to either side that is basically unused; yet I have a number of UI elements at the top and bottom that could just as easily be at the side. How can this be a sensible state of affairs?
Come to think of it, this is down to the limit on reading width, not the shape of the monitor, so this really is a basic design flaw in your average browser.

What's the problem? I don't get it.
I have a lot of Windows open right now, and none of them just happen to be of a shape even approximating the shape of my monitor. The only time the shape of my monitor ever does actually correspond with the contents, is when I'm watching a video full-screen.

Well, I agree. It was YOU that suggested the shape of the monitor is wrong. I was suggested that there were more appropriate ways to use the left and right gutter.
This also reminds me that the "full screen" mode is equally annoying, because again it tends to push text to the full width of the screen. A "full screen" mode that maximised vertically and pushed everything else including window decorations into the left and right gutters would be bloody marvellous, because that's what you actually want when reading text "full screen."

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[nschubach]

I realize it was a whole 10 minutes before you posted the question, but the person before you posted a valid reason for not liking the title bar being double purposed. Another one being use of Remote desktop software in full screen with the auto-hiding bar.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[zevans]

I use a netbook. Move along please.

(Tabs down the side makes MORE sense when vertical space is at a premium, such as my 1024x600 beastie. Can someone else try and explain this please? I'm clearly doing something wrong.)

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Beat The Odds]

I think tabs should be smack dab in the middle of the page.

Isn't it a bit computationally intensive to calculate a "smack dab"?

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[zevans]

You'd have to scroll less if you had less crap above and below the text, n'est ce pas?

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[RiotingPacifist]

don't forget fussion to put the status-bar info in the url-bar like apple do this in safari (much better than what chrome does tbh).
also a few lines to usrchrome will get rid of all those unless buttons and dropdowns

[disabled="true"], /*hides inactive stop button*/

#back-forward-dropmarker, /*hides back/forward drop marker*/
.autocomplete-history-dropmarker, /*hide the adressbar dropmarker*/
.searchbar-dropmarker-image, /*hide the search box dropmarker */
.toolbarbutton-menu-dropmarker, /*hides the bookmark menu drops*/
.search-go-button, /*hides the magnifying glass in the search bar*/

#personal-bookmarks .toolbarbutton-text, /* hide bookmark toolbar icon images */
.tabs-newtab-button

{display: none !important; }

and one day you can all be as cool as me (well you only get the minimal windowdecoration with kde)

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[93 Escort Wagon]

I think tabs should be smack dab in the middle of the page.

Isn't it a bit computationally intensive to calculate a "smack dab"?

Just a tad, yes.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[The Archon V2.0]

If you weren't so educated stupid by evil educators, you would realize the power of the four-corner diagonal tab.

Browser has simultaneous four corner TAB CUBE in only 24 minute browsing session. 4 CORNER TAB, CUBE BROWSER.

BROWSER'S HARMONIC SIMULTANEOUS 4 CORNER TAB CUBE IS THE ONLY WAY!

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[VJ42]

I do like how I can move the tabs around and even make a tab into a new window (although I find this happens way too often by accident).

Firefox has this as well, I just tried it on Firefox 3.5.2; never done it by mistake though.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[FatLittleMonkey]

Oops. Bad Mods. Bad mods gone. Sorry.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[apoc.famine]

I see no problem with that. I've been using Tree Style Tabs since I ran into issues with the amount of vertical real estate on my EEE. The tabs are constrained in about 1" of screen on this massive 22" widescreen, and the mouse-over shows you the full title. That gives me the maximum vertical space for webpages on the many wide monitors I use.
 
Since almost all webpages are designed to be tall, reducing the amount of vertical space to display them is stupid.
 
And I don't get where you came up with sideways text. You must have a lot of crazy stuff in your ass to be able to pull things like that out.
 
Try the Tree Style Tabs plugin for Firefox. It's how tabs should have been done in the first place, in my opinion.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[treeves]

It's a math joke. Read the wikipedia entry on aleph numbers or something if you're interested.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[lwsimon]

I was fun of the improper use of the word "then", as opposed the correct word for the context, "than".

I'm going to school right now for a BS in math, actually. I understood the joke.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[selven]

Maybe we can combine all of these ideas together. Tabs should be diagonal, and come out vertically in between keys whenever you type something on your keyboard. And none of this rounded-off-corner crap, it should be a perfect 90 degree angle.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[selven]

I find it's more logical - the URL is part of the tab, not the other way around.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[BikeHelmet]

Tabs should be down the side.

No no, tabs should be flush against the task bar, so that when you switch to a firefox window, all the tabs show up as a sort of second taskbar level.

Note: This is the only layout that isn't possible with addons/themes, since you can't get anything below the dang statusbar.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheers Nathan

http://trashbat.co.ck/

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[SanityInAnarchy]

If Firefox does this, I'm going back.

Supposedly, they're planning on it. No comment as to when that will be ready, though.

If Google, as announced, implements a plug-in API and those two plug-ins I mentioned are ported, I'll stay.

Just to be clear: You don't mean plug-in. Chrome already supports plugins. It would be very embarrassing if it didn't -- YouTube wouldn't work, for example, without the Flash plugin.

You mean Extensions.

And, they're working on that, too. There seem to be some vague goals to eventually natively support Firefox extensions. At the moment, it's stupidly easy to make an extension (I built an adblocker in two days), but the API isn't stable yet (or fully implemented), and it's only available on the nightly builds, and then only if you pass a commandline flag to enable it.

All those warnings aside, though, it works quite well.

yes, I could kludge them on, no thanks

Define "kludge".

For example, while privoxy is harder to implement, it's anything but a "kludge" -- block the ads once, they stay blocked, no matter which browser you use.

The other one you mention:

I can't right click on pictures and find their properties

Less convenient, but right-click, open image in new tab. You don't even have to switch to that tab -- the image dimensions will be right there.

As for an extension, there doesn't seem to be a good way to modify the context menu. (Again: Unstable API. Maybe they'll add it before extensions are released.) On the other hand, it would be trivial to add as a keystroke or a toolstrip button -- could change the alt text, could make an overlay, or could make it so the default left-click action pops it up.

The most obvious difference is, this would show the actual visible dimensions of the image. So, if you have a 1x1 image scaled up to 20x20, this would report 20x20.

This would probably take me less than an hour to build. I've never tried writing a Firefox extension before, but I kind of doubt it was ever that easy. Think Greasemonkey on steroids.

Also, clearing my tracks (delete everything) takes forever and a day.

Depends what you mean by that. It could be as simple as blowing away ~/.config/chrome (on Linux; there's similar things on Windows). There's also exactly one button to purge history -- or are you saying it's the wait time? And there's "Incognito Mode", which is probably what you're looking for, if you routinely purge your entire browser history.

As for myself, Chrome just feels lighter and faster than Firefox. I use both -- Firebug still has a few things I like, and there are still a few pages that don't work with Chrome (or at least, my Chromium nightly, and I'd expect that). But the fact that I went from knowing nothing about the Chrome extension API to having a working adblocker (using couchdb, which I'd never used) in two days is just awesome.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[EvanED]

Since almost all webpages are designed to be tall, reducing the amount of vertical space to display them is stupid.

Whatever; I almost never have a problem with screen real estate. Sure, maybe I can fit a line and a half less than you at one time or something like that, and so have to scroll one extra screenful if the page is 40 screens long.

But at the same time, I have 16 tabs open right now. (My usage pattern is a bit different on this computer than some others, but it's unusual for me to have more than that many open in one window. I tend to go tab cleaning when it gets that many; in fact, I closed 6 tabs while going through and counting them, so I'm down to 10 now.) The current height of my tab bar is ~24 px. 16*24 is 384 pixes, so those tabs would take 384 pixels of vertical height if arranged on the left (if they are kept the same size). But I estimate ~768 pixels of height are available even within the page, and if you dropped the tab bar from the top and if I closed the find bar at the bottom, this would increase a bit more. If the tabs are even just 100 pixels wide (seems narrow to me for 1", but that depends on your resolution of course), that means 100*(768-384)=38,000 pixels would be completely unused if the tab bar was at the left. (Unless you wanted to do the annoying auto-hide thing as someone else said, or cover up the page.) We're talking like 4 square inches -- AT LEAST -- of completely wasted space. If we say I only have 10 tabs open and I include the amount I gave the tab bar and find bar, and give the width 128 px instead of 100 (that's the width of my tabs right now, with 10 open across the top; it's a decent size) then we're at 5.7% of wasted space.

I'll take using an extra 24 pixels of height to get 0 truly wasted space.

And I don't get where you came up with sideways text. You must have a lot of crazy stuff in your ass to be able to pull things like that out.

It's called "imagining implementation choices". I didn't say you'd require sideways text, just that it was an option (that would avoid the wasted space in the above analysis).

And it's not like sideways text in sideways tabs are unprecedented.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing wrong with tabs above the location bar. After all, the location is associated with the page. The problem with how Google did it is that it it completely breaks the HIG and usability. You now have to hit the open tab to drag the window around, and then reading the window title is now difficult, since it's a cluttered mess of unrelated sentence fragments that only a spammer's mother could love.

The solution? Put the tab above the location bar, but below the window frame, which now reads "Firefox".

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[maglor_83]

At least there were no doubles.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[StuartHankins]

Mod parent up. Definitely hits the point -- free software allows people to tweak it as they see fit. No one is worried about breaking someone else's license when they want to distribute a plugin. No one has to get "permission".

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[StuartHankins]

Brilliant.

and for those of you who have no idea what he's (she's?) parodying, http://www.timecube.com/

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[StuartHankins]

I'm using 1440x900 you insensitive clod!

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Omestes]

Yes, it makes sense like that, but from a usability perspective it kind of sucks. What part of the browser GUI controls do you use the most? The tab bar, I'd guess, you probably switch tabs more often than you type in URLs or hit the back/forward button. But Chrome moves the tab bar the farthest way from the actual page view area, which is where most mice default when idle. Moving the most used element as far away as possible, and past parts that are hardly used, doesn't make much sense.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[apoc.famine]

A point to you sir. That sshot of Amarok is AWFUL! Whoever came up with that needs to be shot. The worst part is that I have the damn program, and I didn't notice how truly awful that was. Now I'm angry.
 
I guess my feeling lies in that many pages don't render well wider than 1024 or so. As an example, cnn.com takes up about 1/2 of the width of my screen. The other bits are just a gray box around it. I agree that you don't gain much, but really, how many tabs do you run? With Tree Style Tabs collapsing the tabs you're not using, I can fit about 30 tabs down the left side of my screen, with the text horizontal. Granted, only the first 18 characters + an icon are shown, but if you need more, a mouse-over shows the details.
 
I just don't run into enough websites which make use of 1680 horizontal pixels to justify NOT using the most I can of the 1050 I have vertically. The numbers change, but the ratio stays close to the same for most of the displays I work on.
 
Seriously - if you haven't tried it, install Tree Style Tabs, and move your url bar and search bar up to the navigation bar line. (Mine goes back/forward/reload/stop/home/URL/Search) Two less vertical lines in firefox really makes the browser seem far larger. I know it's only a handful of pixels, but it really works for me. If most websites made use of the width I have, it wouldn't be all that great. But a lot don't.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Trogre]

Agreed.

Tree Style Tab is one of the best addons for Firefox I've ever used. It's lovely having a vertically-oriented tab hierarchy and opening links in a tab *relative* to the parent.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[quickOnTheUptake]

Since almost all webpages are designed to be tall, reducing the amount of vertical space to display them is stupid.

You have this backwards: Because the convention is that webpages are tall, people expect to have to scroll vertically, not horizontally. Vertically reducing the a area of a page that can be viewed at a time is not a big deal (people already expect to scroll down), reducing the horizontal area that can be viewed at a time can be a very big deal (especially with statically laid out pages or dynamically laid out pages with numerous columns).

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[The Archon V2.0]

Brilliant. and for those of you who have no idea what he's (she's?)

"He", but the equality's appreciated nonetheless.

parodying, http://www.timecube.com/

Not hard to parody, I admit. The previous poster was more subtle. I just took some of Gene's typical rants and made them on-topic. Er, relatively on-topic, of course.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[electrosoccertux]

Tablet PC. Check, and mate. Now king me!

wait...kinging is for checkers...I'm confused....

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[electrosoccertux]

Uh, yeah, pretty sure it's only hurting you dude....

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[Waccoon]

They're probably just saving that feature for 7.0.

Sometimes you stay on top by spending months working on revolutionary technology. Sometimes, for moving a few buttons.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[rdnetto]

No. Tabs should be diagonal.

I agree, it's obvious that the most efficient and elegant solution would be to place the tabs in a diagonal line across all four dimensions, rather than just the two which are used now.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[harmonise]

WOOSH! Right over your head.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[treeves]

Oh noes! A snarky, unfunny joke criticizing someone else's typo escaped my notice as being an attempt at humor.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[samwichse]

If you want it your way, try Opera. Really.

You can configure practically everything in the UI except putting the tabs in the same bar as the main toolbar/file menu.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[badkarmadayaccount]

I didn't. Care to explain to us non-math-endowed physicists?

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[zevans]

A physicist that hasn't heard of Cantor's Diagonal? Man, you are gonna struggle with all the bits of physics that aren't handwaving. I advise a career in string theory for you.

What's more surprising is that you haven't heard of Wikipedia or Google either.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[badkarmadayaccount]

You think I got anything from there to stick? Dude, I'm in high school, I do cool and frigin crazy shit, but I can only deal with differentials and trigonometry, and can more or less understand Lisp and Haskell if that counts, but juggling numbers is not why I got into this.

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[treeves]

His comment was not nice, but you could have avoided it by not calling yourself a physicist without further explanation ("high-school physicist"?). But to answer your question, diagonalization was a mathematical technique that Georg Cantor used to show that the set of all real (rational + irrational) numbers is larger than the set of all counting numbers, even though they are both infinite. They are different "levels" of infinity. I think you can get it if you read this: http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath371.htm

Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[badkarmadayaccount]

We jokingly refer to ourselves like that. Wasn't a good idea, but going through someone like a steam roller just for bad choice of words, especially on a site known for its linguistically challenged members seems... out of place.

Function before form

[Geoffrey.landis]

I do have to say, what I really want out of a browser is function, not a flashier interface.

Make it not crash, and I don't care what it looks like.

Re:Function before form

[Fizzol]

Why is this post marked as a Troll? It's a legitimate viewpoint and one I agree with. I'll take function over form every time. Give me a good, fast, stable browser with a UI that isn't flashy, cluttered or distracting.

Re:Function before form

[Killer Orca]

Why is this post marked as a Troll? It's a legitimate viewpoint and one I agree with. I'll take function over form every time. Give me a good, fast, stable browser with a UI that isn't flashy, cluttered or distracting.

Perhaps mods took the view that Firefox was being called unstable and thus regarded the post as a troll?

Re:Function before form

[Synchis]

How is this a troll?

I agree. I personally don't care how pretty the browser is, and don't really like the Windows 7/Vista graphics interface.

What will it look like in Linux? Thats what I want to know.

I don't like the overly simplified interface, I think it makes it seem like they think their users are idiots. I don't use google chrome for much the same reason.

Re:Function before form

[Runaway1956]

Crash? The only Firefox crashes I've seen in many many months were due to testing 64 bit Flash. If FF is crashing, I have to wonder about your operating system and/or hardware, but the primary culprit is probably buggy code in addon/plugin/codec/peripheral software.

Re:Function before form

[Smivs]

Give me a good, fast, stable browser with a UI that isn't flashy, cluttered or distracting.

No problem, just go here.

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

I do have to say, what I really want out of a browser is function, not a flashier interface.

Make it not crash, and I don't care what it looks like.

"Form Follows Function". It's an eternal debate.

I'm of the team that says we can have both. Especially if they factor in software ergonomics into their design decisions. Most people don't realize it, but they like intuitive designs. Clearly, minimalism (an element of both form and function) is what is "in" for web-browser designs right now. We don't apparently need 8 menus with 20 submenus with 14 more sub-submenus, combined with 9 sections in the options menu, each with 15 subsections. We don't need 40 icons between the top of our web page and the bottom of our address bar.

So, you can have your function (a web browser with less junk crammed into it, and therefore a lower probability of things going wrong) and I can have my form (a nice looking, easy to use minimalist web browser). Everyone wins.

Re:Function before form

[Big Hairy Ian]

I have to agree but today sadly no mod points

Re:Function before form

[jgtg32a]

Agreed, I'd like to add one other thing. I have a buggy wireless card and the drives will lockup Vista x64, every couple of days/weeks or so. The weird part is that if I have FF open when it decides to crash, FF looses all setting. I mean everything even, everything get set to default, this all affects ad-ons as well.

I would really appreciate it if they would fix that.

Re:Function before form

[complete loony]

Speaking of function, for god's sake don't combine the stop and refresh buttons. Or add a sufficient delay and animation when the button transitions from one action to the other so you dont accidently hit refresh when you intended to cancel the page load but it finished just before you clicked.

Re:Function before form

[Viol8]

Firefox crashes and locks up on me every single day. And lets not start on the issue of every browser instance hanging if one instance has DNS lookup issues.

Re:Function before form

[clone53421]

If he'd illustrated his problem by describing when and how Firefox crashes, he'd have a valid argument, but he didn't and I've never had trouble with this. So, in my opinion, he's whining about a problem that doesn't exist, and yeah, I'd call his post a troll.

Re:Function before form

[edmicman]

What will it look like in Linux? Thats what I want to know.

Just based on my experience, it will probably continue to look like ass. I actually *like* the FF icon styles they introduced for WinXP in FF 3.0, and hated that in Ubuntu FF looked like crap because it adopted whatever theme's style you had installed. It's 2009 - why do I still have to have big SQUARE buttons, with all of them looking like crap?

Re:Function before form

[Totenglocke]

True. I love Firefox and have used it for years, but ever since I overclocked my desktop, even though every other application runs dead stable, Firefox crashes on average at least once a minute. It still runs fine on my laptop though....but the crashing on my OC'd system is infuriating.

