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Mozilla Ponders Major Firefox UI Refresh
CWmike writes "Mozilla is working on a revamp of Firefox to synchronize its various versions — desktop, tablet, phone and Windows 8 Metro — into a single visual style, according to documents posted by members of its user interface (UI) design team. The project, which does not have a name, and the earlier blending of Mozilla's mobile and desktop design groups, is meant to bring more coherence to the various versions of the open-source browser. 'One of our major goals for the year [is] getting Firefox to feel more like one product — more 'Firefoxy' — across all our platforms, desktop to tablet to phone,' Madhava Enro of the Mozilla UI design team, said in a post to his personal blog on Tuesday. Enro posted a slideshow he and others used the week before to present their proposals at a company get-together. According to the presentation, some UI elements will be shared across all Firefox editions, among them a lean toward 'softer texture' and smoother curves in the design."
Thank the gods for Iceweasel.
When it's finalized THEN post it.
Doing a story about "pondering" sounds like a MSN bullshit story. Even though it's more likely to happen, you might as well do a story title "moon may fall into Atlantic tomorrow."
see subject
Or maybe even if not fully open source, at least forks.
Cometbird. PaleMoon. Your choice of others. Someone's going to keep the classic UI.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Personally I am not going to judge efforts before trying the result, so good luck to this new endeavor. But I also hope that retaining compatibility of existing extensions will be a high priority task. And hopefully forks like iceweasel on Debian will keep letting user browse with the old FAMILIAR and big-screen-friendly interface.
I use Linux, and everything in Firefox is accessible mostly with a few choices at the top of the titlebar. On the rare occasion I need to boot back into Windows, the Firefox version now has one icon where most the features now live, so now you have to dig under multiple menus to find what you want.
Get the Windows version back to the way it was, and stop expecting me to hunt through multiple menu layers to find what I want.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I'm starting to understand why people stuck to outdated versions of IE for so long.
Firefox in the recent two years managed to break compatibility with 100% of the addons I liked, only slightly above half of them got updated, then it broke compatibility again and even less addons got updated. In the mean time they have managed to force me to use new addons which return the old look to which I am used to, and now they want to revamp the UI completely.
Well fuck me. I think I'll have to find an old FF 2 install and just run it in a virtual machine to have what I liked again and still retain some security.
Another day, another Firefox UI 'revamp'. And another major version number to go with it, no doubt.
Meanwhile, if a download times out Firefox still reports it as having completed successfully. This has been the case since at least Phoenix 0.4, and presumably since it's conception. Yet it remains unfixed. Apparently in 11 major versions and 9 years, not to mention countless UI revamps it seems the FF team still haven't realised that an HTTP connection can fail.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Please stop. Just stop. To re-purpose what I've written before: Stop turning my computer programs into children's toys.
Stop taking away all my menu bars, tables, text boxes, whites spaces, status bars. Stop replacing them giant coloured icons and disappearing peelback tabs and menus. Am I expected to just intuitively "feel" where all the controls and options are now? I don't understand why you are doing this.
This has to stop, as it's happening across the program spectrum. I blame the influence of smartphones and similar touch oriented devices.Speaking as someone who has never owed a smart phone I have always found them restrictive and confusing. Using one is like navigating a theme park without a map. Eventually you'll want to just find a place to sit down but you'll only get more lost among the theme rides and hot dog stands.
The encroaching presence of fatuous smartphone UIs onto my desktop annoys and increasingly frustrates me, and has to stop. I never liked Macs, and Ubuntu's unity is driving me off the distro. I don't want this and I have trouble believing that most FF users do, or will ever. Stop shoving this down the throats of your misfortune users.
Stop. Firefox does not need this. Its UI does not need to be "refreshed" or "toned down" or "streamlined" or even "supercharged". It is a good UI. Title bars and menubars are a desired and productive element of its interface. It's OK to have little icons, buttons, and text around the screen; I use a keyboard and mouse instead of fat fingers and caressing gestures. Stop assuming a smart-phone has been my primary computing device for the last five years.
Please stop this. Just stop. Someone, please tell them to stop.
May the Maths Be with you!
Chrome is massively popular and eating into Mozilla's "marketshare," that's why.
