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The Next Firefox UI
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has been constructing a new user interface for Firefox, and the layout seems to be revealed in new mockups that show the integrated Home Tab app and the streamlining of tabs and browsing buttons."
Whatever happen to UI consistency?
Beats me, but when Apple decided to throw their own interface guidelines out the window and pointlessly rearrange the window icons on iTunes for whatever reason, and then again made the window icons on their App Store app center on the toolbar instead of the top of the window like every other app, it's become clear that the watchword for today is "change for the sake of change."
Incidentally, I notice that at some point after screwing with the iTunes window buttons for absolutely no reason, they've reverted them back to be like every other window that's not the App Store. So apparently Apple is slowly learning their own lessons about interface consistency.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What is sad is it is a classic case of cargo cult usability where they try to ape the looks but not what makes the Chromium based browsers great, and that is Webkit.
For example I have to support users on a wide range of hardware, from circa 2004 office P4s to first gen netbooks and nettops to the latest multicores and since 3.6.x Firefox has frankly been unsuitable for purpose on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT and 2Gb of RAM and even then you better close that sucker out daily to keep FF from slamming the swap. Compare this to what I've switched my customers to Comodo Dragon (Chromium based with some nice extra security features) and even on the 1.8Ghz Sempron I use as a nettop the Dragon is fast, it NEVER loses responsiveness, doesn't slam the CPU and I can leave it on for days because unlike FF when I'm not doing anything with it the memory footprint stops growing which isn't the case with FF. And this is of course while having low rights mode on Win Vista and 7 which FF still hasn't implemented.
I personally think it is Gecko. I just don't think the engine is able to take all the extras being bolted onto it like separate plugin containers. The guys at Moz can ape Chrome all they want to, it isn't gonna turn Gecko into Webkit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No, we are right to be concerned. These days, whenever a large company, open source or not put up something publically or semi-publically on their website, it means that they are going to implement it. It is a cheap way of product testing or to prepare users for the coming apocalypse, I mean, change. I am now starting to look around for other browsers to use. Mozilla has become what it was fighting when it started. I also blame female users for this (no, I'm serious). Look at the UI design of consumer products now days and you realise the over-simplified, over-cutesy, over-dumbed down design is catering for women and girly men who favours looks over function.