Re:Function before form

[azior]

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

RMS, 2007

Why bother with useless junk like browsers?

Re:Function before form

[gabebear]

I'm pretty weary of these new minimalist interfaces. Why is getting rid of the menu bar a good thing? Where did copy/cut/paste go? How do I open a file? How do you print a page? How do I access anything that was in the menus? I hate the new Office ribbon interface... everything that used to be in the menus is now scattered across several ribbons which I have to navigate through.

Standard keyboard shortcuts are well and good, but they don't make up for having a standard GUI interface.

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Firefox crash very often. And Safari, come to that. The cause is always the same - Flash. Both the Mac and Linux versions of Flash are terribly crash-prone. The Windows one is a bit better, but not by much.

Oh, and on Windows, I've not had Firefox crash since... erm...

I can't remember, actually. At least since Firefox 3 came out.

Re:Function before form

[Runaway1956]

Hmmmm. I'd like to troubleshoot the problem. Have you searched and/or posted at any of the FF websites?

1. Most obvious, uninstall and reinstall, see if that fixes the problem
2. Disable non-essential plugin/addon
3. Create and use a different user profile
4. Test a different version (just install into another location)
5. Try using a portable version

I have to agree with the complaint about all instances of FF crashing when one runs into a problem. It's infuriating to open a tab that chokes on the Flash content, then every FF window vanishes. That is one thing that Chrome has right, at least.

Re:Function before form

[cyphercell]

Yea, I'm getting sick of this Firefox doesn't crash shit. Someone needs to start modding these fanbois troll. Not that I don't like FF, but it doesn't shit golden bricks either.

Re:Function before form

[RebelWebmaster]

Yes, because surely Mozilla has the same people working on the front-end that would otherwise be working on performance and stability. It's not like different developers within a team might specialize in different areas or anything.

Honestly, I think I'd be more troubled if that actually were the case...

Re:Function before form

[Ranzear]

This just in: "Fischer Price announces it's entry into the web browser world. Its patented SqueekyButton interface is touted as the most professional and technical layout of modern browsers, incorporating separate stop, refresh, and back/forward buttons in primary colors."

Re:Function before form

[Vahokif]

Sounds like you want K-Meleon.

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he said he wanted fast, and not-flashy. Opera is neither.

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I am so tired of having my computer start to lock up because of firefox memory leaks. I used to love firefox, but it seems to me that firefox is putting too much emphasis on ui and extensibility without dealing with the much more important issue of stability.

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you answered your own question there. If you are using square themes in Gnome/Ubuntu then that's what you'll get in Firefox.

Re:Function before form

[geekwithsoul]

While all that's true, a browser is at it's most basic simply a platform to deliver someone else's content and design. It should be unobtrusive and as the parent pointed out, effort spent on putting functionality into the browser would be far more useful to both content consumers and designers - better CSS support, more efficient code execution, etc. should be a much higher priority than synchronizing bookmarks or in making a new interface.

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll hazard a guess that you are running on Windows, right? FF is most definitely not very stable running on Linux. The developer release of Chromium is fast approaching the stability of FF on Linux and it hasn't even been released yet. (Just so ya'll don't jump down my throat, Chromium is no where near feature complete yet. It is good enough that I use it as my primary browser though.) That is why Opera is my secondary browser and FF is relegated to tertiary status.

Anony

Re:Function before form

[ADRA]

Funny that I use firefox on a very regular basis, and the only issues I've ever had on my many Windows / Linux PC's have been related directly to NS plug-ins which cannot be blamed on Firefox for the issues with buggy plug-ins (unless Firefox isn't honouring the contract / API).

Re:Function before form

[Hurricane78]

I'll extend this to: CHOICE before function before form! :)

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

So, in my opinion, he's whining about a problem that doesn't exist, and yeah, I'd call his post a troll.

This is exactly why you and people who think the same way in regards to what 'troll' means, should not be moderating.

http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml
Search in page for: What do the choices in the moderation drop-down boxes mean?

# Flamebait -- Flamebait refers to comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage. If someone is not-so-subtly picking a fight (racial insults are a dead giveaway), it's Flamebait.
# Troll -- A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality, to make other readers react with helpful "corrections." Trolling is the online equivalent of intentionally dialing wrong numbers just to waste other people's time.

The moderation guidelines clearly spell out what is meant by the 'troll' mod, and it does not once mention what you personally would call or consider it.
In fact, by openly admitting you would classify a non-troll post as troll, you are implying 'moderator guidelines to hell!' To me, that puts any and all moderation you have ever done in doubt.

Way to play slashdot.

PS, this post is not a troll, it is a flame (For some of the more 'intelligent' mods, that means the "flamebait" moderation.)

Just you watch. This post (purposely) follows the moderation guidelines for a flame. I have $100 that less than 10% of the moderation will be correct, even more proof I am correct despite correct while flaming.

Re:Function before form

[jaavaaguru]

I use Chromium on Linux. Pretty much the same as Google Chrome on Windows.

Why is getting rid of the menu bar a good thing?

It saves on clutter, screen real estate and things that distract you from the page you're reading.

Where did copy/cut/paste go?

They're on the page menu button

How do I open a file?

An HTML or XML file? Double click on it. Sure, the in-browser keyboard shortbut is there but how many average users actually open HTML pages with FIle|Open? The rest of us know the shortcut.

How do you print a page?

The print option on the page dropdown, or the usual keyboard shortcut.

How do I access anything that was in the menus?

Bookmark a page? Click the star on the address bar, just like starring your emails in GMail.
View downloads/history/bookmarks? It's on the control menu (the other of the two toolbar buttons). Or open a new tab and all that stuff is automatically displayed.

I hate the new Office ribbon interface... everything that used to be in the menus is now scattered across several ribbons which I have to navigate through.

I have to agree. The menu arrangement was fairly standard across most office suites until Microsoft changed that. I use OpenOffice.org more, and find it really hard to use Word now because of the ribbon.

Re:Function before form

[s0l1dsnak3123]

I do have to say, what I really want out of a browser is function, not a flashier interface.

Make it not crash, and I don't care what it looks like.

I would agree with you there, but you must remember that many users of firefox AREN'T techies, and as such allow themselves to be wooed by such things.

Re:Function before form

[jaavaaguru]

Maybe if I used Word more than OpenOffice, I'd get to like the Ribbon as much as I like Chrome's interface. But I doubt it... it still takes up way too much space and I often use a netbook. I don't want to lose 1/3 of my screen to a toolbar.

Re:Function before form

[Geoffrey.landis]

If he'd illustrated his problem by describing when and how Firefox crashes, he'd have a valid argument, but he didn't

Huh. I hadn't realized that Firefox was an application that had a reputation for never ever crashing. Apparently an undeserved reputation; it crashed on me yesterday. If I'd known that you were going to ask for them, I would have saved the crash logs, but you didn't tell me that you wanted them, so I didn't.

and I've never had trouble with this. So, in my opinion, he's whining about a problem that doesn't exist, and yeah, I'd call his post a troll.

OK, what you just said is that Firefox hasn't crashed on you, so therefore it never crashes.

Wow. Can I have your computer?

Re:Function before form

[Mashiki]

OH 'EY! Look it's bloatware...sadly the samething is happening to firefox albeit at a much slower pace.

Re:Function before form

[omnichad]

I have almost no plugins or extensions on my Mac, and Firefox still uses 100% CPU if its' left open for a couple weeks on end.

And I've even desperately tried bleeding edge Alpha's, figuring that buggy debug-enabled code would be faster than whatever's putting me at 100%.
 
I've switched to Omniweb and I love it. Too bad it's almost as bad as Firefox with the CPU/memory issues.

Re:Function before form

[Youngbull]

Why is this post marked as a Troll? It's a legitimate viewpoint and one I agree with. I'll take function over form every time. Give me a good, fast, stable browser with a UI that isn't flashy, cluttered or distracting.

To be honest I think UI is important, maybe not as important as functionality and stability, but a good UI that makes for an ease of use really makes for a more enjoyable experience. Google usually makes great UIs such the ones of Chrome, SketchUp and picasa. Especially SketchUp, I really recomend trying it with the help of a couple of video tutorials. Chrome really got one thing very right and that it leaves a lot of space for the website, and moving around bookmarks is very intutive.

Re:Function before form

[QuasiEvil]

Better yet, pursue the prototype where each tab/window is its own process. Then when one crashes, it doesn't take everything with it. For that matter, it's usually not FF that I blame, it's usually the @#$%ing plugins in linux (particularly flash).

Re:Function before form

[tepples]

I do have to say, what I really want out of a browser is function, not a flashier interface.

Function for a web browser includes having the UI elements out of the way to show more of the page, which is the subject of the article.

Re:Function before form

[clone53421]

PS, this post is not a troll, it is a flame (For some of the more 'intelligent' mods, that means the "flamebait" moderation.)

You're trying to pick a fight? Good grief, you're subtle about it. I wasn't insulted or enraged by what you posted.

I have $100 that less than 10% of the moderation will be correct, even more proof I am correct despite correct while flaming.

It's easy to be rich on the internet... ;)

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever thought that maybe stability with Firefox, like most applications, varies from situation to situation, and that people who defend Firefox's stability are not just "fanbois" and "trolls", but just people who have happened to have had a better experience than you?

For me, Firefox doesn't crash. YMMV.

Re:Function before form

[jesser]

Some users experience very few crashes and some users experience many. This is true for most software. Why would you categorically call people in the first category "trolls"?

According to my calculations, the average Firefox user only sends 1.5 crash reports per year. Based on this, I'd say that for Firefox, more users are in the first category.

Re:Function before form

[flyingfsck]

Here you go: http://links.sourceforge.net/ Simple, non-distracting, never crashes, lightning fast...

Re:Function before form

[nschubach]

I'm trying to figure out why they removed the status bar... where are my add-ons supposed to update me and place their little icons for easy access?

Re:Function before form

[AlexBeck]

Parent is just kidding, right?

Re:Function before form

[Shemmie]

Have you tried the 'shitting golden bricks' plug-in?

Re:Function before form

[SanityInAnarchy]

Firefox crashes for me occasionally, randomly, and not particularly reproduceably. For one thing, plugins can crash it.

Firefox also lags for me quite a bit, particularly when a webpage is being unresponsive -- or a plugin is being unresponsive -- or some part of Firefox itself is being unresponsive.

Chrome seems to use slightly more CPU and RAM -- I'm not sure. But it never lags, and the whole browser never crashes. Tabs crash often enough, but then, I'm running a nightly -- and it's much faster to just click refresh (don't blink or you'll miss it) than to reload an entire running Firefox and all its tabs and windows.

I agree. UI candy is fine, but that is not the feature I'd have chosen from Chrome.

Re:Function before form

[cmdotter]

Agreed, I for one would prefer a focus on start up time in Firefox. IE and chrome have that nailed, whereas FF is annoyingly slow by comparison

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

Count me in. Visual effects can be added over

Also, Fx developers should fix stability issues of Fx 3.5 before going for new features. Gee, there are many aging bugs waiting for a fix.

FWIW, Fx 3.5.3 is available at Moilla's FTP service. It fixes a load of stability bugs over 3.5.2.

Re:Function before form

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Designing a better interface is about functionality, at least if usability is your goal. Function before form doesn't mean not worrying about what the interface looks like.

I'm not sure this new UI is an improvement, though. It does seem to be more about form than function. Although it's hard to tell because they haven't gone into the reasons behind many of the design decisions.

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

"doesn't crash" == "shits golden bricks" !? Is there really no middle ground?

For what it's worth, Firefox 3.5.x has been stable for me under pretty heavy usage on OS X. The only times it has crashed were when the Mac wakes after sleep after watching the Daily Show. Other flash sites seem not to have this.

Re:Function before form

[holloway]

Well exactly. If you had a delay to the reload/stop/go buttons then combining them makes sense.

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

and I've never had trouble with this. So, in my opinion, he's whining about a problem that doesn't exist, and yeah, I'd call his post a troll.

OK, what you just said is that Firefox hasn't crashed on you, so therefore it never crashes.

Wow. Can I have your computer?

Never crashes here either. Not with any of the nightly builds I've tried nor with any of the many alpha, beta, or release builds I've used since before Firefox was called Firefox. Nor does it crash on any of the half dozen other machines I've consistently run release versions on. Nor have I seen or heard complaints from anyone else I know first hand that uses Firefox. From my very own experience, I have a hard time believing that complaints of frequent crashing is anything more than user error or trolling.
 
No, you may not have my computers either. You would have to prove you can use what you have first, before we allow you to have another.

Re:Function before form

[electrosoccertux]

I suppose technically if Firefox were well designed a crashing extension/addon wouldn't crash the browser. Not sure if that's possible. Probably would require a huge rework. They need to anyways so that the UI doesn't freeze whenever a page is loading in the background (or foreground for that matter).

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

hang on, hang on....Chrome may be flashier (I donÂt see it, but ..) but the important and not arguable parts are speed (if we are talking 1 page loading on a slow or erratic connection) and screen real estate (most of ur screen is webpage, very uncluttered + functionality at ur fingertips).

Firefox does much better on low/moderate powered systems (like all 3 of mine) particularly if u have several windows or tabs open, is *fully* functional and very extensible, but on a dodgy connection repeatedly times out (where chrome gives me the page instantaneously).

Firefox on windows gets honourable mention for being extra crap with the speed/timeout issue (on various Ubuntu installations it seems to get me there where FF on windows simply will not, just not as superfast as Chrome)

Crash-wise FF has been rock-solid and diamond hard....easily the most stable browser IÂve spent any time using....FF has become old faithful

Me personally, I want FF to catch up to chrome rather than vice versa.....if I have to have 1 or the other it still has to be FF (my wife might disagree tho!)

Re:Function before form

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

yes, it dumps core like everyone else.

Re:Function before form

[snaggen]

well, if you claim all UI changes not to be "function" I understand that your post is called a troll. If you want function and do not care about a flashy UI there are lot of alternatives like lynkx...

Re:Function before form

[snaggen]

... my point was not to troll my self but just to point out that adding user interface changes are about improving the function of the browser. The chrome style tab changes are not just for show but to make tabs easier and more intuitive to use.

Re:Function before form

[Mythrix]

What's this about clicking on a button to stop/reload?

I use keyboard shortcuts for everything except for actually browsing on a website and clicking on links (and bookmarks). Escape to stop a page load. F5 or Ctrl-R for reloads. AFAIK (or remember), this works in all major browsers. And I don't even need to take my hand of the mouse to press those buttons!

But, that asides, I'm sure your point is a valid point.

Re:Function before form

[bmcage]

I have to know a star is the same as bookmarking?
Where is this 'page menu button'?

Yesterday I tried to help a college with Vista, and wanted to see the hidden files. No menu in explorer! I didn't find for the love of me how to see hidden files...

This is just broken design. One does not expect users to read the manual, or to get a course, before they use a program. Change for the sake of change is really uncalled for.

My guess is Microsoft is jealous on Apple for their top menu bar, and decided to move to a new GUI paradigm where there are no more menu's. That will teach Apple!
Well, sorry, I don't want any of it.

Re:Function before form

[AmiMoJo]

The only time I ever get crashes in FF is when a plug-in (usually Flash) screws up. FF is pretty stable, but can't account for plug-ins unfortunately.

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

In short Firefox 4.0 steals it's look from Chrome and it's features (browser sync) from Opera.

how does it feel Firefox losers, or be the last to get all the other browsers features? (I doubt FireFix will ever get Operas security thou).

Re:Function before form

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I think the browser should disappear and let the web sites take not just center stage, but the whole stage.

Re:Function before form

[bill_mcgonigle]

I suppose technically if Firefox were well designed a crashing extension/addon wouldn't crash the browser. Not sure if that's possible. Probably would require a huge rework. They need to anyways so that the UI doesn't freeze whenever a page is loading in the background (or foreground for that matter).

Yes, this has been talked about for the better part of a decade, and yes, it's considered so much work that it'll never happen (until somebody does the crunch and drops it from the sky, but odds are great that such an effort would bitrot anyway, so nobody bothers).

Re:Function before form

[fm6]

So take away plugin support (the only reason I still use Firefox) and what advantages does it have over Chrome?

Re:Function before form

[AmiMoJo]

Man, are you just looking to argue with me?

Anyway, you misunderstand. In Firefox lingo, a "plugin" is a binary that displays a certain type of content, like Flash or PDF documents. You seem to be thinking of "add-ons" which add to or change the functionality of the browser itself and are written in Javascript and XUL.

Add-ons can cause problems, but rarely cause the browser to crash since they are entirely interpreted code. Plugins, on the other hand, being native programs can quite easily cause the browser process to crash.

Re:Function before form

[fm6]

Man, are you just looking to argue with me?

Yes.

Anyway, you misunderstand. In Firefox lingo, a "plugin" is a binary that displays a certain type of content, like Flash or PDF documents. You seem to be thinking of "add-ons" which add to or change the functionality of the browser itself and are written in Javascript and XUL.

Oops, you're right, I was muddling the two terms — my aging brain has trouble remembering which is which. I mean, is there any logical reason you should "plug in" a mime-type handler, but "add on" any other kind of extender?

But wait a minute a minute. (Fiddles with menus.) Yep, it turns out your terms are wrong too. If you do Tools/Add-ons, you get a dialog for managing Plugins, Extensions (which is what you meant by "add-ons") and themes. So "add-on" is the generic term.

Also I don't see how you can say that add-ons, I mean extensions, rarely cause crashes. Many's the time I've found my browser useless after an a bunch of updates got downloaded, with the only fix to go into safe mode and disable my extensions one at a time until I found the one that was screwing me over. And of course if you disable compatibility checking (not recommended, but sometimes it's tempting when your favorite extension becomes abandonware) there's a good chance you'll see crashes.