Palm trees and 8
I may get accused of being a cranky old man but seriously, what I want from a browser UI is to access the functions of the browser like back/forward, refresh, an address bar that actually displays the address including the protocol, maybe start page button and bookmarks. What I don't need (and this apparently includes, from the mock-ups) is a "twitter" button.
I'm starting to think the problem is that Mozilla is hiring a lot of people who then (naturally) feel obligated to "do something" and weird changes are the result. Also, why copy everyone else? Why not, ahem, think different for once? Not everyone wants a Chrome-style browser and those that do probably use Chrome (and they should, more power to them).
Remember back when there was an iron grip on how menus were laid out? Remember when it frustrated us all that we had to use the same keyboard shortcuts to reach simliar functions? I miss those days. From the current nightmare that is Microsoft Office, where it took me twenty minutes to find the print command for the first time. To drilling down through three menus to find my bookmarks!
While you're at it, knock off that rapid release cycle! Version 12 looks just like Version 3, except that I had to completely wipe my copy of firefox, delete every single firefox folder on the machine, then had scrub the registry just so I could reinstall and not have weird errors and random things not work. Boy that was a fun way to spend my evening.
Chrome is eating into Mozilla's marketspace because Mozilla are trying to copy Chrome by producing an inferior clone of it rather than a browser which survives on it's own strengths.
If both are trying to be exactly the same thing, why use the cheap knock-off when both cost the same?
I blame the influence of smartphones and similar touch oriented devices.
There's a pretty big reason why all these changes are being implemented; that's where a large portion of the users are at, and these devices are getting more popular. It only makes sense that people using your software across devices will at least want a consistent UI, and it should be accessible no matter what type of device you are using.
That being said, looking over the Firefox designs, I see nothing that looks substantially different (or difficult) about how the new UI will be used.
Stop turning my computer programs into children's toys.
Conversely, I could say the old style of fiddly menus and unnecessary buttons and icons everywhere is more toylike than what we are moving towards, because those are all a big distraction and just make the software more difficult to use 95% of the time than it needs to be.
Well' I'm still waiting for tabs in the title bar on linux/gtk :-/
doesn't mean it's better... just that they (google) spend more on marketing and distribution (tv commercials, streaming video spots, bundleware, pc makers, etc)
Wait... are you serious? There are TV ads for a web browser?
Dunno if it's just me, but there feels like a massive shift in computing coming through soon. It's this weird Tech version of the Mayan doomsday where everybody is going all "OMG Mobile!"
So desktop users will be sorta pushed to the sidelines, and then we're all supposed to live on our phones or something.
But once those UI switches are made, ... then what? It's creating a kind of "block in the prophetic visions of the future", so everyone scrambles for two years because Mobile Is Da Hotness, ... then what?
Are we just going to stare at each other in a kind of giant fishbowl meta-boredom having reached a point where there "isn't any innovation left"? Oh, they'll do small things, like add ons, and maybe "smart clothing" with GPS enhancements, etc etc, but after everyone finishes this big "Mobile or Die" push, it feels like it will be almost a letdown of "what do we do with ourselves now?"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
As a Firefox user, I see literally dozens of google Ads suggesting I install Chrome, or upgrade to a faster browsing experience, or other similar messages, every day. Google put popups to that effect on their search homepage. I'll hazard a guess that this bears some responsibility for market share decline. Some is no doubt due to perceptions that FF is slow/a memory hog in comparison to Chrome.
Neither of these factors will be affected by changing UI to copy your competitor. Firefox needs to carve out their own niche, and the seemingly deliberate activities to remove all discernible difference, and hence possible competitive advantage they have over their more highly resourced competitor, seems stupidly short sited.
The new design strongly highlights the current tab, but subdues the other tabs into an ambiguous text and icon soup; they do not have shape. I'm having a hard enough time getting my parents to grasp the concept of tabbed browsing, must Mozilla and Google make it so much harder with this and the obfuscation of the new tab button?
I hope they won't break pentadactyl compatibility. Seriously, why my desktop browser experience should be influenced by that metro thing and tablets? It's so unfair.
and their GD box of unity/gnome3/metro8 crayons away from my web browser, email, and desktop GUI!
