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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."
when it's not broken, do not fix it.
is Chrome.
As long as I can still get my tabs and shit below the even-more-goddamn-awesomebar, and put a status bar addon in, I'm not going to complain. Default layouts are fine-- it's when you suddenly can't modify them any more that I start to get tetchy.
Browsers have now reached the maturity of 1950s American cars. They more or less work, still break too much, use too much fuel, and have lots of chrome and tailfins.
Please stop trying to make your browser fit on a 2" screen. I have 20"+ monitors. I can spare the pixels.
Further, burying the menu bar makes it very hard for me to support people who get confused when I say "Go to Edit and Preferences".
Innovation is not simply following Chrome's lead. Kthnx.
Please read the comment appearing at the top of the web page, and then un-wad your knickers, folks.
We appreciate your interest in our design experiments!
The UI mock-ups shown on these pages were part of a meeting, and were for discussion purposes, and to explore different design directions. Some of them are already out of date.
Mozilla works in the open, and the way to get the latest in UI improvements to Firefox is to download the UX channel build for your OS, which will auto-update every night with various design experiments we're looking at.
WALSTIB!
Not quite: try pressing the green "make the window as big as it needs to be to display all the content" button.
Oh, that's awesome. Not only does it not actually "zoom" the application, what it actually does is what the "collapse" button (the little bar on the right of certain windows) is supposed to do.
Although the Zoom button has always effectively meant "do something random" so I've gotten in the habit of never touching it.
I always find it hilarious when Apple shits all over their own guidelines, especially when there's a ton of research and design behind them. Microsoft can get away with crap like making the Office windows not behave like any other window in their OS, because they've never sold themselves as being "the user interface experts," but Apple?
Come on, your HIG is enormous and generally explains why it suggests what it suggests. Why do you then ignore your own guidelines?
Incidentally, it's worth reading the Microsoft HIG for using custom window frames for examples of Microsoft applications that ignore their own guidelines. It's nice to know that Microsoft's interface people are aware that the Gadgets window is broken, even if they can't convince anyone on the Windows team to fix it.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The last few releases of Firefox have had the UI driven by graphics designers, rather than programmers, and these have been by far the shittiest Firefox UIs ever. Each one strips away more and more useful features, and hence becomes much more difficult to use.
Can we please have the programmers come up with the UI design? At least with the earlier Firefox releases, they put together something that was usable, even if it wasn't as "pretty" as what the designers might come up with.
Frankly, I don't use Chrome because it has a shitty, stripped-down UI that intentionally hides all of the useful functionality. That's why I used to use Firefox. But if Firefox is going to imitate Chrome, why the fuck would I use Firefox? Even Konqueror is more usable than recent Firefox releases, so I'll stick with it until Firefox's UI isn't a compile cesspool.