And in any case, a badly-written extension can certainly hang your browser — which is just as bad as a crash.

One other nitpick: extensions that use native code are rare, but not totally unknown. CoolIris is an example.

Re:Function before form

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Function before form

[fm6]

The state of Mozilla Foundation docs is pretty appalling. But in fact the page you link is not just about extensions — it covers plugins and themes as well. Both are listed in the "Categories" box on the left.

The site actually seems to be pretty consistent about its use of these terms. The issue is confused by the absence of clear definitions, by the sloppy organization of the web site, and the fact that extensions account for 90% of all addons.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks pretty fantastic, but why the end of 2010?

of all the things to copy from Chrome

[spyrochaete]

If there's one thing I hate about Chrome it's the way the tabs replace the normal title bar functionality. It makes the window harder to drag, harder to maximize, and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window. I expect something like this from Apple but not from Firefox (or Google for that matter).

A nonstandard UI is the epitome of developer arrogance. The tabs-on-bottom mockup is excellent, but the tabs-on-top concept needs to die on the drawing board.

On the flip side, if Firefox 4.0 supports some of the new Windows 7 standards like Aero Peek controls I will be very pleased!

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[VGPowerlord]

Tabs on top makes a sense, they just shouldn't be part of the title bar.

I say they make sense because the address bar, back button, forward button, refresh/stop buttons, and home button are all part of the current tab, rather than the browser as a whole.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[chrb]

Chrome is better optimised for small screens and maximising window real estate. I actually like the "throwing the title bar away and integrating tabs with window decorations" of Chrome - it gives a couple of cm more vertical space for the html render window. As does hiding the bookmarks bar, and status/download bars by default. Going back to a default Firefox layout now reminds me of those old 3D wireframe Elite style shootemups, and how they used to have huge blocks of static graphics at the top and bottom of the screen to speed up the frame rate.. ok, I'm exaggerating a little, but on my 17 inch monitor the difference in default vertical space is 28mm, that's a slightly >10% increase in vspace with Chrome.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[DragonWriter]

If there's one thing I hate about Chrome it's the way the tabs replace the normal title bar functionality. It makes the window harder to drag, harder to maximize, and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window.

The tabs don't replace the title bar functionality in Chrome. The title bar, including its minize, maximize, and close buttons, is in its normal place, and performs its normal function. It's slightly less tall than on a normal window, though.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Runaway1956]

"Windows usability standards"

You were shooting for the newest oxymoron? Ohhhh-kay.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[jgtg32a]

Thank you, nonstandard UIs annoy the hell out of me. Personally I think rule #1 for HCI should be "for better or for worse be consistent."

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Zocalo]

I'd agree with this, but I was actually more taken with the concept of the Combo Stop/Refresh/Go button which with 20:20 hindsight just made me think "Duh! Why wasn't it done like this from the start?" What might be better for the tabs though is "Version C"; put the tabs over the location bar, but below the standard title bar of the OS in question. Of course, we are talking about probably the most configurable browser of them all, so the best solution has to be "Version D" which is where the user gets to use whichever style they prefer.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish.
Tear away tabs are the perfect solution to your hate.

Calling an unfinished set of ui designs "The epitome of developer arrogance" Is a clear demonstration of your failure to read and is clearly a demonstration of your ignorance.
Giving users the choice of having tabs above or below would allow users to choose what they want. It's abundantly obvious that neither way has enough merits to warrant being as you put it "Worthy of death."

As a Windows user, I recommend you worry more about Windows' security features and more accurately; useless lack of them instead of the copied directly from Mac OSX and compiz eye candy features of Aero.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[rampant mac]

"and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window."

That's odd you mention that, considering the last two releases of Windows (Vista & 7) both have different interfaces (Vista with Aero, 7 with it's dock, er, task bar). I like how Google implemented its tabbed interface, but there is room for improvement. I find it fascinating that 10 years ago, IE *was* the internet! Now FF and Safari (along with WebKit dominating in the mobile space) have begun to push aside IE's presence on the internet. Who said the browser wars were over? :)

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[daid303]

Tabs on bottom makes a sense, they shouldn't be part of the title bar.

I say they make sense because the address bar, back button, forward button, refresh/stop buttons, and home button are not part of the current page, rather than the browser as a whole.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, nonstandard UIs annoy the hell out of me. Personally I think rule #1 for HCI should be "for better or for worse be consistent."

Or to put it another way, "The thought of change leading to progress scares me."

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Kozz]

In your current installation of FireFox, double-click your title bar.

Now go to Chrome, open enough tabs to fill up the row from left-to-right, and try to double-click the title bar.

For me, double-clicking an app's title bar (same function as "Restore Down" or "Maximize") is especially useful when I want to restore a maximized window so I can drag the app from my primary display to a secondary, or vice versa. I suspect many people do the same.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[jj00]

I completely agree, I like having a normal title bar. Then again, I still use the "classic theme" in Windows. I like the current UI as it is, and have even been a bit annoyed in some of the tweaks they've made over the past few releases.

I'd like to see these features as options or themes. Maybe even make an easy option to go into "support mode" which will provide a unified standard UI.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[WebmasterNeal]

Safari also caved to the tabs on top layout. While the extra screen real estate is nice, I'd still rather have the title bar for the same reasons you pointed out.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[D Ninja]

I would argue the opposite. To me, the address bar, back button, etc ARE part of the current page. For example, if I have two websites up, each have a different address and, thus, each have a different address bar. Additionally, I don't see the point of having a title bar (one reason I like Chrome so much). What a wasted amount of space when you can just grab and maneuver the tab, instead (especially as tabs become more prevalent in software).

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[wilder_card]

Odd, the double-click works fine for me. I don't see any of the problems you complain of.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[gabebear]

The big problems are that you can't reorganize title-bar-tabs by dragging, and that you can't just click anywhere in the titlebar to drag the window.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[jgtg32a]

That is a legitimate counter, however it's highly disruptive to the user experience when one app decides to be different; there are proper time for those kinds of "fundamental" changes.

The best time for those are during "revision" changes, like a new version of an OS, and then all applications need to fall in line. People will be expecting new and will be more inclined to put up with the "training."

But usually I'm more annoyed by the little differences. How may times have you right clicked on an program in the task bar and click close, but instead it opened help or some other then close.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[bendodge]

Tabs on top make me move my mouse further to get to them (although I usually Ctrl+Tab anyway). Tab on bottom, now that's worth a look.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[DirePickle]

Try to double-click the title bar *when Chrome is fullscreen* I think he might mean.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[gabebear]

What has Apple done like this? The biggest annoyance like that I had was when I switched to OSX and the switched CMD-N from creating a new directory in Finder to creating a new Finder window. Microsoft has been doing this non-standard GUI crap for ages in their media players and the Office ribbon crap annoys the crap out of me...

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[gabebear]

care to elaborate on this progress?

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[prionic6]

In your current installation of FireFox, double-click your title bar.

Wow, it minimizes the window into the dock. Didn't test chrome.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[jollyreaper]

If there's one thing I hate about Chrome it's the way the tabs replace the normal title bar functionality. It makes the window harder to drag, harder to maximize, and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window. I expect something like this from Apple but not from Firefox (or Google for that matter).

A nonstandard UI is the epitome of developer arrogance. The tabs-on-bottom mockup is excellent, but the tabs-on-top concept needs to die on the drawing board.

On the flip side, if Firefox 4.0 supports some of the new Windows 7 standards like Aero Peek controls I will be very pleased!

With UI there's a trade-off between "flawed but we're used to it" and "innovative but so different nobody will catch the hang of it." QEWRTY sucks. Scientists can prove with lots of charts and numbers that there are better ways to layout a keyboard. Unfortunately, this is a change that won't likely happen. Everybody is used to QWERTY even if it sucks. Metric beats customary every time but I can't think in metric.

The problem with most of these changes is there really doesn't seem to be much of an improvement, no compelling reason to switch. Different does not mean better. Going from command line to GUI was a revelation. Even when you were lost in the first week you knew you were going to love it once you got yourself sorted out. You had your fuddy duddies who memorized scads of commands who said GUI wasn't as good but hell, the dos box was left in specifically for you guys. Have at it. Going from Office 2003 to Office 2007 was "where the hell did all my shit go?!"

I'm a big fan of unified interfaces. While dropdown menus might not be the best possible way of displaying tools and options, it's the best we've come up with so far. I think the biggest innovation I've seen on this end is with OSX where you have a search box built into the menu box. Start typing what you want and it will highlight the icons that apply to the feature. The drawback here is you need to know what the feature is called in order to type the name.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[PainKilleR-CE]

Umm grabbing and moving the tab does not do the same thing as grabbing and moving the title bar, and double-clicking the tab appears to do nothing. If I manage to grab the small space above the tab I get the functionality I would expect from the title bar, but that makes for a much smaller than usual target.

Of course, if you sit around with your browser in full screen mode all day, the only one of these that applies is double-clicking the bar.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Harder to drag

Pick one of the below
1) Buy better hands
2) exercise your hands
3) get linux (with KDE) where you can drag windows around regardless of where you click, or get the numerous programs/scripts that enable KDE-style window management.
Windows ALWAYS sucked when it came to dragging a window around, hell, Windows sucks in general with Window Management.

harder to maximize

YES, BECAUSE THAT HUGE MAXIMIZE BUTTON IS SOMETHING ONLY CHROME DOES...
Normal functionality my ass, double-clicking a titlebar is an advanced interaction with the UI, maximize button is normal.

How about when Mozilla decided to destroy the Go button in recent Firefox versions?
Now instead of being able to click Go in the usual place it is, i have to go all the way to the left to hit Refresh.
Worst part is that they removed the Go button entirely, there is no such thing as the Go button any more.

Also, Microsoft themselves are guilty of throwing their own Windows usability standards out the window with several of there popular programs.

Chrome simply gets rid of functionality that the majority of people have no idea about.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[man_of_mr_e]

Actually, IE7 was originally designed with the combo stop/refresh/go button, but they recieved a ot of feedback from users that stop and start/refresh are distinct functions and should not be combined. Eventually, Microsoft relented and made stop seperate.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[shutdown -p now]

If there's one thing I hate about Chrome it's the way the tabs replace the normal title bar functionality. It makes the window harder to drag, harder to maximize, and basically throws 25 years of Windows usability standards out the window ... A nonstandard UI is the epitome of developer arrogance.

They didn't start it - have you seen Office 2007? IE7? There's no such thing as a "nonstandard UI" on Windows anymore.

Anyway, Chrome only puts tabs in title bar when the window is maximized. At this point, you obviously don't need to maximize it again (and you can restore it by clicking on the freaking huge Restore button), and you cannot move maximized windows around, either.

When Chrome window is not maximized, it actually pushes the tabs down somewhat, so that you have a convenient dragging handle.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[spyrochaete]

Chrome is better optimised for small screens and maximising window real estate

That's a fantastic point. I've got a 22" monitor at home and use a fairly high resolution laptop at work so I'm sure I'm out of touch with those with small monitors and netbooks. I still argue that disposing windows UI/UX standards is not the best way to accomplish this task, though.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[spyrochaete]

Despite the UI changes, someone who hasn't used Windows since version 3.1 could still get around pretty well in Vista or 7. That's what I'm talking about - the overarching similarities used throughout the Windows brand. In my opinion the only developers who ignore these standards are either egotistical or hostile toward Microsoft.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[dissy]

I say they make sense because the address bar, back button, forward button, refresh/stop buttons, and home button are not part of the current page, rather than the browser as a whole.

So... wait. That is really confusing.

When you click 'home', all of your tabs change to the home page at once?

And when you click 'back', all of your tabs go back a page in their history? Do all your tabs share the same URL history, so clicking back in one always takes you to the previous page you had open in any tab?

Typing into the address bar too doesn't open that URL in the tab you have open, but all tabs accost the browser?

Well, I don't think I would want to use your choice of configuration, but isn't that extremely hard and confusing to function in?
I am having a hard time seeing how the browser that makes sense to you would even work with more than one tab open at once.

Or do you just dislike tabs? That would be valid and fitting to your specs. It would have been a lot less confusing to just say you don't like tabs though :)

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[jaavaaguru]

For me, double-clicking an app's title bar (same function as "Restore Down" or "Maximize") is especially useful when I want to restore a maximized window so I can drag the app from my primary display to a secondary, or vice versa. I suspect many people do the same.

I just drag it and let my desktop environment deal with how it fits on the second screen. Although with Chromium I do need to find that awkwardly small bit of title bar to do that with, or click the "Restore" button first. There is the "Use system title bars and borders" option if I don't like this, but I thought I'd give Google's UI a spin.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[0xABADC0DA]

Tabs on top makes a sense ... because the address bar, back button, forward button, refresh/stop buttons, and home button are all part of the current tab, rather than the browser as a whole.

A cardinal rule of good user interface design is that controls are always in the same place. When the buttons are part of a tab, they may move around, for instance if the tab bar is set to hide if it contains one tab, or if the tab bar can expand to multiple lines, or if it can be placed horizontally or vertically.

In a GUI, "part of" means what visual grouping it belongs to and not the conceptual grouping it belongs to. If all the tabs contain the same controls, in the same positions, then these controls are not "part of" the tabs, they are part of something outside the tabs (they are factored out). To put it in geek terms, consider these expressions:

chrome: (xa + xb + xc)
firefox: x(a + b + c)

Do you argue that "x" must be inside the grouping because it is 'part of' each term, even though it is the same for all terms? It's more clear and more usable to factor out everything that is shared in common.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

I strongly dislike how the basic consensus on GUI design states that as much screen real estate as possible should be wasted on huge, ugly, clunky bars.

Why should 40% of my screen height be the title bar, menu bar, navigation bar, bookmarks bar, tab bar then we've got 55% of the screen height dedicated to the content you're actually trying to consume with the browser? Then there's the 5% at the bottom for a status bar whose messages are only significant when you're changing what the page is doing.

I like Chrome's interface because all in all, it uses up less than 10% of my screen height for the tab bar and the navigation bar. Considering I'm running at 720p on my 40" HDTV, every inch of real estate counts. I can't read the font comfortably at 1080p and rescaling to a larger font screws up many applications - why a TV? Saves space in my tiny-assed apartment and turns computing into a social thing when friends are over.

I think most of the people who are in favor of that huge stack of shit at the top of the screen are running at Hojillion-by-WTF resolution on a desktop monitor and keep their browsing to themselves, so it's understandable that they'd like their navigation (harder target to hit at higher resolution) to be spaced as comfortably as possible.

Minimalism is what I'm comfortable with, so I like Chrome. I really miss Firefox's plugins, though, so a change like this would be welcome. Considering how modular Firefox actually is, there's no reason they couldn't just make the presentation layer of the browser's UI elements a plugin and let you swap between them.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[spyrochaete]

What has Apple done like this? The biggest annoyance like that I had was when I switched to OSX and the switched CMD-N from creating a new directory in Finder to creating a new Finder window. Microsoft has been doing this non-standard GUI crap for ages in their media players and the Office ribbon crap annoys the crap out of me...

To be fair to Apple, their deviations from UI standards apply to their software on Windows OSes. Obviously they're the ones who create the standards for their own OSes.

I do agree with you 100% about Windows Media Player. I think the last time they used the ordinary Windows UI was around version 6 or so, and they're up to 11 or 12 now. I can't agree with you on Office though because I love the ribbon. That's just my opinion though - doesn't mean you're wrong.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Bat Country]

It takes me roughly a half second longer to target and acquire the title bar when maximized with all tabs open.
Then again, I play a lot of video games and work with Photoshop and InDesign a lot, so maybe I'm more accurate with mousing than the average user.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

I would disagree that metric beats standard in every situation. For many things you would commonly measure, the meter is too long and the centimeter too short. Whereas the foot is just about right. Also, for temperature, degrees Celsius are just a little too far apart for some people. To each their own though.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[AndrewNeo]

Assuming by Aero Peek you mean the individual taskbar previews, the Bugzilla entry for that feature is currently blocking Gecko 1.9.2, for Firefox 3.6. According to the tracking bug for Windows 7 they also plan on implementing Jump Lists, the progress-bar-in-icon feature for downloads, and others, in the future.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Elwood P Dowd]

While you do not have enough tabs to fill the title bar in Chrome, their non-standard window increases the size of the target for maximization.

I love Windows usability standards (I'm stuck in the XP era of fitts's law, screen real estate conservation, responsiveness) and that is the main reason I use Chrome.

This isn't like Apple shipping Safari for Winders w/ a close box in the upper right that doesn't activate when you click the top right pixel on the screen. Google has worked out the kinks here.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Kozz]

(Disclaimer: I'm talking about using my XP laptop at work, not any *nix OS/apps)

I guess the point I'm making is that the new design would result in slightly decreased functionality because it's not as easy to target the title bar as with other apps. I understand your mouse-fu (just teasing you here) but the way I see it now is that I don't have to really even *look* to place my cursor -- It's easy to slam my cursor to top-center and know that I can double-click and it will work. In Chrome that won't work unless I hit one of the tiny blue triangles of real estate between tabs or the blank area to the right of the last tab.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[gabebear]

That makes more sense, I'm more used to OSX than Windows, so the OSXish interface on Windows's iTunes didn't bother me. Running a Windows apps in OSX via Wine is harsh...

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Twinbee]

[quote]The drawback here is you need to know what the feature is called in order to type the name.[/quote]

In that case, the app should show them all, or even better, associate many keywords with a function so that the user can type any one of them, and the function will appear. For example, zooming on a page could be associated with the words "zoom", "scale", "page", "magnify", "200%", "50%", etc. I bet GUI apps of the far future (2500) will use this method.

Sigh, when will people realise that a metadata filesystem is best too.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

A nonstandard UI is the epitome of developer arrogance.

That "developer arrogance" is what brought tabbed browsing to life in the first place. M$ refused to even add tabbed browsing until IE7.