... as long as it's not the broken, mis-designed (assuming it has been designed and not just the result of a failed Rohrschach test) and for a desktop utterly unusable "Metro" look ...
I think they're trying to clone Windows 8, which is far, far worse. I don't want to encourage Microsoft, as I'd rather Windows 8 die in the corner of ignominy.
Chrome is massively popular and eating into Mozilla's "marketshare," that's why.
Yes, the problem is when you start thinking that everything they did must be right and everything we did must be wrong. Chrome annoys me at times, still somewhat less than Firefox did but they both have pros and cons. Just because they do it doesn't mean it's a good thing if Mozilla copies it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Don't take away the separate search bar. It's one thing I like about Firefox is that it's not sending all my keystrokes in the URL bar to Google. Looks like they're now gonna take that away (from the screenshot).
They're really pushing IE 9 adverts in the UK. It's fucking hillarious since all they do is show whooshy graphics and flash buzzwords up in between it. It's all "The web is more beautiful!" and stuff
It's on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/37918278
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
OK, not perfect.
Kurt
Opera makes a fine browser choice. They are not constantly trying to fix something that's not broken, and updates are released more infrequently. Plus it comes with things like tabs-on-left and plugin blocker out of the box.
Just install a tabbed windows manager, like fluxbox and you get tabs everywhere...
Higuita
Why don't you like my hammer? Can't you see how shiny it is? Every working man is getting one, clearly it is the tool of the future! You're just preducided against hammers because you don't appreciate how flexible and intuitive it is. It's so ergonomic, it fits the human hand so perfectly! Feel the weight of it, the balance. Don't you want one too? I bet you secretly do.
Sure, some people might insist that those old-style hydraulic drop hammers gets more hammering done, but they're so... loud... and heavy. Not all portable, or shiny. Who would want to use something like that? You clearly don't understand the manifest benefits of a light-weight, hand-held, ergonomic implement that anyone can use! So pretty to look at too -- you can see that mine is chrome plated and comes with a doe-skin suede hip holster. It's the latest style. You'll love it, trust me.
The market has clearly spoken: more people are purchasing shiny hand-held hammers than heavy and dull hydraulic drop hammers. You're just slow to get with the times. It's time for you to join the rest of us in the future.
who was boasting about how great it was to have 4(!) versions of FireFox under development at the same time, not to mention all the different platform flavours.
Sadly, it turns out that it's a different clown, so there are at least two of them at Mozilla. I has a sad.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Why strive for a "one size fits all" anyway ?
Yes, mobile devices are on the rise. Often with small (touch)screens where it makes sense to minimize control elements, in order not to clutter that screen.
At the same time, big screens aren't disappearing either. Browsing the web on a 40" TV at home isn't unheard of, maybe those screens are wall-size in a decade or so. And the average laptop / PC on a desk with mouse beside it, is yet another way to go about it.
The intelligent thing would be to realize that those devices & user experiences are different, and applications + their user interfaces should adjust accordingly. Or if that's too difficult, have different applications & different user interfaces for different devices. Like what has always been the case, really.
So long as they don't called it "Mozzarella Foxfire", I'm good.
I rather think it will be along the lines of Galactic Moronic Convergence. The poles will flip and what you saw on your phone will appear on your desktop and what appeared on your desktop will appear on your phone, all on Dec. 21. At that point, marketdroids will become engineers and engineers will become marketdroids. China and India will outsource to the U.S. Republicans will become Democrats and Democrats will become Republicans.
The U.S. Patent Office will finally admit it has no idea what it's doing and will shut down for 5 years to become one with itself and study Zen Buddhism. Lawyers will slit their throats, but no one will notice except to wash off the sidewalks. Larry Ellison will reveal he's an alien and attempt medical procedures to become human, but he will fail miserably. Jesus will return, stay awhile, and then leave with the excuse that he's a busy guy.
I'm looking for one gonzo-whopper of a Moronic Convergence.
Do I use finger to poke, swipe, and pinch when I am on my desktop? Do I use a mouse to point and click when I use my phone? Is my desktop screen 3" x 2"? Is my phone screen 24" x 12"? No. No. No. No. These are two totally different operating environments with totally different requirements and limitations. They each need different interfaces. Besides who uses Firefox on their phone? It's all about Dolphin baby.