Yes, let's shun all new and interesting UI design ideas for the status quo handed down from the Redmond gods. Clearly, they know better. And who would want any of that fussy "competition" stuff anyways?

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[VGPowerlord]

I first saw the Combo Stop/Refresh/Go button in Opera 9. There are times when having a combined button is annoying, though: If you are going to hit stop for a page and it finished as you're clicking, you end up clicking the refresh button instead, doing the exact opposite of what you intended.

I'm sure there are lots of arguments for both sides (much like there is for where the buttons are).

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

>QEWRTY sucks.

Wow, how did you manage to misspell that? :-)

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[VGPowerlord]

OK, I can see why the buttons being outside the tab would make sense, but it doesn't make sense for the location bar to be outside the tab, as what it displays is unique for every tab.

In other words, it's not a case of x(a + b + c), but rather ax + by + cz.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[__aailrp9629]

On the other hand, on a small (netbook-sized) monitor it's very handy to have a UI like Chrome, where the extra 30 or so pixels of screen height saved by omitting the title bar make up 5% of your overall display height.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[bazorg]

you can! Just press CTRL+N before going to another site!

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[0xABADC0DA]

OK, I can see why the buttons being outside the tab would make sense, but it doesn't make sense for the location bar to be outside the tab, as what it displays is unique for every tab.

There is no difference between those buttons and the location bar.

The location bar shows the URL field for the current tab. It also uses global state, for instance browsing on one tab adds completion entries to other tabs. Should it be outside the tab because completing is global and not specific to a particular tab? No, because what it displays and how it operates is irrelevant to where it should be located. What matters is what visual grouping the element belongs to, and this is not the tab because the presence of the element is not unique to a tab.

Take another example, an SVG editor. What buttons are active and what is displayed (font, color, etc) depends on which object is selected. Does each object get a separate Font text field floating within its bounding box just because the data varies per object? No, that would be madness. The location bar per tab is just a degenerate case of this, but the same principle applies that controls are shown at the outermost layer where the element is always present.

Lets also put it in another way. The purpose of a tab is to switch between different views. Suppose the bookmarks bar, buttons, and location take 20% of the window. With tabs at the top, switching tabs changes 80% of the tab's area, plus a little bit extra for the URL and possibly different button states. With tabs at the bottom, switching tabs changes 100% of the tab's area plus some extra areas.

In terms of visual appearance, tabs in Chrome "sort of" switch between different views, but not completely. How would you explain what changes when you select a different tab? "The web page part is completely different, the buttons change what they show, and the bookmarks bar and menu buttons are unchanged" vs "When you select a different tab its contents show a different web page". I think you can see which is conceptually simpler and makes the most sense of the two.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[RiotingPacifist]

if you want to lead the charge to progress do it in the right place, design a new WM/toolkit not a new app

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Taevin]

I'm confused. I'm sitting here in Chrome right now, in full screen mode. Tabs are in the space normally wasted by a title bar in full screen mode. There is still a space to the left of the window buttons that I can use to drag the window if I want to take advantage of Windows 7's functionality (this space is just slightly smaller than the window buttons themselves so I can't see the complaint there). If I do switch to windowed mode, either by dragging it out of full screen or double-clicking, there is now a hideous waste of space in the form of an empty title bar (well, empty save for a "Google" in small print near the window buttons). Same size as any other window/full screen application. What's the problem again?

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Eil]

I say they make sense because the address bar, back button, forward button, refresh/stop buttons, and home button are all part of the current tab, rather than the browser as a whole.

This is true, but you don't have to make the UI conform strictly to the functional model in order to make it easier to use. Anyone who has used Firefox figured out in the first 5 seconds that the navigation toolbar applies only to the currently-selected tab. The tab doesn't have to visually enclose the whole toolbar in order for this to make sense. Placing the tabs right above the content area is best (from my point of view) because a proficient user will create, select, and close tabs more often in the course of browsing than he or she will use the navigation toolbar.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[cyanidecircuitry]

someone who hasn't used Windows since version 3.1 could still get around pretty well in Vista or 7.

Try replacing 3.1 with 95. I'd argue that there was a big leap from 3.1 to 95 - namely, the start menu and taskbar - so I doubt you'd find someone who could do that. Things have remained relatively static since then though.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[spyrochaete]

someone who hasn't used Windows since version 3.1 could still get around pretty well in Vista or 7.

Try replacing 3.1 with 95. I'd argue that there was a big leap from 3.1 to 95 - namely, the start menu and taskbar - so I doubt you'd find someone who could do that. Things have remained relatively static since then though.

You're not giving 3.1 enough credit. There's still many conventions from 3.1 that they use today in 7. For instance, dragging by title bar, double clicking title bar to resize the window, double clicking the icon at the top left-hand corner to close the window, tiling and cascading onscreen windows, etc. Even Notepad is pretty much the same.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[maxume]

Yeah, me too, in this case, lazy is a much better design principle than pedantically logical.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[k8to]

I like stop as a separate button, so that I can remove it.

I never click it and I don't ever want to see it. I press escape to stop.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Lunzo]

It's not that hard to say 30cm instead of 1 foot. I guess it depends on what you grew up with. Anyone in the current generation outside the USA grew up with metric and degrees Celsius, so it isn't hard for us.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[TSPhoenix]

I could live with Go/Refresh merging, but Stop should be separate. Sometimes when loading a page I want to load it again (partial load), sometimes I want to stop it loading. I just hope they don't mess with Esc/F5/CTRL+L.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[AmiMoJo]

Google sees the browser as the platform, the underlying OS is irrelevant. With that in mind it makes sense to take over the entire screen and not worry about the window being movable, because it replaces all other applications and the task bar with it's tabs anyway.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[spyrochaete]

I agree with you completely. Google did this with hostile intent to Microsoft.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

no, what is arrogance is thinking that the way you want it done is the "right" way for everyone. doing it this way makes sense.

but, maybe a windows fanboy doesn't like anything that isn't the MS way.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

My car combines stop and start into the same key. What makes this "distinct functions" in a web browser?

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[daid303]

I love tabs. (Except when you give me IE tabs, those act freaky)

But for me, a tab contains the contents of a page, not a full browser. And those buttons just act on the current tab.
Just like the current song position in a media player acts on the currently playing song, and not all songs have an own song position bar.

(And if you want a freak interface, then look at the old VisualStudio6 project configuration, where you have tabs that contain a combobox that changes the content of that tab)

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Bat Country]

Point taken. I lost a bit of efficiency when space requirements made me swap sides with my second display so that I can't close windows as quickly just by flicking the mouse to the upper right. As a result, I came to rely more on key combinations for closing windows (ctrl-w, alt-f4), but it's just not the same.

My mouse-fu degrades rapidly with age but they keep obligingly changing interface paradigms on me to accommodate my stately decay. By the time I'm old and shaky it will all be gestural anyway.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

QEWRTY sucks.

Agrwwd, I can't eritw a cohwrwnt swntwncw eith this layout.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine trzing to use the QWERTZ lazout...

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[man_of_mr_e]

Primarily because sometimes sites take a long time to load. Sometimes you want to stop the site from loading, sometimes you want to refresh because the request seems to get lost. You would have to stop first then refresh (two clicks) versus a single refresh click.

All i'm saying is that some people are vehemently against combining them. I really couldn't care less myself.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[badkarmadayaccount]

Esc, Ctrl+R, and Enter are still there. Use them, Luke, use the key combos!
Jokes aside, why does everything have to be on-screen, the whole fsc&(*^&king manual included, ala M$ Bob? It's fraking annoying and cluttered. These are so headbanging basic that they shouldn't even exist as buttons! Whats next? A right mouse click button next to Stop?

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[badkarmadayaccount]

When you call method from a class *cough*Reload*cough*, it's called from within the object, and not the whole class. All tabs inherit from the browser class, but the methods called within them are distinct, and should be visually so.

Re:of all the things to copy from Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one thing I like about Opera. It's tabs-on-top and so it makes sense that affecting the top (switching tabs) affects what's below (the address on display, the page on display). Why, when you select a tab in Firefox, does the address bar above change, and the page below? It's weird.

Sort of old...

[Sj0]

These screen-shots have been available for months. This is old news.

Frankly, I think worrying about minor details like whether the tabs are above or below the taskbar sort of shows how far browsers have come. On the list of things I was worried about 5 or 10 years ago, it's near the bottom.

Re:Sort of old...

[BarMonger]

On the list of things I was worried about 5 or 10 years ago, it's near the bottom.

I like my to keep my issues on-top of the list.

Separate search box option?

[Killer Orca]

I hope they make integrating the search box in the URL box optional. One of the things I really like about FF is the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to select specific search engines or sites. Of course with Ubiquity http://labs.mozilla.com/ubiquity/ progressing nicely I may be in the minority.

Re:Separate search box option?

[maxume]

By using keyboard shortcuts, yes, you are in the minority. Even more so for using something application specific (lots of people use control-c and friends for cut and paste).

Re:Separate search box option?

[NatasRevol]

My keyboard shortcut is to hit tab to go to the search window :-)

Not really different than typing w for wikipedia, etc.

Re:Separate search box option?

[Randle_Revar]

Personally, in SeaMonkey, I just type the search keyword before the term
wp search term - search wikipedia for "search term"
ud search term - search urban dictionary for "search term"
etc.

Actually not too bad

[Taibhsear]

I was half expecting to have to go on a tirade about the new look but it's actually pretty decent. Just looking at FF right now there's a lot of empty space that can be consolidated (mainly the file menu bar and the tabs bar area). The go/stop/reload consolidated into the path bar is a pretty good idea. Clears up a few buttons worth of space. And the file bar could really be hidden and opened up by right clicking the title bar icon in the upper left (where you'd normally just see 'restore, minimize, close, etc') to save even more space. As long as they kept a drop down button for bookmarks and either a button or hotkey for the home page I would definitely consider upgrading to this GUI.

Re:Actually not too bad

[Mozk]

So basically you want my customizations.

The menu bar is gone, and the things I use most from it are placed into a button next to the address bar. To the left of that is a bookmarks button, which I usually don't have, but I put it there so you could see it. I use a mouse gestures addon for stop and reload, so those buttons are gone. The only things on the screen are things that I use frequently, and I have minimal wasted space.

Also, the combination go/stop/reload button is a horrible idea from a useability perspective. What if I want to stop a page loading, and right when I go to click the button, the page finishes and the button changes to reload right when I click it? The page reloads when you thought you told it to stop. What if while a page is still loading, I type something in the address bar? Should the button be go or stop?

You don't need it when you have mouse gestures anyway. And mouse gestures are great since you just move the mouse in a direction from your current position. You don't have to move it to a specific position like a button on a toolbar.

Re:Actually not too bad

[Hijacked Public]

Also, the combination go/stop/reload button is a horrible idea from a useability perspective.

Indeed. Kind of like having UI elements (like buttons) disappear on a screen refresh, only to have an element that does something different appear in the same spot. Poorly designed web pages do a lot of that. Apple is fond of doing it on their phone.

Re:Actually not too bad

[PainKilleR-CE]

You don't really need it if Escape actually stops when you want it to, either, because Enter and CTRL+R already work perfectly fine for Go and Reload.

Re:Actually not too bad

[Mozk]

I use mouse gestures and not the buttons.

Actually, that second thing you mentioned has its own bug. In older versions of Firefox, when a page finished loading, it would replace the address bar text with that page's address, erasing whatever you had typed there while it was loading. I'm not sure if that still happens in newer versions.

Qt version?

[GreatBunzinni]

Another detail that would be nice to know is if Mozilla will take advantage of this major version rewrite to finally drop GTK in favour of Qt. Personally I can only see good things in that migration.

Re:Qt version?

[bogaboga]

Personally I can only see good things in that migration.

Care to elucidate? Man, give examples in a case like this.

Re:Qt version?

[13bPower]

Yeah I thought they used there own XML / chrome or whatever to draw widgets, not GTK.

Re:Qt version?

[seandiggity]

You need to read up before starting a GTK/Qt flamewar.

Re:Qt version?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mozilla Application Framework is the platform-neutral way to draw stuff; however, each platform still has to have a platform-specific toolkit to actually create them. The Mozilla Application Framework is just a layer above the actual toolkit that makes anything written for it platform-neutral.

Re:Qt version?

[GreatBunzinni]

You also need to read up on what software Firefox is built on, which obviously includes GTK. You could also check the requirements for any firefox package such as the ones provided for Debian and Ubuntu, which clearly mention GTK and their companion libs.

Re:Qt version?

[GreatBunzinni]

By adopting Qt they do away with the need to develop and maintain their own personalized cross-platform code, which may be seen as a source of resource waste. Moreover, Firefox is a C++ project. By relying on Qt instead of GTK they end up making the project simpler to manage and also reduce the project's complexity, which means the project becomes simpler to read, understand and, as a consequence, hack.

Why transparency?

[JPLemme]

Am I the only person who thinks transparency sucks? If it's too transparent, the content can be hard to pick out from the background. And if it's only a little transparent (OS X), the menu can look like it got smudged with dirt. Are we expected to use only low-contrast, muted backgrounds?

If I wanted to see a partially obscured, blurry version of what's behind my browser, I can just smear my glasses with Vaseline and minimize Firefox.

Re:Why transparency?

[sloth jr]

I don't have mod points, otherwise you'd get them. There's zero functionality derived from transparency for UI elements.

It doesn't look cool. It's the UI equivalent of spinners and under-chassis neon lighting.

Re:Why transparency?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow... did anyone ever think those things inside Windows would ever become.... .... wait for it ...... WINDOWS!

read: you can see through them.

personally... i think the Aero GUI is ugly, its kinda like forcing the patches the Window Blinds ppl were doing years ago on the masses......

Re:Why transparency?

[melikamp]

This is an UI setting in Vista, it can be altered in seconds and has nothing to do with Firefox.

Re:Why transparency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blurring is CPU-intensive, so transparency is something that wasn't possible years ago, but is now possible. No one likes it when their neighbor has something they don't, so transparency drives people to upgrade their hardware and OS.

Re:Why transparency?

[CaptnMArk]

Agreed. I don't pick the highest quality screen I can afford to look at blurry screen.

Re:Why transparency?

[ProfessionalCookie]

Yup you're right! . . . Apple >> System Preferences >> Desktop & Screensaver >> Translucent Menu Bar

My favorite thing to uncheck.

Re:Why transparency?

[jittles]

But not all of us have glasses, you insensitive clod!

Re:Why transparency?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but I guess reading a webpage tutorial or "how to" underneath a semi-transparent terminal window while typing in commands doesn't increase my efficiency.

Re:Why transparency?

[Psx29]

If you look closely all menus in OS X are slightly transparent.

Re:Why transparency?

[CRiMSON]

I would believe yah you are the only one lol, I love transparency, Cause it let's me see what's going on nested windows (a shell under a browser for example). Too each there I guess.

Re:Why transparency?

[thisnamestoolong]

So? Don't use it. The transparency is an OS function and you can disable it very easily if you like, instead of getting all 'get offa my lawn' about it on /.

Re:Why transparency?

[thisnamestoolong]

I'm sorry, but I guess reading a webpage tutorial or "how to" underneath a semi-transparent terminal window while typing in commands doesn't increase my efficiency.

Thank you, AC, I have used that particular one many, many times. Above and beyond that, why does everything need to be directly functional? I like the look of transparency and I enjoy using my computer more when the UI is aesthetically pleasing, which in turn indirectly improves my productivity.

Re:Why transparency?

[JPLemme]

I know. And that's one of the tests I use to determine if something is a bad idea. "Always show all menu items" in Office XP/2003. "Never show Clippy" (also in Office). Etc.

Re:Why transparency?

[red_blue_yellow]

There's zero functionality derived from transparency for UI elements.

Transparency is occasionally useful when you have limited screen space. It rarely makes sense for things like menus, but every so often it's nice to have a transparent shell (for example) so that I can follow a guide from another document that is sitting behind it, instead of resizing everything or alt-tabbing between windows.

Saying that there is "zero functionality" is overboard.

Re:Why transparency?

[shutdown -p now]

Am I the only person who thinks transparency sucks? If it's too transparent, the content can be hard to pick out from the background.

It's why transparency in Aero applications is mostly used for desktop/chrome areas, where there's no text. The only exception to that is the window title bar, and it uses a simple trick of adding light white glow around black text there to ensure that it's visible even on white or bright backgrounds. In practice, this seems to be quite sufficient - I've never had a problem reading the title regardless of background.

Re:Why transparency?

[BarronVonGoerig]

"Am I the only person who thinks transparency sucks?" Let me guess, you haver a poster of Bush/Cheney hanging on your wall.

Re:Why transparency?

[JPLemme]

Far from the truth, but I LOL'ed.

Re:Why transparency?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can just smear my glasses with Vaseline and minimize Firefox.

Wouldn't it be easier to just remove you glasses?

Re:Why transparency?

[mr_matticus]

There's zero functionality derived from transparency for UI elements.

No, that's just not true. There may be zero functionality derived from gratuitous transparency, but the problem there isn't the method, but the implementation.

For example, proper transparency can serve functional purposes: terminal editors can overlay on other documents, allowing you to work on code and have other materials still visible in the background (e.g. developer documentation). It can also create usable overlay controls in graphics editors/viewers, giving you the controls and tools you need without obscuring the document itself. For one more example, the proper use of adjusted opacity can also.

It also serves general workflow aesthetic purposes. A tool palette that "fades" to partial transparency when not in use helps drive focus to active parts of the desktop. When conservatively used on UI chrome, it also reduces the visual weight of windows, which has proven invaluable in studies to people who consider a pile of windows and palettes to be a jumbled, cluttered mess.

It's the UI equivalent of spinners and under-chassis neon lighting.

No, the UI equivalent of spinners and neon lighting is anything introduced just for show. There are certainly examples of that (and I think the OS X menu bar is one), but there are plenty of counterexamples for intelligent and functional use of lowered opacity.

The fade-in on hover controls in Preview and Quicktime on OS X are strong examples of those.