Why are all the software producers abandoning 30 years of desktop user interface improvements to make it more like mobile interfaces which are new and still developing, and by needs totally different. Just when they get it right and are just in need of the slightest refinements, they think it's time to make radical changes. Is this about improving the product or is it about keeping programers employed?
MOZILLA LISTEN!!! A browser should be so easy to use that it almost becomes transparent. It becomes that way by maintaining a nice user interface for a long time so use of the features becomes deeply ingrained habit. STOP CHANGING THINGS AROUND! PLEEEAAASE!!!
-- QED
For my personal usage, the only reason I still use it is at work it's nice to have Live Bookmarks. Seeing the RSS feed titles without having to use yet another service to manage is great. But I'd have switched completely to Chrome earlier if it wasn't for this. Now all my installs and managed pc's run Chrome. It's just so much easier and simpler, esp when the client is already in the Google domain.
Google put popups to that effect on their search homepage
Google doesn't use any pop-up advertising, period. If you are getting pop-ups on Google sites then your PC is probably infected.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So desktop users will be sorta pushed to the sidelines, and then we're all supposed to live on our phones or something.
Well, makes sense, doesn't it? On the hardware end everything is being pushed towards non-upgradeable, throwaway devices like cellphones and tablets, designed for the dump. I've been using and reusing the same ATX computer case on my desktop PC for the last decade at least but in the same number of years I've accrued five cell phones, four of which are currently rotting in a drawer because I don't know what the hell else to do with them. Sell them on eBay for $3? Not worth my time...
Firefox, in their efforts to streamline the experience, should progress by replacing all UI interaction with a single button labeled with the word "Do".
The Version number doubles every 18 months
We all know complaining on message boards never does anything, so tell them directly what you think of their ideas:
http://input.mozilla.org/en-US/feedback#idea
Let's have a major UI refresh every quarter!
How's the view from the bike shed, guys? Figure out which color to paint it today? Screw the UI overhaul, some of the engine needs overhauling too, but that's no fun. We'd rather bicker endlessly over how curvy to make the soft curves, while the memory leaks and weird crashes go on, unabated.
The important stuff is hard to fix, and no one wants to do that stuff. Arguing over UI rehashes is more fun, and "feels" productive whether or not it actually is.
How about inventing mechanism so themes and plugins don't need constant updating and are so frequently uninstallable because of version issues? Wouldn't that be more useful - and thus attract more users - than a sexy new bit of graphics?
But don't mind me, I'll be over here using Opera, which I find more useful, and Chrome, which is way faster.
You know what color would be good for your bike shed? Fail-Red, with nice, soft curves...
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I think he's talking about this: http://i45.tinypic.com/4sy43t.jpg Not exactly a pop-up, but annoying nonetheless. Also, Chrome is often bundled with other "freeware." Equally annoying.
Yeah, there are many UI changes that they could make, like letting us put tabs sideways on the side of the window instead of across the top, allow toolbars to be vertical on the side of the window, and basically give us the vertical screen real estate back that we lost when the world decided it had to go 16:9...
I would rather have my forward/back/URL/search fields on the title bar with the window control buttons, and my tabs, capable of being sorted into more than one row, sideways up the left side of the window. Or, allow me to do the opposite. Also, allow the notifier that switches sides at the bottom be able to be vertical, as it's annoying when it blocks part of the text of a webpage.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I find it hard to imagine that a unified look and feel will be equally useful. The software is used on a very wide variety of devices with wildly different screen sizes, aspect ratios, and input devices. I don't WANT the same control scheme on my smartphone as my desktop!
Sounds like you want the "Tree style tab" addon.
Please, no more change for the sake of change! No hidden menus, No side bars, No task bars on top, No minimize-close on left side instead of right side, No transparency, No 'new' Gmail format, NO NO NO! How can I learn, and teach others PCs when the change is going faster than I/we think?
After seeing the slideshows, all I see is lots of rounded borders (including window borders, which the WM should handle), and less desktop integration:
- It's own decoration instead of the OS's
- It's own widget styles
- It's own titlebars
etc?
Do we really want a product that looks the same everywhere regardless of the OS and theming settings we've configured on it?
Or did we choose+configure our OS for a reason?
Tree Style Tabs
Ive had it for years... (Google it)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Chrome is eating into Mozilla's marketspace because Mozilla are trying to copy Chrome by producing an inferior clone of it rather than a browser which survives on it's own strengths.
If both are trying to be exactly the same thing, why use the cheap knock-off when both cost the same?
EXACTLY
I was a Firefox user until the day they abolished versions and started to do updates in the Chrome style.
My Net Banking goes nuts, the security plugin stopped working and I endup being forced, AGAIN, to use Internet Explorer (aaaaaaaaaaargh) to pay my bills.
And you can bet your sorry arse I'm pissed off. This stupid decision to go Chrome style forced me to use again that god cursed half baked browser made by Microsoft.
If they're going Chrome style and I HAVE to use IE again, what the heck I'm doing with Firefox anyway? I'm using IE and Chrome now. I'm not satisfied, but the thing works.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Mozilla always has the wrong answer. That's why the most popular extensions are ones that revert their stupid UI decisions.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Ur doin it rong. You're supposed to set up the joke _before_ stopping your post in the middle of a sentence.
For example:
I don't care if they update the UI, as long as they also fix all the memory bloat and the crash problem that keeps happening whenever i tr[NO CARRIER].
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
so they spent the last few years making each version look different ("native"), and now they want to make them all look the same again? great. how about: 1) the crashes and memleaks that are still there. firefox is currently using 2.3GB RAM on my Mint11 system and it's only been running a few hours since it last crashed. 2) the horrendously inefficient database format used for local storage. anyone tried using FF over NFS? it takes twice as long to start as opera, and about 5x as long as Chromium. Now i realise not the same people work on that stuff as on UI design, but that picture of the airflow around sports car? Slide8. hilarious. someone is getting paid to produce this rubbish? depressing.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
I don't like the concept of unifying the UI across platforms, and I don't like the idea of Firefox being more identifiably "Firefoxy". If you ask me, one of the strengths of Firefox is that it does a passably good job of appearing to be native on each platform.
When I'm on a Mac, I want my browser to appear "Mac-y". When I'm on Windows, I want my browser to appear "Windows-y". When I'm on Linux, I want it to be "Linux-y". The browser should be inconspicuous, and it should blend into the platform that you're using. I personally think applications should be "out of your way" as much as possible. It should basically be an intermediary between the document and the platform, appearing as though it was something meant to be built into the OS from the start. The more aware I am of the application having a personality, the worse the UI is.
So if you want to refine the UI, I say more power to you. Make it sleeker, less obtrusive, more powerful. IMO, Firefox looks slightly clunky when compared to Safari or Chrome, and a few superficial tweaks might do something to improve that. But please don't turn it into an exercise in branding, to make your browser "distinct". Make your browser distinct by improving performance or adding useful features. Or make it distinctive by making the UI so bland and making it fit so well into the installed OS that all other browsers seem weird and quirky and non-standard by comparison.
You mean more Chromy, don't you? Firefox hasn't looked like FF for a long while.
Mobile will dominate. Your "desktop" will be just be a fancy docking station for your phone (wireless perhaps with induction for power too). Wherever you sit down, your mobile device and the desk in front of you can pair for extended functionality. 10 to 20 years later, it will have AI like HAL 9000. As it is, IBM Watson comes close today.
Welcome to your personalized "symbiant" where in the future the vast majority of users will rarely touch a GUI and may never even have heard of the CLI. Eventually this symbiant turns into a mind numbing crutch for the mind as idiocracy takes us all to the abyss.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's a shame, but the folks at Firefox have gone off the rails in just about every way. First Gnome goes off the rails, now Firefox. We are living in troubled times my friends.
I've been a hardcore Firefox user for years, spreading it to family and friends every chance I get. I finally left it about a month ago. The constant versions didn't bug me nearly as much as the performance, particularly on older/slower systems. I went to Comodo Dragon, a Chromium-based browser with the Google tracking stuff removed and a bit of security protections added. I love the snappier response but I do miss AdBlock (yes, there are two for Chrome and I run one but it is nowhere as effective as the version on Firefox). However, our old XP machine at home and the kids' netbooks love me for switching.