The Vista/Windows 7 window borders are actually a good use of delineation and proper weight to make the UI chrome less bulky and in-your-face. Same goes with the HUD-style backgrounds in OS X Quick Look/Stacks.

Not everyone has to like it--but it cannot be dismissed that there are legitimate reasons to use it at times. It can't just be categorically dismissed as "zero functionality" because it is so frequently overused and employed in inappropriate situations. Any UI element can be abused in that way (and each and every one of them has been by someone, sometime).

Re:Why transparency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only person who thinks transparency sucks? If it's too transparent, the content can be hard to pick out from the background. And if it's only a little transparent (OS X), the menu can look like it got smudged with dirt. Are we expected to use only low-contrast, muted backgrounds?

If I wanted to see a partially obscured, blurry version of what's behind my browser, I can just smear my glasses with Vaseline and minimize Firefox.

"as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, you must become, DERELICTE!"

Re:Why transparency?

[Anonymous Coward]

An application can define what regions to make transparent, and in these mockups Firefox has made a large chunk of the application transparent, not just the default title bar and border. So yes, it does have a lot to do with Firefox.

Re:Why transparency?

[shirotakaaki]

To each their own I guess. After using OSX for years I just noticed this setting after your post. Turning it off and on just alternates between colors (default and my background). I could see how it would be messy with a flashy background though. Good thing there is an option to turn it off I guess.

Re:Why transparency?

[mr_matticus]

"For one more example, the proper use of adjusted opacity can also"...make pop-up messages and certain dialog boxes more functional (e.g. search-and-replace operations).

Not sure why the rest of that sentence vanished.

Re:Why transparency?

[kklein]

Transparency sucks. It's just a toy. It looks cool, but doesn't do anything, and sometimes makes things hard to see. "Sometimes" is often enough to make the whole thing a net negative.

If it looked cool and never got in the way, then I'm all for it. I'm not one of these anti-aesthetics weirdos we have roaming Slashdot. However, it does get in the way, so it shouldn't be used.

Re:Why transparency?

[theurge14]

Except for dialog boxes being slightly transparent as to make it very apparent which window the dialog box belongs to.

Re:Why transparency?

[Phroggy]

If you look closely all menus in OS X are slightly transparent.

That's true, but they always appear on top of whatever was underneath them, and only temporarily. The menubar isn't allowed to have anything underneath it other than your desktop, and the menubar being transparent looks like complete crap when your screen is full of windows. Steve Jobs likes his screen to be uncluttered, and probably has a 30" LCD on his desk, so it's not completely full of stuff, so he can probably actually see his desktop, and having a transparent menubar probably doesn't look so bad then.

Re:Why transparency?

[badkarmadayaccount]

I hate spinners, but what is people's problem with under-chassis lighting? And transparency, for that matter?

Mockups page slashdotted?

[Saija]

I love the smell of smoking servers in the morning, it smells like victory!

How about just getting 3.5 to work right

[rimcrazy]

Been using 3.5 on OSX. Works like crap. Downgraded back to 3.0 and issues went away.

Re:How about just getting 3.5 to work right

[ColdWetDog]

Using 3.5 on OS X and it works fine (10.5.7 and 10.5.8). So there! Check your add-ons. They're often the source of Great Evil.

Re:How about just getting 3.5 to work right

[rimcrazy]

No add ons at all but google toolbar which gets hosed every time you try to make it larger. Never remembers tabs even though it says it is going to. Crashes like crazy. Back to 3.0 with no problems at all.

Re:How about just getting 3.5 to work right

[AndrewNeo]

And I've been using 3.5 on OSX. Works great, just like on Windows. Funny how that works, isn't it?

Re:How about just getting 3.5 to work right

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't agree more, 3.5.x is the biggest pile of unstable crap ever.

Re:How about just getting 3.5 to work right

[jesser]

I get frustrated when people comment "crashes all the time", "uses lots of memory", or "is slow". There could be hundreds of different causes, each affecting a different tiny percentage of users. Too many people who experience frequent crashes assume that everyone has the same experience, rather than contacting the support team or otherwise trying to figure out what's special about their setup. As a result, even for crashes that affect a whole 1% of users, we never learn enough to fix the bug.

I understand that you'd have to know a lot about software to understand which symptoms fall into this category, so I try not to get mad at users, but rather at software for crashing in the first place or not being helpful for the few users who do experience lots of crashes.

But "works like crap"? That takes the cake.

Re:How about just getting 3.5 to work right

[VoltageX]

Unfortunately, works like crap is not a useful bug report.

Memory Usage

[TheBilgeRat]

I hope the new version will fix some of the memory issues in linux. I use Iron on my windows boxes and would love to have a version of that for my Nix boxes. If Firefox could get that speedy I would be very satisfied.

Re:Memory Usage

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't that last years troll? Dam, you got me.

Re:Memory Usage

[TheBilgeRat]

Was not trolling-I was stating in more general terms of the desire for function over form. Firefox has always felt more "bloated" than I like. What does it matter about the visual theme? That is what skins are for-most people will end up tweaking it to their desktop theme du jour anyway. The long and short is there is no browser that is the perfect answer. Since firefox(or iceweasel) is bundled with the most "popular" linux distro, I think the next release should focus less on asthetics and more on speed and stability. Sure its fast and stable, but there is always room for improvement.

max

[fulldecent]

for transparent backgrounds, I reply this:

most browsers are maximized, and transparent looks awkward

Re:max

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that right? I can't remember the last time I had a browser maximized.

Re:max

[prionic6]

My neck already hurts when I thik about reading slashdot comments in a maximized browser window on a 24'' widescreen monitor. ouch!

Re:max

[PainKilleR-CE]

Don't most windows solidify when maximized? Maybe I'm just imagining it, since I don't have transparent windows available on this machine to check, and don't use maximized windows enough at home to really remember.

Re:max

[Anonymous Coward]

Since this is using Aero, the glass becomes opaque and darkens when the glass-using window is maximized. So if Mozilla doesn't do any special handling, you'll end up with an opaque (but dark) background to the window. They'd need to change the text color to work with the darker background, though, and that may not fit into their desired design vision, so they may instead simply disable the glass effect when the window is maximized (so you get the light blue shades of the non-Aero style instead of the medium-dark greyish maximized glass becomes).

With how long they still have before it would need to all be nailed down, I'm sure everything can (and probably will at least somewhat) change. So what we get may have little resemblance to these draft mockups. But I would have faith that Mozilla will ensure the browser's design both looks good and is functional in both normal and maximized states.

Re:max

[Sloppy]

most browsers are maximized

I don't know how you can stand that. You mention transparent looking awkward, and I agree, but that's just one of many things that are going to be awkward, unless your monitor is both 9x16, and also either really small or you're using really huge fonts.

Re:max

[B4light]

OMG, some people maximize their browsers, and some people don't?!

Where's the menu?

[Anonymous Coward]

In their haste to save vertical space, they seemed to forget that the menu bar is a perfect place to put all those "customize" icons for various functions that otherwise would have to go on a toolbar. Especially if you have a lot of extensions installed that use them. Even on a small screen, you can squeeze quite a few icons into the blank space next to the Help menu. Besides, menus are a perfect space-saving device. How else can you squeeze dozens or even hundreds of options into a single horizontal row? If you can't at least turn the menu bar on, I'm sticking with 3.5.

Same thing with the status bar. I like to hover over a link and see where it's pointing me before I click it.

Die IE Die!!!

[IAmKidding]

Yes...much better UI.

and ofcourse..my favs would be.

1. Faster startup time - i hate when IE takes that time to even show me the white color of the page..I used to love IE6.0...but good to hear abt this startup time thing..
2. Saving on Vertical Space - its often nice to have a big working space and at the sametime dont have to have small buttons...good combination.
3. tabs-on-top (dont know what so good abt it though)

allthough the mockups dont talk abt statusbar thing..will it be like chrome? because..it feels as if we are floating without statusbar..statusbar is a must.

[opera 10 is good too..with that small thumbnails of the tabs on left hand side..but i guess not in the race yet?]

rest..firefox rules!! :)...die IE die.

"Going Chrome"

[Lord Lode]

By "Going Chrome", I thought it was about having every tab be a separate process! But it's just the UI. What a disappointment.

Re:"Going Chrome"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm confused by the whole thing, since Mozilla were using "Chrome" to mean browser UI when google were in their infancy.

There is work under way to do the page per process thing work in Mozilla. I too would like to see that, while having a stupid UI like IE7+ or Chrome doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. I currently have the menu, and URL bar with small icons and that's all I need from a browser UI.

Perhaps the only interface improvement would be an 'auto-hide' feature so that the menu's are painted over the page content only when I mouse up to the top of the window. That's how I have XFCE (top tasklist, bottom panel) and OSX (dock) configured.

Re:"Going Chrome"

[jesser]

We're working on multi-process too, and also hoping to have it in Firefox 4.

Re:"Going Chrome"

[marcuz]

Please please please. Let it be done as soon as possible. Ffox is really very unresponsive piece of software. It wastes my time and makes me angry. I use lots of tabs and it is unbearable - for example trying to load 50 tabs at startup is a pain. I don't care about memory, memory is cheap - but I can't buy 10Ghz processor to run my browser. Please go the Chrome way and do the multi-processing ASAP - forget the UI, it's absolutely unimportant.

Combo stop/refresh/go button FTW

[FiloEleven]

I like tabs on top because it makes them "pop" more--I save almost 0.1 second when hunting for an open tab at the top of the window compared to looking past the normal clutter to a lower tab bar! The lost title bar functionality doesn't affect me much since I always browse in a maximized window, but the mockup shows a thin strip above the tabs which should help those who don't.

The Windows 7 stuff doesn't excite me, because I am no longer a Windows user except here at work, where we will not be moving to 7 anytime soon.

The nicest feature IMO looks to be the combo stop/refresh/go button. That makes so much sense that I'm surprised I haven't seen it before. It removes excess buttons from the UI and shows only the functionality that makes sense within the current context. Very nice.

Re:Combo stop/refresh/go button FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason the triple button might not be such a good idea is that when you want to stop a page load, you might accidentally cause a refresh instead (if the page finishes loading between the time you wanted to stop and the time you clicked).

Re:Combo stop/refresh/go button FTW

[argent]

One reason the triple button might not be such a good idea is that when you want to stop a page load, you might accidentally cause a refresh instead

Happened for me within minutes of installing Safari. There's no "might" about it.

Re:Combo stop/refresh/go button FTW

[jesser]

It might be possible to combine stop and reload without this problem. The plan is for the button to be invisibly disabled for about half a second just after changing from "stop" to "reload", to take human reaction time into account.

Re:Combo stop/refresh/go button FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 4 will definitely be including a transition animation to prevent these accidents.
Also, it will run plugins in a different process, so when they crash they don't take Firefox with them which is the #1,#2,#3,#4,#5,etc. cause of crashes. The UI will also run in a separate thread from content so it stays responsive when people load multiple tabs.

Re:Combo stop/refresh/go button FTW

[argent]

The plan is for the button to be invisibly disabled for about half a second just after changing from "stop" to "reload", to take human reaction time into account.

Worse and worse, now the button will mysteriously _not work_ some times.

How about this... just don't do it?

Re:Combo stop/refresh/go button FTW

[jesser]

It would just act like "stop" and not do anything. How is that mysterious?

Re:Combo stop/refresh/go button FTW

[argent]

It would just act like "stop" and not do anything. How is that mysterious?

If the page just started refreshing under control of a script, I hope it wouldn't be acting like "stop" or even like "refresh", it would just not do anything. If I'm trying to keep it from starting the refresh before it clears the page I'm actually reading, I sure as hell don't want to to "not do anything". I want a button that actually works. One that always does the same thing.

Combo Button

[Anonymous Coward]

I really like the combo button, seriously, you do only need one of those at a time, so automatically deciding which is needed is a great idea.

Only thing is when a page hangs I usually reload it to get it going again, this would make for a two click solution to that, but then again I just use F5 anyway.

As for the tabs above/below thing, I like chromes tabs on top method, saves more room for content, but the obvious solution is to make it a choice in the options menu.

Fugly indeed...

[Anonymous Coward]

And just because you can do alpha-blending translucent windows doesn't mean you should.

Options.

[Kamineko]

Please make it look like Firefox 2. I want it to look like an ordinary Windows XP application. Nothing flashy.

And if you do add something flashy, please make sure to ADD IN THE OPTION TO DISABLE IT. Options are GOOD. KEEP ADDING OPTIONS. Make the options VISIBLE.

Re:Options.

[thisnamestoolong]

You, unfortunately are in the minority. Most people want their computers to look slick, modern, and be aesthetically pleasing. Not only that, but a lot of times the UI is tied in too tightly to back end of a piece of software for it to be a simple fix to change something like that. Expecting Mozilla to put that kind of work into their software to please a small minority of folks such as yourself is unrealistic and bullheaded.

Re:Options.

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn Aero off in Windows?

Re:Options.

[Anonymous Coward]

To many options is a turn off for many people. It's confusing, they don't know what the options mean and they just want it to work.

Don't make all the options overly visible - hide them, requiring the user to check "Advanced" or some such thing. Make it available and explorable for the minority of computer savvy folks, but don't make it overt.

Re:Options.

[HannethCom]

You do realise that one of the design goals of Firefox was to reduce options?

If you really want a full featured browser with the same rendering engine as Firefox you really need to look at Seamonkey, which was the old Mozilla Browser. Unfortunately version 2 that has all the functionality of Firefox 2 & 3 with out the artificial limitations is still in Beta.
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Re:Options.

[Blakey Rat]

Options are bad. The more options there are, the greater the odds that your particular combination of options was never QAed, meaning the application as a whole is much more quirky and buggy than an application with fewer options.

Anyway, if you want Firefox 2 just run Firefox 2. I'm not a big fan of people who are so set in their ways they refuse to even *attempt* to learn a new software interface.

Re:Options.

[jesser]

I'm pretty sure Firefox 4 will still look like an XP application when you run it on XP. The transparency will only be for Vista and Seven users, and even then only if you have it enabled in Windows preferences.

Re:Options.

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes looks like a turd when I run it on XP...

Re:Options.

[jesser]

iTunes looks like a turd on Mac too. What's your point?

Re:Options.

[Anonymous Coward]

That it's possible, with some effort, to make a perfectly serviceable application look like a complete shambles on Windows XP.

Poor UI design

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely dislike the proposed interface. I refused to install Chrome because of this poor designed UI and I will definitely switch browser if FF does the same mistake...

Move along, nothing to see here...

[koro666]

This can already be done.

Also, I hope they will keep the tabs on the bottom, and not clutter the titlebar with it. It's the window manager's job to draw the window border and decoration, definitely not the application's.

Thats when all the bugs in 3.x will be fixed

[Viol8]

Actually , probably not.

More images for the "Oooh shiny!" crowd.

[Viol8]

No doubt they hope some pretty pictures will make the drooling fanbois forget about the endless bugs in 3.x.

im so glad

[nimbius]

firefox will become translucent. god knows you cant browse the web unless its translucent (thats how they do it in minority report.) When will we see the genie effect added so the browser will finally pass the Acid exam with 100% and i can use web 2.0 the right way?

Re:im so glad

[The Moof]

Like many before me have pointed out: The window transparency is a Windows Vista thing, not Firefox.

So much for "Redmond, start your copiers"

[initialE]

This copying trend is going out of hand. How about some innovation from someone other than Apple for once?

Re:So much for "Redmond, start your copiers"

[s1lverl0rd]

Tabs on top was Google, not Apple.

Combo Button is hateful.

[argent]

I really hate the combo button. Safari introduced this and I started running into the following problems:

1. A page is loading slowly (slow site, busy computer, DNS lookup failure, ...) and I go to click "stop", but the load finishes just before I click, the stop icon changed to a reload, and now I have to wait through it loading again.

2. A page is refreshing on a schedule. I decide I want to reload it sooner, so I go to click the reload button... just as it starts reloading, so now the automatic reload gets stopped.

Moving it to the end of the address box in the latest Safari is just an extra layer of manure on the sandwich.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[prionic6]

Press ESC for "stop", F5 or CTRL/CMD-R for "reload", CTRL/CMD-L for adress bar, "ENTER" or "RETURN" for "go"

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[argent]

Press CTRL/CMD-backspace or CTRL/CMD-W before hitting submit next time. The fact that it's possible to avoid using a bad user-interface doesn't mean it's not a bad user-interface.

If you want to run some minimalist browser under Ratpoison, you're welcome to it.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[diamondsw]

Not sure if this validates your points (it was a problem) or not (it was fixed), but in Safari 4 Apple added a miniscule delay between such button transitions, exactly so things like that won't happen.

It can probably be argued equally that this shows it's a bad idea to start with, or that it's a case of just getting the details right. Personally, I like the minimalist interface - to me it evokes earlier days when the browser wasn't a kitchen sink.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[prionic6]

I appreciate your opinon, but would like to suggest another way to handle it. I tested this in Safari / Leopard:

If you want to stop the loading of a page, click with the mouse button, but do not release it yet. Now look at the screen. Is it still showing the x? Then release the button. Has it changed to the relaod symbol? Then move the mouse away and release. The button does not change while you hold the mouse button.

Another idea, the clickable region of the "stop"-state of the button in Safari is quite a bit bigger than the reload-region, so it is possible to click a bit to the left to prevent accidetial reloading. Doesn't help with your problem #2.

Not perfect solutions, but workable if you prefer to use more space for the url entry field or other stuff.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[clone53421]

ALT-D for adress bar

Much easier to hit one-handed while moving the right hand into typing position. Most of the time my right hand is on the mouse.

I don't know if it works on non-Windows versions, but I prefer it.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[prionic6]

I think F8 also works in some win-browsers

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another annoying part is how the loading spinner disappears on the active tab. Sometimes when I click a tab that's still loading, I think it has suddenly stopped. I have to move my eyes away from the spinner that was there up to the address bar to see if it's still loading. It's such a small thing, but surprisingly annoying.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You are dealing with a race condition and you can't eliminate it completely. What if the button changes right before you release it?