On a somewhat related note, moving from AVG to MSE made a huge impact on system performance on these less-than-stellar machines. I couldn't believe how much better MSE runs and that it actually does a decent job now.
Because FF isn't quite as bloated as it could be....yet.
I've used Firefox for years but recently switched to Comodo's Chromium-based browser. While the Chrome version of AdBlock is much weaker than Firefox's, I otherwise love Comodo Dragon so far. Firefox was barely usable on my old XP machine and was only tolerable on our new netbooks. The performance difference on these types of computers is noticeable.
Rather than carefully designing a number of different interfaces while taking into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of each form factor, they feel it would be more prudent to make unpleasant compromises to every platform in the name of uniformity.
Anyone else happen to notice the slide that seems to imply they're striving for... aerodynamics, to imply speed? I don't even get Mozilla anymore. It's a goddamn browser not a sports car.
Does "more Firefoxy" mean "less Chromey"?
/* No Comment */
Because they (cue George Carlin voice) "don't give a fuck about you", or me, or nerds.
They want a mass market. That means copying familiar shittiness, and too bad about that.
Appropriate Carlin voice here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
How about instead of focusing on bell and whistles focus on more important things like speed, memory usage, and and the constantly crashing Flash plugin. i know Flash isn't made by Mozilla but why doesn't Mozilla and Adobe work together to fix this?
I just set up a new computer with Ubuntu 12.04. It comes with the latest Firefox.
I had assumed that an Intel Core processor with HT should be able to handle Firefox, but no: It repeatedly maxes out CPU and Ubuntu greys it out (signaling that it's unresponsive).
After a few days of this, and confirming it wasn't a fluke, but rather Firefox, I installed Chromium.
Of course, I do hope that somebody (not me) will be installing Firefox and clicking on their ads to support Mozilla because I wouldn't want Google to become too powerful, but it's just so hard to keep waiting on Firefox.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Don't worry. For cranky old men like us there is Pentadactyl, a Firefox plugin that gets rid of all that fancy crap and shows an old school interface.
What's wrong with FF as it is? Let's hope they don't fuck it up the ass, like Google have fucked gmail. Designers design, coders code, managers manage, and not always when it's necessary or even useful to do so.
Some professional coders don't care much about bloat in my experience. They don't even have time to notice or care about bloat. Most of those I know are on turbocharged workstations or recent model Macbook Pros and rely on Moore's Law to solve the runs-like-a-slug problem by the time their code gets to market. Their main problem is getting to the next sprint or release.
Since you're running on Windows (if don't mind paying a couple of dollars), I highly recommend AdMuncher. It Just Works(tm).
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
that's why.
Totally agree. It goes along with the final collapse of western civilisation, descent into imbicillity along with politicians claiming that their opponents are traitors and should be killed. The B Ark had far smarter people on board than 99% of the current population. The new management in China might have jobs for you recycling heavy metals or something.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Doubleplusungood! A smartphone / pad / whatever has a completely different input framework and completely different surface area to display stuff on; it's absolutely stupid to try to make stuff that works in that environment also work on a desktop where you have full keyboard and mouse input, and comparative miles of real estate for the display.
On the other hand, I'd be thrilled if they would at least synchronize the layouts of their various desktop versions. On Linux, preferences is under the Edit menu; on Windows, it's under Tools. Do they think there's no overlap between users of the two OSes so nobody will ever be troubled by the rearrangement?
Mozilla Ponders Major Firefox UI Refresh
Oh, is it another month already?
Whoever put the apes in charge of Mozilla, please translate the following message to chimpanzee or banana or whatever:
You don't need a fresh UI. You need a good UI, and then you need to stick with it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Could somebody please just tell me: What is the problem that needs to be solved here?
Who are these people who "need" to have the same UI on both their smart-phone and their dual-24-inch desktop?
I'm dead serious here. Somebody please show me a message board where there is even ONE POST complaining about a lack of consistency between these platforms.
GNOME 3. Canonical Unity. Windows 8. I want someone on any of those development teams give me the name of just one user who has complained that their dual-24-inch desktop doesn't look like or behave like their smart-phone.
The name of JUST ONE USER -- that's all I ask. I just want to talk to him, and ask him a few questions.
I'll be sitting here patiently waiting for an answer, as I have been doing so for almost a year now.
Your "desktop" will be just be a fancy docking station for your phone (wireless perhaps with induction for power too).
All things being equal, I'd rather my phone becomes a fancy remote terminal for my desktop.
When was the last time you lost your desktop or shattered it on the pavement?
But the way things are going, my desktop is going to be a remote terminal for my phone,
which is going to be a remote terminal for some cloud service that the police can access with a polite phone call.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I think they're trying to clone Windows 8, which is far, far worse. I don't want to encourage Microsoft, as I'd rather Windows 8 die in the corner of ignominy.
I use Linux because I don't like the way Microsoft writes their programs and OSes, they do everything ass-backwards. So I don't care whether 8 is a stunning success or a miserable failure.
But -- I don't like the way Microsoft writes their programs and I wish people would stop copying their ass-backwards, unintuitive, poorly designed, nonfunctional ways.
If FF starts looking like Microsoft wrote it, I'll switch browsers.
Free Martian Whores!
So desktop users will be sorta pushed to the sidelines, and then we're all supposed to live on our phones or something.
No, that's what marketing makes you believe. In reality, like all trends and hypes, those who go along with it will do well in the new market and those who stick with what's old and working well will do well in the old market. It's just that the old market isn't hip, so you don't read much about it in press releases and news (if there's still a difference).
Some of the biggest and most profitable markets are rarely in the news because they aren't sexy. Food companies are some of the biggest corporations in the world - Nestle has about the same revenue as Microsoft, Kraft has more revenue than Google and more than twice its profit, and so on - and yet you don't reach much about them. Big oil is often in the news for everything but their revenue and income - for starters, Shell has four times the revenue of Apple.
So don't read the news when you want to know where the market is heading. The news only tell you where the hype is going, not where the money is.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No, doesn't make sense. Some hardware is converging to that style but not all of it. Definitely not the desktop (except maybe newer macbooks). I've had one phone in the last 6 years, it still makes voice calls just fine. Sure, if you've got a browser on a phone them maybe pick some UI that fits it, but don't do that where you don't have to.
Similar stuff happening with GNOME 3 in some ways. It's like formerly open source developers in touch with their community and who are a part of their community suddenly were taken over by corporate brain slugs and start thinking that they know better than the community what the community wants. This is a patronizing attitude, you're expect that sort of thing from Microsoft maybe.
There extensions that revert the current Firefox version to the 3.6.28 UI? I'm quite happy with FF 3.6.28 for now, but they haven't stopped supporting it yet.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Well, yes. That's why all mobile devices are headed towards the mysterious cloud. Drop or lose the thing, and you can quickly port over its identity via an online backup.
Life is not for the lazy.
I've been working with a pretty vertical resolution saving setup for Firefox for a while now. It is the program title bar, the menu bar, and the tabs (only if you need them). You might give it a try.
http://www.supercars.net/gallery/132464/1542/922256.jpg
As someone who has been using web browsers since before some of you were born, I'd like to make a few comments on this latest foray into copying either Chrome or that spawn-of-evil, Metro.
Alright, one comment. A very brief comment.
No.
Firefox does not need its UI endlessly tweaked by a circle jerk of self-congratulatory programmers who rejoice at every spline and every pixel-level change. Firefox needs the following:
1. Bug fixes. There are a lot of them pending. Have you noticed? I have. It's not nearly as much as fun as playing with the UI, but it needs to be done. (Yes, I've helped. But I'm getting damn tired of writing extremely detailed, carefully researched bug reports that sit in the queue indefinitely.)
2. Security and privacy improvements. A substantial subset of the functionality of NoScript, AdBlock Plus, Better Privacy, Beef TACO, Disconnect, BlockSite, BugMeNot, ShareMeNot and oh yes, HTTPS Everywhere, needs to be IN THE BROWSER. Not an add-on. IN THE BROWSER. Hell, you have a budget: buy the technology if you have to, but get it in. Security and privacy are NOT add-ons, they're core functions. Make it happen.