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[argent]

I appreciate your opinon, but would like to suggest another way to handle it. I tested this in Safari / Leopard [yet another workaround for a bad user interface]

This is even worse as a workaround than the previous one. No other button on the page requires you to click, hold, and verify that it hasn't changed before releasing. Time-based user interfaces are annoying enough when they're consistent, as a special case workaround they're plumb loco. Just give it up: a combo button dependent on asynchronous state is a bad idea.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hate the combo button.

Agreed. Buttons should not change. I tend not to look at the picture on a button, I learn where buttons are and just click based on the position. Don't make me stop, look at the picture, and think "what is this button going to do for me this time?"

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[Leslie43]

Agreed, it is a hassle, I also hate how they moved it.

Why split up the buttons? Microsoft did this on I.E. and I can't stand it, you always keep the buttons together. You control things with one hand, splitting the buttons means moving that hand around a lot more. Leave them grouped!

Netscape/Mozilla made a name for itself by making a simple browser that people could use. They shouldn't go making major U.I. changes just because some new company decided to challenge it. the basic U.I. works perfectly as it is.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[prionic6]

Hey, I was just suggesting workarounds to handle your problem, assuming you were interested in using Safari.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[argent]

I'm more interested in discouraging Firefox from picking up this stupid user interface design as well.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[zobier]

Your hints are useful, and I wish more people knew their way around keyboard shortcuts, but none of this changes the fact that this 'feature' is a poor UI.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[clone53421]

What if the button changes right before you release it?

Nothing, because it can't. If the page finishes loading while the Stop button is depressed, releasing the mouse button will just execute the Stop action, which does nothing. It won't change into the Reload button until you've released the button. If it changes to Reload before you click, just move the mouse off the button before releasing it so as to not trigger the click event.

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[Randle_Revar]

I run a maximalist browser in a (fairly) minimalist WM, you insensitive clod! (SeaMonkey and Awesome, for the record)

Re:Combo Button is hateful.

[argent]

Obviously the definition of a minimalist window manager has drifted over time. Feature creep at the low end. Give wmx a try.

Combo stop/refresh/go button FAIL

[argent]

The nicest feature IMO looks to be the combo stop/refresh/go button. That makes so much sense that I'm surprised I haven't seen it before.

You have, in Safari, it sucks dirty swamp water through used oil filters.

Re:Combo stop/refresh/go button FAIL

[FiloEleven]

I never used Safari enough to notice, but that is apparently a good thing. Now that you mention it, I see the problem with it and it doesn't look like such a good idea after all.

Space ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

I too use chrome cause I have a 12.1" screen and the mozilla stuff on top takes tons more space.

I imagine every ultraportable ( I refuse to call them 'netbooks' ) on the market would need something like Chrome as a browser.

IE8

[C_Kode]

Can we look anymore like IE8? Did I ever tell you I don't like IE8's UI?

Missing what??

[ProfessionalCookie]

I don't know what you're smoking but Chrome has a title bar. It's an easy drag target. Here, have a look: http://www.google.com/chrome.

See. Title bar. Big, double-clickable, dragable, resizable, titlebar.

I'm not a Chrome user but if you're going to complain, at least get it right ;)

Re:Missing what??

[PainKilleR-CE]

If you fill the width with tabs, you end up with about a slightly less than 2/3-sized title bar. Of course, if you only have 1 or 2 tabs open, you end up with about a 1.5x-height title bar for a portion of the window. Additionally, the window function buttons are the smaller size of the title bar.

Re:Missing what??

[spyrochaete]

If you were a Chrome user you wouldn't be so quick to call foul. Press ctrl-T a few times and you'll instantly see what I mean. The title bar gets filled with tabs and the draggable/clickable part is razor thin and has no textual title at all. That's a far cry from the way 99.9% of Windows software operates.

Re:Missing what??

[prockcore]

The title bar gets filled with tabs and the draggable/clickable part is razor thin and has no textual title at all.

Maybe windows should provide a better way to move windows then. In ubuntu, I hold the super key, and then I can drag the window around by clicking and dragging any part of it.

Re:Missing what??

[spyrochaete]

Maybe windows should provide a better way to move windows then. In ubuntu, I hold the super key, and then I can drag the window around by clicking and dragging any part of it.

That sounds like a very good feature, but I don't think Windows needs to consider adding it just because some developers break their existing UI standards. They should add a convenient feature like that for its own merits, not because they're being provoked.

[sarcasm]wow[/sarcasm]

[owyn999]

yeah as if some of us don't get most of these features sans the transparency from oh I don't know opera 10 but you know it doesn't have plugins but it now has widgets and jscripts for greasemonkey scripts if you really need site specific and the widgets do external stuff that doesn't have to be site rendering dependant

URL copying fail.

[argent]

Botheration, that should be it sucks dirty swamp water through used oil filters.

They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[Ilgaz]

That is exactly why we must meta moderate like crazy these days. Troll has a very strict explanation and believe or not, it means exactly same on slashdot.

These idiots really confuse Slashdot moderation with digg down&up while Slashdot does make a favor to them, overrated and underrated are exactly for that purpose.

There are unhappy people with every kind of browser&application out there and yes, in this age, a browser should be really fast, simple to use and stable having very good standards support. It is valid for every browser out there. It is not just Firefox who doesn't get people's concerns, I have heard first time that system's default browser can't download files. It is Safari for Snow Leopard. Way to go Apple... All of this for run a freaking in 64bit mode, hurry of release to show finger to MS. See Firefox loving moderator? Every browser these days are a bit disconnected from users actual needs and demands.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[AlHunt]

>That is exactly why we must meta moderate like crazy these days

Except that Metamoderation these days doesn't present you with already-moderated posts. At least, not for me. All I get is a selection of 10 random posts and I have to decide if you, the average Slashdotter, would benefit. Nearly every post I'm given to "meta-moderate" us not previously moderated.

Now, someone mod me down.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[Anonymous Coward]

These idiots really confuse Slashdot moderation with digg down&up while Slashdot does make a favor to them, overrated and underrated are exactly for that purpose.

Despite the little labels, it has always functioned the same damn way. If you agree it's "insightful" and if you disagree it's a "troll" or "overrated".

The goal of Slashdot moderation is to filter down the Top N comments to present the consensus opinion to casual readers, not individually classify every post.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[Ilgaz]

Meta moderation is not re-moderation of posts, it is used to hunt down the moderator abusers and people not understanding what moderation really is. You moderate the moderator in fact. So, just because poor guy says "Firefox crashes" and talks completely on topic about a different focus developers should have rather than cosmetic stuff and gets "dugg down" as troll, you will notice it and tell it is not fair.

I know it needs considerable time but that is why this and limited Karma prevented Slashdot from becoming some Bangalore PR company outlet, astroturfer playground like other sites.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[MaraDNS]

The problem is that Slashdot is handing out moderation points like candy these days. They're becoming more Digg-like; maybe because their overloads have told them that the more traffic Slashdot gets, the better. Since Digg.com is a good deal more popular than Slashdot, maybe they're trying to emulate Digg more.

Personally, I prefer the older Slashdot where we didn't confuse "troll" with "legitimate criticism of Linux" or "Legitimate rebuttal of conservative idea". The reason Slashdot had moderation in the old days was to stop the brats who would post Goatse links and what not; it was not to stifle legitimate discussion.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[AlHunt]

I understand that meta moderation is moderating the moderator. My problem is that when I go to meta-moderate, none of the posts I'm given have been moderated. Go re-read the paragraph at the top of the meta-moderation page. It's changed in the last few months.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this from department of legitimacy department?

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

Personally, I prefer the older Slashdot where we didn't confuse "troll" with "legitimate criticism of Linux" or "Legitimate rebuttal of conservative idea".
The year 2000 called it wants its /. nostalgia back. Btw you need to get with the times, troll now== something bad about apple || anything nice about libertarianism || lower taxes/less regulation.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[hkmwbz]

I can't find anywhere to meta-moderate anymore. Weird.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[hkmwbz]

Personally, I prefer the older Slashdot where we didn't confuse "troll" with "legitimate criticism of Linux" or "Legitimate rebuttal of conservative idea".

Sorry to have say this, but "you must be new here" ;) (...waiting for a 3 or 4-digit user to chase me off the lawn...)

In all seriousness, moderation has never been much better than today. Not even through rose-tinted glasses. There were always problems, hence the meta moderation and such.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[WaZiX]

Parent is an obvious troll!

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[Omestes]

The year 2000 called it wants its /. nostalgia back. Btw you need to get with the times, troll now== something bad about apple || anything nice about libertarianism || lower taxes/less regulation.

Thats why I love /. politics. The left sees the place as dominated completely by Libertarians with little shrines to Ayn Rand sitting in their living rooms (parents basement). The right sees it as a bunch of Leftist radicals with little shrines to Karl Marx sitting in their living rooms (parents basement). I think /. is basically reprentative of the lunatic fringe. Which lunatic fringe? ALL OF THEM. If there is something with a lunatic fringe, /. wholly embraces it.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[zobier]

Have you meta-moderated recently?

The UI has changed.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[zobier]

Yeah, I guess now they run a generic score keeper (like in the firehose or on reddit) in the background and compare moderations to these scores in order to rate the fairness of the moderations.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[MaraDNS]

Slashdot is a place for nutcases of all kinds. For example, open source developers. What idiot works hard making completely free software without being paid?

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[Anonymous Coward]

but who meta moderates the meta moderators?

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[electrosoccertux]

This is good!

Even meta-moderation is flawed-- and (the way it was run previously) is the reason I never bothered. If I'm moderating the quality of posts coming from a user instead, and not his actual decisions for how to dish out mod points, then we're less likely to have issues like the following:
So, imagine a meta-mod wingnut disagrees with a moderator's decision that a post was insightful, informative, etc-- particularly, because said post brings up a good point that meta-mod doesn't want people to know. So he meta-mods that the original moderator's modding was "bad modding" or whatever the radio-button was. This can particularly be a problem in political threads.

This way, the odds of a meta-mod getting a political post where he is likely to become unfair in his meta-modding (for the purpose of furthering his own agenda) are much fewer (perhaps we could even make it so that political meta-moding never occurs-- no meta-modding of posts in political threads). This way the meta-mod is only deciding whether or not the poster would be a good candidate to be given mod points. If he does not contribute much of use to the discussion, he probably shouldn't have moderating abilities.

This makes so much sense now that I think about. Kudos to CmdrTaco or whoever thought of this.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[AlHunt]

No, moderating is designed to make a post "more visible" to the casual reader. If person X mods a post "insightful" or some other positive mod, it rises to the surface (so to speak). Person Y meta-modding the original moderation "unfair" doesn't erase the original positive moderation and doesn't cause the original post to drop back down, in terms of visibility (as far as I know). I believe it just effects the original moderators odds of getting more mod points.

I used to meta-mod most days but now I only do so infrequently. I don't think I need to be "voting up or down" some casual comment or joke. The whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that most posters don't bother quoting what they're responding to, so there's no context to judge the post against.

Oh, well. It's not my website and I guess the power that be will run it how they see fit. I'm still here so must not be too aggravated by it all.

Re:They are abusing moderation for a long time now

[ConceptJunkie]

I rarely bothered. Given the lack of context, it was seldom possible to really judge if the moderation was fair or not. This is particularly true for something modded "Off-Topic".

Of course, there's the moderations "Overrated" and "Underrated" which are meta-mods on their own. That always struck me as really weird.

It's seriously flawed, but still works reasonably well. We've had it with little change for more than a decade. I don't think it's going anywhere.

So why don't you browse in full screen mode?

[Animaether]

In FireFox, enter fullscreen mode. Boom, 100% - a few pixels at the top, all for rendering the page content.
Want to get to the tabs - hover your mouse over those few pixels.. voila, there's the tabs and address bar.

Re:So why don't you browse in full screen mode?

[Animaether]

Oh shit, +2 Troll - that's a new one.

How is saying "so browse in full screen" (also available in Chrome) when the parent poster lauds the extra browsing real-estate he gets in Chrome, a troll post? What would I be trolling for? Some scathing reply that full screen browsing is the bastard child of Bill Gates? Yeesh ;) /nokarma

FIXME:

[thenextstevejobs]

Why'd all the browser developers decide that this same model we have for browsing web pages is adequate? Considering how much time we, as a human race, are currently using the web browser, I would hope that we could make one that is a little better than this Netscape 26.0 shit we're stuck with. Apple, are you there? Can you please do for the browser what you've done for the phone? Google, we know you have like $n! dollars, can't you throw some more money at this problem? Chrome (which I am browsing from ATM) is pretty half-baked.

Shouldn't this thing read to me by now, standard? Shouldn't I have a better way to look at multiple pages than separate tabs and windows? Why does it all crash so much? Why must it be such an unelegant, awful thing to display information to from programming languages?

Re:FIXME:

[Blakey Rat]

I'd just be happy if they adopted some old-as-dirt "innovations", like the ability to split scrollbars and look at two parts of the document at once. Word's had that since, what, 1995 or something and we *still* don't have it in *any* web browser?

Re:FIXME:

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't I have a better way to look at multiple pages than separate tabs and windows?

What do you suggest? I don't think there is anything better other than tweaks.

This question is very similar to the debate about keyboards (which some people say totally suck and we should have invented something better by now). Consider even if we had some sort of perfect super-AI voice recognition or 3D "wave your hands" type input, a keyboard would still be better for many, many tasks because it does what it does the best of any device conceived.

Re:FIXME:

[Eil]

Why'd all the browser developers

Firefox is open source software, so congratulations! You are now a browser developer! We look forward to seeing your code contributions for text-to-speech, a new MDI model, stability improvements, and comprehensive development integration in time for Firefox 4.0 to ship 11 months from now. I'm sure you already understand that features like this normally take teams of developers years to get right, it's incredible that you're volunteering your time so generously to work on these projects yourself. Thanks so much for your help, it's very rare these days that someone stands up and commits themselves to this kind of enormous project instead of just whining about it on Slashdot.

Re:FIXME:

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Shouldn't this thing read to me by now, standard?

Screen readers (for the visually impaired) already do. Generally, it's an awful way to browse the web; a slow and purely literal description of everything, including buttons, links, and images.

If you've ever played with speech synth, you know it's solidly in the cool-but-not-very-useful category.

  Unless you're illiterate or just can't see, you don't want to experience the web this way.

Shouldn't I have a better way to look at multiple pages than separate tabs and windows?

There are. Opera and Safari have wall-of-thumbnails views. There's RSS if you want to skim through text summaries. There's even a cool Firefox add-on that concatenates series of pages into one long scrollable page. (Great for those multipage articles with endless "next>>" links.)

If you actually have some ideas of your own in mind, I'm sure some add-on developer would love to hear from you.

Why does it all crash so much?

My browser generally doesn't. When it does, it's usually because of Flash. Unless Adobe suddenly gets its shit together, that's not something any browser developer can fix.

Why must it be such an unelegant, awful thing to display information to from programming languages?

Mostly because we don't have any better ideas yet.

Re:FIXME:

[BZ]

> Unless Adobe suddenly gets its shit together, that's not something any browser developer
> can fix.

Actually, it is. Just have to put the plug-in in a separate process. Safari's working on that; so is Firefox. Then it can crash its little sandbox all it wants...

Re:FIXME:

[thenextstevejobs]

I appreciate your comment, but I think you are mistaking underwhelmed with whining

In retards (I meant to type regards but I'm gonna leave that) to contributing myself, at this point I'm not ruling out attempting to develop my own browser. It's on my list of things about the world that I might fix.

It's right next to creating a better workspace manager for OSX, implementing a new scripting language with features I like, adding easier database support to JavaScript, and formulating a new model of quantum physics. Maybe I'll release an iPhone app this year too.

Re:FIXME:

[thenextstevejobs]

Shouldn't this thing read to me by now, standard?

Screen readers (for the visually impaired) already do. Generally, it's an awful way to browse the web; a slow and purely literal description of everything, including buttons, links, and images.

If you've ever played with speech synth, you know it's solidly in the cool-but-not-very-useful category.

Unless you're illiterate or just can't see, you don't want to experience the web this way.

Actually, I majored in computational linguistics at school, and while I didn't focus on speech synth at all (I'm a syntax guy!), it certainly did not leave me thinking that we were far from a very decent ability to be read to by a computer.

I think, if I can have someone sit across the room from me and read a webpage to me and have it be comprehensible (which a select few are capable of doing), then I think we can get a damn robot to do it. We need to move away from only relying on our eyes when it comes to computing. Then I can read Slashdot easily when I'm driving or biking or walking or simply not being tethered to this awful screen technology we use these days

Re:FIXME:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Konqueror (at least the KDE 3.5 version, I haven't really used KDE 4 much) has the ability to split a window/tab into multiple panes (horizontally/vertically however you like) which could be used to view different parts of the same document (or different documents).

Re:FIXME:

[badkarmadayaccount]

Well, Opera isn't *any* browser, I agree, though I'm an avid FF user for years.

Re:FIXME:

[Blakey Rat]

Wow, that's one thing Opera does right. Now if only I could get over the 99 things it does wrong, and the god-awful UI, I might be able to tolerate it long enough -- no I'm kidding, I hate that fucking browser.

There's a reason Opera isn't used by more people despite all the features it has. The smugness of its users like you doesn't help, either.

Re:FIXME:

[badkarmadayaccount]

Didn't I say that I use firefox? Most of the things people complain about are a matter of taste, and it's configurable, though not as easy as many, myself included, would like. Tough I have nothing but the utmost respect for the Opera team, and hope they continue the good, if not widely appreciated.

Can they fix JS handling on Slashdot first?

[edmicman]

I not sure who to blame, but every time I go to /. in Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu, it hangs/greys out the screen for a good 20-30 seconds and maxes out the CPU. Granted, it's an old crappy laptop (Dell Inspiron 600m), but I don't remember those problems when I had XP, and it works acceptably in Chromium's nightly builds. Basically, FF dies on Linux for a minute or so on any page that is heavy in JS or had embedded Flash videos. Sigh....

Re:Can they fix JS handling on Slashdot first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your complaints will fall on deaf ears, Mozilla don't listen to anyone now.

And to be honest, this is only partly their fault, the code on Slashdot is downright awful and it is broken in several browsers in their own unique ways for each sub-domain.

He is whining, you are apologizing.

[Ilgaz]

So are you claiming Firefox developers invented an application that doesn't crash? Should he paste 300 line crash reports each time he talks about his browser crashing?

For example, Apple did release the very same, boring looking Safari for Snow Leopard with one extra feature. Flash/Plugins/Java applets can't crash it since they run in separate thread. What about implementing THAT instead of Windows 7 UI tricks while 30% of global www users are perfectly happy with your default theme?

If we speak about UI evolution, fine... What about helping Cairo Project so OS X Firefox users see the text rendered same way as their other OS X browsers/apps? What about listening to international users issues with characters which hasn't been fixed for years?

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[clone53421]

I'm just saying that, in my experience, Firefox seems extremely stable. It almost never crashes. Claiming it's unstable is trolling unless it's backed up by some indication that either my (good) experience isn't typical or that his (bad) experience is worse than mine because of some valid explanation.

If he'd included any information at all – even just the OS or the version of Firefox – I'd be able to tell whether his experience should be similar to mine. "Firefox [version] on [OS] is unstable" is quite different from "Firefox is unstable".

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[PainKilleR-CE]

While I agree that both OS X and international issues should be important, it should probably also be remembered that some users would like the Windows version of Firefox to conform to Windows UI standards, too, even if IE and Office don't bother to do so (and who knows how many other MS apps).

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[Ilgaz]

OS X users have Camino solution. It is a Cocoa browser running Gecko engine. While guy is working on Chrome for OS X, he didn't give up his Camino and users.

I bet it is perfectly possible to make a Win32 browser using Mozilla engine but that time, XUL magic will be gone, just like Camino for OS X. While I am perfectly happy without extensions, it would really bother some people. I am saying majority of users are really used to Firefox UI and they like it, as far as I have seen. Even gigantic back button is a welcome change. Majority of users aren't slashdot types you know.

OS X does have UI standards and it somehow pushes them to developers, on Windows, it is not the same deal.

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[PainKilleR-CE]

OS X does have UI standards and it somehow pushes them to developers, on Windows, it is not the same deal.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx

Windows does have UI standards readily available for developers in the place a Windows developer would be most likely to look for them. They can also be downloaded in PDF format, and they used to publish it as a book, too.

Of course, there are a lot of guidelines that a lot of people ignore, and a few that are in direct conflict with Apple's guidelines for OS X. The conflicts especially are where Apple either ignores the guidelines for Windows applications or simply falls back on consistency across platforms, rather than consistency on the current platform (something MS got bashed for with one of the 9x versions of Office for Mac OS).

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[Pulse_Instance]

So what you're saying is that on your unspecified version of Firefox on an unspecified OS does not crash... How exactly is that different than saying that for him an unspecified version of Firefox on an unspecified OS he does not want it to crash?
Notice also that he did not say that it does crash only that he wants it not to crash.

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[dreemernj]

But he never said "Firefox is unstable." Unstable would imply things that he never implied. He said "Make it not crash, and I don't care what it looks like." And that comment could be made in any web browser UI overhaul discussion on the web and still be something important to keep in mind.

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[clone53421]

So what you're saying is that on your unspecified version of Firefox on an unspecified OS does not crash...

Yes...

How exactly is that different than saying that for him an unspecified version of Firefox on an unspecified OS he does not want it to crash?

Not in the least bit different... except that he's the one who brought it up in the first place, which puts the burden of evidence on him to convince me (and anyone else who hasn't found Firefox to be noticeably unstable). But, since you asked, I'm using version 3.5.2 on Windows XP.

Notice also that he did not say that it does crash only that he wants it not to crash.

He wouldn't have felt the need to say "function before form" if he didn't feel like Firefox devs were putting form before function, which implies that he thinks it is lacking in function. Then he explicitly clarified that: they need to make it not crash.

Alternately, if they got the function right, they ought to be free to do whatever they want to the form, and he shouldn't care – so if they got the function right, why is he commenting?

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Thanks for proving the point:

It almost never crashes.

Wouldn't it be better if, during one of those rare cases that it crashes for you, it didn't take down every single tab and window you have open?

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[SilverJets]

If he'd included any information at all â" even just the OS or the version of Firefox â" I'd be able to tell whether his experience should be similar to mine. "Firefox [version] on [OS] is unstable" is quite different from "Firefox is unstable".

Firefox on Solaris (Sparc) is not stable and has never really been. Like everyone else posting here, I want a stable, functional browser over a flashy UI. Oooohhh, I can see the desktop background through parts of the window !! Big F-ing deal.

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[clone53421]

The crash recovery has worked just fine for me in the rare occasion where it has crashed.

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I haven't had as good luck with that. One obvious example: If some other tab crashes while I'm typing this, I won't lose what I typed. Firefox might well open a tab pointing back to your comment here, but it wouldn't contain this text.

Arguably, this is something that could be fixed at the level of the website -- if Slashdot had a plain HTML form (and not ajaxy), Firefox might be able to recover it (though probably not). Or, Slashdot could take a Gmail-like approach, and periodically save it to a draft on the server.

But I don't have to deal with either of these. The other tab crashes, even an extension can crash and not cause problems for what I'm typing right here.

That, and Chrome remembers open tabs, too, in the form of the "recently closed" history in a new tab.

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[clone53421]

One obvious example: If some other tab crashes while I'm typing this, I won't lose what I typed. Firefox might well open a tab pointing back to your comment here, but it wouldn't contain this text.

I haven't used it personally, but there's an addon called Lazarus Form Recovery that claims to solve this particular problem.

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[clone53421]

Also...

Chrome remembers open tabs, too, in the form of the "recently closed" history in a new tab.

There's another addon, Tab Mix Plus, which includes a recently-closed tabs list in the right-click menu for the tab bar. (Or just hit ctrl-shift-T to restore the most recently closed tab.) It's actually one of two addons (the other being AdBlock Plus) I would recommend by default if someone wanted to know what addons to use.

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Oh, Firefox has this built in anyway, mostly -- right-click, "undo close tab". My point was that this, and the crash recovery, are two things that Chrome has anyway, in some form.

So, Firefox gives you crash recovery. Chrome gives you crash recovery and less chance of a whole-browser crash. (Seriously, is there any other browser that you'd comfortably use the latest svn as a default browser?)

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Interesting. ...I'll have to add this for Chrome. Looks like it wouldn't be too difficult.

More for navigating away from the form than anything, I suspect.

Re:He is whining, you are apologizing.

[Ilgaz]

Of course, Windows has UI standards. It is just, XCode forces you to conform to the OS X UI standards right from the beginning.

Apple and MS are the actual end user GUI inventors, they both have different opinions on where things should be. I am one of OS X users who thinks pushing OS X scheme to Windows is really stupid and childish especially considering the extra work they had to do with all those weird hacks.

IMHO they changed their mind and Safari 4 windows success compared to earlier ones really made them think twice about it.

The application you talk about is Word 6 for MacOS. As Mac users keep asking for the "full windows thing" , MS have sit and directly converted the Win32 application to MacOS. The result was a disaster. Just like they asked for Outlook for years and now they got it, Of course, this time, MS got their lesson and even using Webkit etc. to render mails I heard. Of course, Office for Mac is an Amazon chart topper except the OS X major release times so that should tell you either "I hate ms office os x" guys are lying or BillG keeps buying them :)

UI nice but speed?

[domatic]

The webkit based browsers and Opera have greasy speed compared to Firefox. Firefox's javascript based XUL design serves it well in that developing for the browser is nice. But it is just plain slow compared to some of the competing browsers. And I've seen more than one conversion story away from Firefox to things like Chrome because the speed difference is so marked. Do the Mozilla folks intend to concentrate on getting the performance up?

news_monster

[ciaran_duffy]

I have to admit I'm not really that bothered about the look or a flashy interface - a decent browser, with useful finctions that works well is what I want!

Apple gave up insisting too

[Ilgaz]

Even Apple admitted that fact and Safari for Windows tries to use Windows native controls. I didn't look deeply to it but as it comes from a company who insisted on iTunes/Quicktime UI on Win32 for years, it is a big deal.

No need to be some kind of insider to predict Quicktime X for Windows will follow the same attitude and iTunes X will follow.

Re:Apple gave up insisting too

[jgtg32a]

I've noticed that a bit with iTunes about the only thing that they've forgot was having preferences in the Edit menu instead of the Tools menu.

Re:Apple gave up insisting too

[RiotingPacifist]

you always edit preferences, sometimes you tool options though.

Re:Apple gave up insisting too

[jgtg32a]

True enough, I actually think it makes a bit more sense under edit, but all other Windows programs have it under tools.

Yeah but...

[multi io]

I'm sure it'll still run the damn Flash plugin in-process, making "kill" the most frequent way to quit Firefox. But it'll have tabs-on-top. Talk about priorities!

Follow The Leader

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

If Google or Apple but their tabs in a rotating circular drum surrounding the window, you can be certain that Open Source developers would follow swiftly behind. It's disappointing to see it confirmed that Open source will never, ever have the confidence to put forth its own designs, paradigms or new innovations directly in front of users unless a glitz and glamour company has broken the mould first. The worst part is how eagerly FOSS developers ape the latest trend. A little dignity would be a lot more digestible.

By contrast, Microsoft would simply wait to see what Apple did in their next revision before implementing what was kept.

To the topic at hand, Tabs on top are an atrocious development, unfit for human consumption. They are the product of people who spend too much of their time using flashy, UI paradigm-less monstrosities like Winamp skins, Flash site and those awful OSX floating widget things, not to mention that ridiculous top bar. Inclusing that was the worst decision GNOME has ever made. Most normal people on the other hand expect applications and button that stay within their window box, that don't warp or distort when your mouse draws near, and that don't look like they just had a full body wax job done. There was very little wrong with the 1997-era user interface.

I curse the Cult of Mac and what it has wrought on my UI's over the last 10 years. I'm hoping the Order of Google will not cast its baleful eye towards what little sanity remains in modern day GUIs.

Re:Follow The Leader

[multipartmixed]

> It's disappointing to see it confirmed that Open source will never, ever
> have the confidence to put forth its own designs, paradigms or new innovations
> directly in front of users unless a glitz and glamour company has broken the mould first.

Yes, I was sorely dissappointed to see it take this long for Mozilla to implement a tracing JIT in their JavaScript engine.

After all, Microsoft's version of JavaScript has had a tracing JIT since, what, 1974?

Re:Follow The Leader

[HigH5]

I second that. Firefox started the browser war, but now it seems to follow the others rather than raising the bar.

Noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Arrgh, were back with those early nineties freeware style interfaces. Trying to be bling is the death of interface. Die random curved element that semi swosh around. It looks like a shitty mplayer/vlc/winamp skin!

Stop It Now. I mean it!

Fossil

[jrennie]

Is Slashdot so behind-the-times that it considers FFox news relevant?

As long as they keep the native WM frame

[pen]

Chrome's UI is kind of annoying but tolerable overall. One reason I really hate it, though, is that they replace the native window manager's UI with their own home-brewed crap. Not only is it kind of buggy, since it hasn't had nearly as much user testing, but it breaks all kinds of standard WM functionality. Chrome windows don't respond to "Minimize All" or "Move to Other Monitor" or any other kind of functionality that's handled by the WM that doesn't know what to do with this window that doesn't have a frame. Please, Mozilla, don't repeat this mistake!

It's a matter of personal preference

[A Friendly Troll]

A: "Tabs on top!"

B: "No, tabs on bottom!"

A: "STFU!!!"

B: "No, you STFU n00b!!!!!!"

C: "STFU both of you wankers, tabs need to be on the left side!" ... sigh.

It's all a matter of personal preference. For as long as Firefox offers the option to rearrange things as you'd like them to be, everything will be fine. (Note that I have no idea if Firefox allows that. I'm sure it does, or an extension is available for it. End result - it's possible.)

*My* personal preference would probably make most of you sick: my tabs are actually on the _bottom of the browser window_. From top to bottom, it's app menu, navigation + address bar, personal bar, web page itself, tabs, status bar. And I like it that way. Been using that arrangement for about seven years now.

Don't make a big deal out of nothing. Whatever is chosen by default, you will surely have the ability to rearrange it as you see fit.

Nuts... I was hoping for Webkit...

[zarmanto]

At a glance, I thought that the article title meant that Firefox 4.0 was going to be based upon the Chrome browser, and therefore Webkit... no such luck, I guess. A browser which has full compatibility with the Firefox legacy of plug-ins, and runs on the Webkit rendering engine would almost certainly replace Safari as my default browser on both my Macintosh and my PC -- and I would hazard a guess that I'm not the only one who could say this. What's more, then the "browser wars" would effectively be whittled (back) down to a boxing match between Internet Explorer and Webkit, instead of this wild-and-crazy-free-for-all that's been going on ever since Netscape gave up the fight and sold out to AOL. Maybe then, the collective market share of all of these webkit-based browsers might drive web development more strongly to a "standards centered" philosophy of design and away from the "IE workaround" philosophy of design.

Ah, well. A guy can dream, can't he?

Re:Nuts... I was hoping for Webkit...

[midnaz]

First you might find it hard to get that dream of Firefox extensions working in Webkit, since every extension is written in XUL which is not in Webkit. And why the heck do you want less competition in the browser area?? IE isn't really supplying competition, a browser war between them and Webkit sounds horrible. What we have right now is so much better than that boxing match. Keep in mind that Firefox has double the market share of all Webkit browsers put together - and also that a "standards centered philosophy" that just one rendering engine implements could also be called "proprietary" (ie. IE's Webslices are technically "open standards" but nobody would call them that).

Re:Nuts... I was hoping for Webkit...

[zarmanto]

Wow. Someone certainly has a bee in their bonnet.

The standards to which I alluded are defined by independent organizations, such as W3C, Ecma, IETF and others, and have been championed by such organizations as the Web Standards Project. Web slices is technically "open" as you said -- and as such, has even been incorporated into Firefox via plug-ins as early as Ff2.0 -- but the "standard" for web slices was actually developed and published by Microsoft, with little or no collaboration from the rest of the industry. So with that, you're really attempting to compare apples and... well, Microsoft.

Webkit is most assuredly not the only browser to strive for (real) standards compliance... if you had followed the news surrounding the release of the Acid3 test a couple of years ago, you would already know this.

My comment about Firefox plug-ins was really more of a reflection upon the days when Firefox was my default browser, and a rumination on the lack of similar add-ins in Safari -- but frankly, I can live without them. And I couldn't possibly care less what language Firefox used to develop their plug-ins; other browsers have plug-ins too, and they're not all based upon XUL. If the folks over at mozilla.org ever did decide to chuck Gecko, and instead built a plug-in framework around Webkit and dubbed it the next version of Firefox, I am confident that they would have no difficulty at all finding a way to make it work. Likewise, I am certain that third-party plug-in developers would moan and groan about having to recode their plug-ins... but most of them would still do the work, and we'd all be quite happy with the end results.

Now, with the red herrings out of the way... to directly address the question you posed: I suppose I can see how you might interpret my comment as "less" competition, but that is the furthest thing from my mind. You state quite accurately that Internet Explorer isn't supplying any competition, but frankly, that's because they're now the incumbent. They don't have to bring the battle at all... someone else needs to bring the battle to them. With that in mind, what I desire is stronger competition against the Microsoft juggernaut, which might ultimately result in real progress across the board, which can only be defined as directly influencing the juggernaut itself. And let's face it: Opera may be almost exactly as standards compliant as Webkit, (and a halfway decent browser in its own right) but it's not exactly big enough to drive the market in any meaningful way on its own, right? So they're not much help. There are several other even smaller players out there, but they'll never even show up on a market share pie chart as anything more then a speck, and it's quite rare indeed for any of them to come up with something so innovative or useful that it actually propagates beyond the narrow scope of that one browser. And obviously the most noticeable non-Microsoft slice on that chart is the open source efforts of Firefox/Mozilla -- but they've been running at a distant second place to Microsoft in this race since their inception, and in all that time, all they've really managed to accomplish for us is to popularize a few key features, such as tabbed browsing, which was actually a concept borrowed from one of those lesser known browsers.

In other words, I'm not saying I want Opera and Konqueror and iCab to all just go away... rather, I simply want to see a new champion come forth to challenge Microsoft's indisputable dominance, picking up the battle that Firefox has effectively abandoned. And more importantly, I would like to see that champion steal enough market share away from Internet

Lame

[j_cocaine]

15 years and the best they can do is change the chrome to transparent?

it look slike ie 8

[trum4n]

so i hate it. where the fuck is the file menu ppl. this isnt a fucking mac.

personally...

[pjr.cc]

Now that chrome on ubuntu is getting might stable, i find myself using it alot more often. I've been dying for the day when chrome is good enough to replace firefox simply because mozilla dont give a rats bum about linux (well, thats not fair, they do but they could do alot better).

As for "windows 7 graphics features". Does anyone else get annoyed seeing what compiz (actually, it wasnt called compiz then, it was something else) was doing when aero came out simple because aero was crap in comparison? The reason I say that is cause i find the visual aspect of what linux is capable of quite impressive in comparison to windows (i.e. better) in alot of ways. All the while though I also hate where it seems to have fallen behind. Pull up nautilus for example - so much wasted white space (goes for all gnome apps really), yet the panels are beautifully efficient - i only have one. Same with ubuntu remix's window picker applet - nothing short of what a task bar should EXACTLY be, and its brilliant.