3. Resource usage. Not everyone on this planet is wealthy enough to afford a new laptop every two years just to run a web browser. And make it possible for users to clamp memory footprint, CPU utilization, and other resources so that they don't find their web browser eating their system alive.
4. Standards compliance. I don't care if you think some of the standards suck -- I think they do too. Do it anyway.
5. Stop dumbing it down. THAT function should be in an add-on, call it "Training Wheels for Firefox".
6. If anyone suggests adding "social network" functions, please give my earnest sympathies to their surviving friends and family.
7. Respect Mah Authoritah! No automatic updates, no automatic checking for updates, nothing. (Why? Think about browser fingerprinting techniques and add-ons, and why some people really, REALLY don't want their browser to provide any clues to those who are doing DPI on the network they're connected through at the moment.)
8. Every icon in every panel needs to be set up as (a) icon only (b) text only or (c) icon and text. All of them. Because i'm getting damn tired of squinting at my 7" netbook screen trying to figure out WTF some squiggle means.
9. Get off my lawn!
10. Stop trying to out-Opera Opera, out-Chrome Chrome, and REALLY stop trying to out-IE IE. You have...had...a vision of a pretty good piece of software and somewhere around Firefox 4, you lost it. Stop. Go find it. Pick it up, dust it off, and tack it on the wall. Then pay attention to it.
Can they make it look just like the UI in Firefox 2.0?
That would be a massive improvement.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's why smart people use Chromium instead; no bundled crap, no phone-home, just a solid fully open-source Webkit-based browser with lots of available extensions (including AdBlock Plus) and a separate process-per-tab architecture.
I totally disagree about Gnome3. The Gnome developers have been like this for over a decade; they've only taken a long time to reach their present extreme. They got involved with Sun and usability studies at least a decade ago, and hopped on the minimalism bandwagon. Everyone now has forgotten, but back then, when Gnome2 came out, everyone was mad about it because it was so much more minimalist than Gnome1 (which was actually pretty similar to KDE at the time). The Gnome developers were constantly repeating the mantra "we need to reduce clutter and reduce confusion" by eliminating configurability and making everything "simpler". Well, everyone got used to it, and now they're taking it to the next step in Gnome3, and people are all mad again. I predict people will simply adapt to these crappy new UIs and get used to them, rather than switching over to better UIs, and productivity will suffer as a result.
Maybe you want to rotate your screen... It can be done.
Please, just stop it already. Every user interface change in the past couple years has made it *less* usable. Give it up.
See what I did there?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
It's gotten to the point where Firefox or Thunderbird tell me there's a new upgrade that I say "NO!"
Works fine for me. The thing I don't understand is why a coder would think it's a good idea to keep changing common keyboard commands. Idiots!
If Mozilla wants Firefox to be more like Chrome, they really need to build daily multiple crashes into it. Seems like just when I'm in the middle of reading, searching, watching something in Chrome, a tab, multiple tabs, window, windows become unresponsive, then shut down. Only issue is that it stopped displaying PDFs in the browser with one of the last releases. No devolution for Firefox!
I like SeaMonkey. I hope they don't "FIX" it. It's very good as it is.
I like beer too.
Uh, yes. Chrome ads have been all over the TV for a few years now. Also all over subway stations in some cities (London comes to mind).
Ad budgets for some of the browsers in the market right now are estimated to be in the high 9 digits to low 10 digits of dollars per year, once you include the value of in-kind advertising and bundling deals. If you exclude those, more like mid-9-digits.
Keep the refresh button next to the back/forward buttons. Don't ever put it back on the right side of the address field. EVER.
WTF. Do you have to copy everything IE/Chrome does?
maybe you would like opera. there you are much more free what to do with the toolbars.
Safari put the refresh "button" on the right of the address field. It was stupid then, and stupid now. I can Customize buttons where I want in Firefox.
They're going to change that???? Chrome doesn't have a customize feature for the toolbar, does it? Maybe it might if I log in, but don't want to do that.
I never used the default look anyway. You're not really using Firefox if you don't customise the shit out of the UI anyway.