It was interesting as well to see google chrome's "how do we hack gnome/Qt to do that window bit like windows" - and they did it, which is great, but I do hope gnome get the message in terms of UI flexibility at the coding level. Time will tell.

Oh, and another point - fix SSL!!!

[pjr.cc]

Ever since ff 3, i have HATED firefox cause of its "invalid site certificate" rubbish. Do mozilla even get how absolutely annoying this is? Why oh god why would they do that. The way it was done previously (and the way EVERY OTHER BROWSER DOES IT was perfectly sufficient). Now, whenever I build a server (or a new network devide with a ssl-enabled web server for config) I have to go through that same pain. Given I work for an SI, this is frequent - and the reason I so desperately want to get rid of it in favour of chrome.

Re:Oh, and another point - fix SSL!!!

[MacTenchi]

It's not broken. Your certificate isn't signed by a trusted CA, so it isn't trustworthy. No user should ever encounter a self-signed certificate going to their bank, so the warning is flashy. Just confirm the exception and get on with your work.

Re:Oh, and another point - fix SSL!!!

[pjr.cc]

unfortuantely im doing it alot, a hell of a lot actually...

So while my browser is getting flooded with these rediculous certs it wants to remember (or do i check the "dont remember permanently" box and deal with it even more often - i.e. more annoying) it slowly gets slower and slower because it has to record them all. Right now (just on my laptop) there are about 600 certs in that unknown catagory. Do you have any idea how much it speeds up my browser when i erase them all? Unfortunately, i do have some that I want to keep cause they're for various admin tasks and I cant change the cert. In several of our SAN storage gui's for example.

The best solution (for me) is to switch browser, which i will happily do when chrome is a little bit more stable. I can happily live without the plugins if i can get rid of that absolutely thoughtless ssl dialog.

And thats the point, I seriously cant believe they did this utterly stupid thing and didn't make it so people who work in IT and SI's in particular (where your going to stumble across a number of self-signed certs) can turn it off - theres a good reason they're the only ones who do it the way they do it.

Tabs on top helps usability...

[jamesbulman]

There seems to be a lot of hate for tabs-on-top but there is good evidence that it improves usability as it takes advantage of Fitt's Law. In particular, interface elements which are placed on the edge of the screen effectively becomes infinitely tall or wide and a much easier target for a user to hit.

Re:Tabs on top helps usability...

[JSund]

The problem with this is that you might have other functions for the edge on top of the title bar. The default behaviour in many systems would be to resize the window if grabbed by the edge and both OS X and GNOME have menus there. Not everyone use their browsers as full-screen applications.

Does it matter?

[DoofusOfDeath]

I'm what I figure is a pretty average web user, in terms of frequency and what I access. I pretty much just use Firefox 3.5.

At this point, I almost never find myself wishing that my browser had some new feature or some bug fix. The browser has pretty well melted into the background at this point.

Are many people in my shoes jonesing for additional browser improvements? Or is that mostly limited to, for example, web developers or users of browsers other than Firefox?

Re:Does it matter?

[swordgeek]

Mostly I agree. I've wanted bug fixes on occasion, but they're usually bugs in a plug-in, rather than the browser (acrobat and flash are notorious for this!)

Tabs were a huge leap forward. Firefox's crash-recovery was a big one as well. I've got a handful of add-ons which make the browser just work better, and aside from that, it's there. I don't need any more than what it provides. At only one recent point have I thought, "Hey--they need to add this feature.," and as it turns out, the code was already in beta. (The feature--bookmark tags--is now in FF3.5)

I would like it faster. I would like it to crash less. Do I need new features? Nah. But someone might. Just don't make it slower, bigger, or crashier and I don't care.

OmniWeb - Re:Tabs on top, do it NOW!

[the JoshMeister]

Tabs should be down the side. [...] I don't understand how this basic mistake can have stayed with us for what, 10 years+ of tabbed browsing...

OmniWeb has been doing preview tabs on the side since 2004. Unfortunately, it's a Mac-only browser and has never really caught on.

"Stop" button needed for Javascripts/AJAX as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Since many pages these days are updating without the user clicking or typing anything (and bringing a browser to its knees, like Yahoo's recently-updated email does, or how the bottom of Slashdot's page functions for loading more stories), I'd like an additional "stop" button which totally stops all updates on a page/tab (e.g. the equivalent to "pulling out/disconnecting the plug from the network socket" for a tab in question).

You're never gonna please everybody

[AnalPerfume]

We've all got our own ideas on which parts of which browsers work for us, as well as which parts we hate. Each of the major browsers offers different combinations of things, leaving us to choose which one has most of the features we like and living with the features it has that we don't. No matter how Mozilla go with Firefox 4.0 it's going to please some while pissing off others. Whether people stop using Firefox because of the eventual change or whether they're blowing steam with threats of leaving if a change happens is another matter. For me (and I suspect a great deal of others) Firefox is still the best browser available by a country mile.

What would make a LOT of difference is if Mozilla could design the UI so it can be rearranged in a way the end user prefers. You can already drag the icons to different places on the toolbars, remove them or add them when you install a new addon. You can already hide or display toolbars. Why not extend that to other features? Prefer your tabs on the top? No problem. Prefer them on the sidebar? No problem. Prefer a traditional stop, reload button? No problem. Prefer a separate search bar? No problem. The reason I think people are passionately trying to win the argument over, is the fact that in some cases Mozilla have imposed the final decision on all users, like the Awesome bar, which many didn't like. If a default was chosen but options given to modify parts and let users keep parts of the older layout that they liked, it'd be a win for ALL of us. Not only that, but it'd up the bar for the other browsers to compete with.

Judging by the mockup images, the only thing I could think of was "Vista" which made me both shudder and wonder about. Why is an open source browser using the Vista imagery? Are they aiming Firefox 4.0 to be as well received as Vista was? Haven't they got the internet? Has nobody mentioned that Vista bombed? I understand it's likely one member of the Firefox team who uses Vista that made the mockups but since it's a cross platform browser you'd imagine they'd do more than just Vista mockups to emphasize that it's available for OSX and Linux too, and how it might look on those platforms.

My only real concern having seen the mockups is that I'd expect it to use the native theming of the platform. My Firefox uses GTK themes which matches the rest of my GTK system. I have Opera installed but it looks out of place, I tried Chromium for a few days out of curiosity, it also looks out of place. I'd have problems upgrading to Firefox 4.0 if it abandoned the native look and feel, after it'd spent a great deal of time and effort finally getting it right for Firefox 3.5. I expect Firefox users on other platforms have gotten used to it looking native to their platforms too.

Having said all that, this is just the developers putting out an early mockup to get feedback. It's rare for anything to arrive in it's final state close to what was originally proposed. It's almost always redesigned with feedback before it's final.

Keep it fast

[Colonel Korn]

I got frustrated with FF 3.5.2's occasional pauses while i was trying to smoothly and rapidly scroll through a long page of images and links (ve3d) to embedded videos yesterday. The main Slashdot page showed some of the same behavior. I'd grab the scroll bar, pull down, and the framerate of the scroll would stutter and occasionally lag to the extent that it skipped a whole screen in catching up. I decided that I'd do a qualitative benchmark on those two pages on all the major browsers, then find a way to get good adblocking on whichever I picked. This was in Windows 7 with a c2d at 2.6 ghz, 4 gigs of ram, and a 4870.

First I tried IE8, since it was already installed. Surprisingly, it wasn't worse than FF. It wasn't noticeably faster either. A tie goes to the status quo, so I waved goodbye to Trident and moved on. Then I tried Chrome, expecting to encounter my winner. Instead, the problems were vastly worse. Javescript benchmarks showed me much higher scores with Webkit, as expected, but in terms of HTML rendering it was much, much slower. The scroll bar itself noticeably lagged behind my cursor, sometimes to the extent that my cursor exited the bar until I slowed down to let it catch up. The pauses and hickups on the screen during scrolling went from being annoying to agonizing. I probably saw 2-5 fewer frames while scrolling than in FF or IE. Amazing, but true. I hoped that Google simply had a bad Webkit implementation, but sadly, Safari showed the same performance. I removed Chrome (easily) and Safari (less easily, since it installed two or three other Apple things that didn't go away during my Safari uninstall) and moved to my last option.

I installed Opera and ran the same test. I was blown away by how smooth the scrolling was. Loading those pages from cache also matched FF and went a little faster than Chrome/Safari (I didn't check IE). I hadn't expected much from Opera, but the new version (10) is, for me, the fastest browser in Windows. In the grand scheme of things, FF and IE are pretty fast, too, but even when I turned adblocking back on in FF it was still slower than Opera. I never really liked Opera in the past, but I'm going to use it as my main browser for awhile to see how it goes.

Speaking of which, is there an auto-updating adblocker plugin for Opera?

Looks more IE8 than Chrome

[pembo13]

And I am not sure that that is a good thing. That aside? How about Qt support and better Linux functionality?

Example 2 made on a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the font rendering in this example:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Windows_Theme_Mockups#Version_B_-_Tabs-on-Top

Clearly the Mockup was made on a Mac or at least they used a screenshot from another browser running on a Mac.

New and hot UI that actually sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's it then for Firefox. Put in a Chrome UI and it's over. Why? Chrome's UI sucks. Why it must be copied? The same reason OpenOffice wants to copy Office 2007's UI. It's "new" and "hot". Whether the UI is actually usable is a moot point. It's "new" and "hot" so it will be copied, no matter what. It seems that FF 3.5.x will be the last version of FF I will ever use. Because there are no other browsers with similar extension ecosystem (I will not use browser without NoScript) it means I can never update to 4.0 and beyond. And in the good old Firefox fashion, this "new" and "hot" UI cannot be turned off in any way. It will be force-fed to everyone. Dissenting opinions will be suppressed. Good going Mozilla Corp. You've demonstrated (once again) the universal unwritten law that everything, *EVERYTHING* will go bad eventually, no matter how good the product initially is.

WOW

[d'fim]

". . . 4.0 is headed for an October or November 2010 release . . ."
". . . the design is not final."

Wow, something that's scheduled 13-14 months out isn't final? Amazing!

Listen to Jacob Nielsen

[Webcommando]

I have to agree with parent. Many changes in interfaces appear related to change for change sake. Why remove the menu bar when it has become the very model of interaction with an application.

Jacob Nielsen , who is a guru in usability, created a set of UI design heuristics.

I think the ones that are highly appropriate are:

Consistency and standards: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.

Recognition rather than recall: Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.

From the above, getting rid of menus is going to generally screw with consistency and ability to recognize operations (I really hated how Office use to hide menu items that weren't used recently)

Granted he also recommended minimalistic design when too many options are not warranted--such as a dialog with too many options available to achieve simple things.

FatassFox

[Cloud K]

Personally I wish they'd do a "Snow Fox" - zero new features (maybe 1) and concentrate on making it leaner, faster and more reliable. Enough new features and redesigns already.

Regression test takes three times as long

[tepples]

the best solution has to be "Version D" which is where the user gets to use whichever style they prefer.

If the user can select among configurations A, B, and C, and the browser publisher supports all three configurations, then the regression test suite has to run in each of configurations A, B, and C. This makes the regression test cost three times as much: either it needs three times as much hardware, or it takes three times as long to run (and time is money).

unrealistic timeline

[dirtyhippie]

I would LOVE to be proven wrong, but I for one do not expect to see ff4 in a little over a year. At least, not in a form that resembles the various things that have been suggested for ff4 over the years (multi process browsing ftw)...

I hope this is optional

[Kaptain Kruton]

I currently use Firefox for its UI and its plugins. I use relatively few plugins, so that is not a major concern. On the other hand, the UI is of great importance. I like many of the features that Chrome has, but I hate its UI. I really like Firefox's current UI and, because of this, Firefox is my primary browser. If Firefox changes its UI to match Chrome's, I hope they have an option to change it to the old UI. If they don't, I will just find another browser or drop Firefox and switch to Chrome. I suspect Firefox will lose other users if they force this change in the UI.

Who cares

[sphoid]

To be blunt... who cares? IMO Firefox is on its way out in regards to relevance in the new browser wars. It won't support h264 in html5, they still use a single-threaded model which makes it really F***ing slow compared to other modern browsers, and it eats up more memory than any other program on my computer if I use it for longer than an hour plus it really sticks out across platforms. I don't expect to be using firefox anymore by the time 4.0 comes out even if they fix all the grievances I just listed. Just like Microsoft with IE, too late to the game to make a difference.

Progress... of a sort

[Anonymous Coward]

So now Firefox is ripping off Chrome? Well, I guess that's an improvement, since now they can steal ideas from both Google AND Microsoft.

That's what passes for innovation in the FOSS world, it seems.

Great add-on!

[traindirector]

I just installed the Tree Style Tab add-on based on your recommendation, and in using it for twenty minutes, I must say that with my browser usage pattern, it may improve the usability of the browser almost as much as the original addition of tabs. I usually leave a number of tabs that I'm working with open, sort of like short-term bookmarks, but in Firefox's display of the tabs at the top, I usually end up with two screen-fulls of tabs. In the default horizontal display, once some of the tabs are off the screen I need to scroll to access them. I can't easily tell which tabs are open, and it's easier to open new tabs than find the ones I'm looking for. This is convenient, but it makes the situation worse.

I'm sure displaying the tabs vertically wouldn't be convenient for the vast majority of people, but for me it's a huge time-saver. As long as the possibility of detailed customization remains, perhaps the simplest interface that makes the most often used features easily accessible is the best default.

TG Daily link

[Spyware23]

TG Daily is a horrible, horrible news website with even more horrible, horrible "journalists". Please Slashdot, for the love of news, don't ever link to TG Daily again.

It's a DRM feature.

[GameboyRMH]

I have heard first time that system's default browser can't download files. It is Safari for Snow Leopard.

That was to combat the resurgence of piracy via direct HTTP download - and it prevents users from downloading torrent files as well. Microsoft, Mozilla and Google are running a big legal risk by producing these browsers that are being used as piracy tools.

You see Apple is just ahead of the curve, as usual.

Never have I ever...

[JoeShmoe950]

heard someone reference Blender as an excellent UI... until now!

Re:Never have I ever...

[Twinbee]

To be honest, I haven't used it much yet, but it does seem very snappy, and I like the way each GUI section can be assigned to different parts of the program (render window, material settings, camera view etc.).

Re:Never have I ever...

[JoeShmoe950]

I'll agree. The whole split move assign system seemed really powerful to me. I wish that was more of a standard GUI feature, but aside from that, I found the interface nonstandard and somewhat quirky. Not a good example of having a custom GUI

What's the deal with Seamonkey?

[lanner]

Due to lack of support from developers, I recently moved my Debian desktop from IceApe (Seamonkey) to IceWeasel (FireFux) and IceDove (Thunderturd). I was horrified.

What have these people been doing all these years? There are no new features, only features that they have REMOVED from the suite! What's the benefit in that? It's less functional.

IceWeasel is far far FAR more unstable than the old IceApe. It crashes often. VERY VERY often.

So the new stuff is less featureful, less stable, and looks like crap.

What did we do to deserve this crappy Windows-wanna-be software?

Re:What's the deal with Seamonkey?

[maxume]

One of the things they have been working on is crashes under Windows. Firefox on XP, is, in my experience, quite stable (the last time I remember it crashing, I was messing around examining some exploit code and accidentally executed it...).

I do run Flashblock, which I think tends to help.

They have also added lots of features as far as supported html elements (stuff like canvas, from html5) and css, and also moved to a faster javascript engine.

MOD PARENT UP!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, I haven't laughed this hard reading slashdot in at least a year. Thanks for that-- absolutely hillarious.

Not Mac users

[amake]

As ridiculous as it seems, many Mac users have a rabid hatred for any deviation from the OS X UI standards. For instance in "favorite browser" threads on the MacNN forums, there are always lots of people claiming to dislike Firefox because it's "not Mac-like enough." Forget the fact that Safari has no actual plugin support (witness the breakage of all existing 32-bit plugins with the move to 64-bit Safari in Snow Leopard), unlimited extensibility means nothing if Firefox doesn't have exactly the same percentage transparency in its menus and use the system-provided slide effect for its menubar config sheet.

Still plenty of bugs in F3

[dugeen]

Effort would be better applied to fixing the bugs in Firefox 3, like the non-functional profile settings to turn off automatic updating and the use of Internet Explorer's security settings.

Firefox continues to loose it's way

[Zoxed]

Don't get me wrong: I love Firefox and use it everyday but, IMHO, I think the project lost it's way sometime ago. It started as a simpler/leaner/faster browser. Slowly functionality has been added, and now we are down to should the tabs be on the top or the bottom, and what colour the re-load button should be. This is what Extensions a Themes are for !!

(But of course Mozilla has a business to run, so perhaps sleek and smooth is what 'the people' want !)

(I know I could use another browser: Opera/other Gecko based, but I need cross-platform, and then there is the effort of transferring all my settings/add-ons after years of Firefox usage/customization !!)

Never mind the look

[jandersen]

I don't care what it looks like; what I am interested in/worried about is what goes on inside. Firefox has become more and more of a strawman for Google, I feel, and has an increasing number of features I'd rather not have. So far I have been able to turn them off, but who knows what the future will bring?

Hilarious comments

[Kartu]

So, other companies do this shit "because they are evil", but google is different, it does it "to protect itself from evil". Brilliant. I wonder where does all this luv4google come from? A lot of google employees posting here?

If Flash is nr1 crasher, Cache&History is seco

[Ilgaz]

One thing browser developers should code is 'cache consistency" and "history file integrity" checks. Nobody does it and the suggestions from 1994 is still valid, you know the "clear your cache" thing.

Nobody should clear their cache or "start a new profile", it is browser which has to deal with its own cache files and the files are easy to "delete and forget", they are on the internet already anyway.

See, Javascript JIT compilers, high end UI tricks, OpenGL tricks and we still have to clear our caches like it is 1994 all over again. Unfortunate thing is, it actually fixes things.