The future Firefox UI
people.mozilla.com
people.mozilla.com
While in this case it is simple user preference, in other cases it could mean an accessibility concern, or even give room to malicious attacks: With all these custom browser skins, pop-ups over the HTML body (link destination on hover) and no clear divide between window and application, users won't clearly know the difference between interaction with the browser, and interaction with a smart malicious website.
With smart design one could make the bottom browser toolbar appear to be higher, and control the top half with your website. Fake plug-in install modal windows etc.
Hear, hear. On our new serious workstation, we mostly run a variety of developer tools and browsers, some basic office software, various graphics/DTP/modelling stuff from companies like Adobe and Autodesk, and a bunch of tools to automate things and join the dots.
On a quick look, exactly none of the major products there uses the standard Windows 7 UI conventions.
I, for one, am sick of:
- not knowing which keyboard shortcuts perform frequent tasks like undo/redo, or more generally, not being able to navigate a UI using systematic and intuitive keystrokes;
- every application's windows having different conventions for dealing with multiple documents, docking panels, and so on (and making the labels ever-smaller wherever they are, so your documents all look like "C:\users\Fred\..." and your web pages are all "Favourite Site | The S...");
- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious methods of giving you "important" notifications;
- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious auto-update policies that break stuff;
- every application having different ways to download and maintain plug-ins;
- more and more applications trying to squeeze every last square inch of screen space by hiding commands behind a small number of tabs or, worse, meaningless menu-icon-things (we bought large, hi-res monitors for a reason, and having access to browser bookmarks within two clicks is worth far more to us than reading a web site at 2560x1400 instead of 2560x1370);
- every application shoving its executables and config files in its own place (not helped by Windows 7's holier-than-thou "you can't put that in that directory" and "are you sure you want to do that" messages);
- and many other things that just make day-to-day work horribly inefficient.
I wish Microsoft would define a robust, standardised set of UI conventions again, based on usability rather than flashy stuff, and then at least stick to it themselves instead of inventing a whole new bunch of tricks for every new version of Office, IE, Visual Studio and so on.
And then I wish other software, including everything I mentioned above and most definitely including Firefox and Chrome, would just follow the conventions or make some effort to collaborate and standardise in connection with Microsoft (or whoever else writes the platform(s) they run on).
This, to me, is one the biggest pluses for Macs at this point. Microsoft keeps trying to reinvent the GUI, but they don't get rid of the old stuff, even in their own systems.
I also wish Microsoft would adopt actual application bundles. 99% of applications should not actually need installers and uninstallers. Despite what Raymond Chen says, a simple folder is not the same thing.
I'm not an "old-timey" Mac user by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't help wondering when Macs were "full of matte gray". Are you referring to pre-OSX days, because it seems that OSX is more gray now than ever before?
This also included a glorious commitment to the desktop metaphor, when that phrase meant anything: you really could map your mental representation of virtual objects onto their real-life analogs and expect things to work remarkably like you expected.
Now, I don't know that a desktop metaphor is the right way to interact with a computer (I certainly avoid it like the plague), but it seems preferable, in my experience, to the hodge-podge of mixed metaphors that the modern desktop UI has become, in both Mac and Windows.
I'm reminded of the scene in The Big Lebowski when the protagonists encounter a group of nihilists: say what you will about the desktop metaphor, but at least it's an ethos.
As an (at the time) longtime Mac programmer and enthusiast, my disappointment in the OS X UI was one of the reasons that I walked away from Mac programming and never went back. In fact, OS X drove me to more seriously try out Linux and learn to appreciate Windows. Now, I tolerate OS X, but still find myself pining for good ol' 8.5.
I think they are ugly but they are certainly not inconsistent.
You can create a Cocoa app in XCode and just add a text field, and you will automatically get spell check, dictionary look-up and font controls. All your shortcuts will work exactly how you would expect them to (ctrl+a, I'm looking at you). You get a help menu with built in search of the menu bar (http://cl.ly/8yKI). All with no effort from the dev at all.
The only exception to this would be Adobe apps, but at least they have their own UI/UX that they seems to follow most of the time (but they actually hate Apple/OS X, so they probably just do it out of spite)
How many different IDEs/toolkits are available and used to develop Windows or "Linux" applications?
This is one area in which the browsers seem to be getting better. Consider the humble Javascript alert, which used to grab and hold focus so that you could not interact with any other browser window or dialog until you had addressed the alert. Nearly all of the browsers have now switched to less intrusive alerts that display but do not dominate.
If you remove the word malicious I think this very fact is the future of browsers. The browser should be designed to prevent a developer from doing anything malicious, but they should fade into the background and allow the web developer to make many (all?) the UI decisions.
Also: you disagree with the poster. That doesn't mean he has been proven wrong. Your post comes off as unnecessarily rude.
Trying to be an "app" or not: For me, it is about the courtesy of respecting my main OS settings. It is about introducing accessibility concerns by overriding system settings such as demonstrated in this active bug report from 2008: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=92
> They aren't going to, and shouldn't, waste their time
It looks like they are going to, and really should fix this bug report. Improving the usability, interoperability and accessibility of your "app" or "operating system" is not a waste of time. You'd have a hard time backing that up.
* Simplified, customizable graphical menus. No idea how well this will work, but it's only a mock-up at this point.
* Removal of the forward button, merging the back button with the URL bar.
* Refinement of per tab UI. In chrome you still get the browser chrome on pages like preferences or history.
* A change in browser chrome when entering fullscreen mode. (Chrome just over-lays the standard UI when you mouse to the top.)
[1] If anyone knows the context for these images, would be nice to link it!
Just FWIW, my FF (over KDE) is pretty much like this: http://i.imgur.com/RH2Ld.jpg.
I do actually keep the search box but I use it almost exclusively as a scratch pad for short notes (!) and do nearly all searching via keywords in the URL bar ("Awesome Bar").
Image also shows how not to use the <title> element in HTML.
This has been in FF since version 4. These mockups are for FF 8.
Also, I don't even think these will land for FF8, since I've been running the nightly for a while now and they haven't appeared.
When not maximized it sort-of looks like in the linked screenshot. Running the latest "UX-builds", I can see that it now has the maximized-behvaiour for all Window-states, so you are right in there being some changes.
http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/devTools/devTools.html
This is how I understood it when I talked to the Firebug team a few months ago. Mozilla has since hired a ton of people for their Dev Tools team and John J Barton has left Firebug due to lack of funding from IBM -- so I have no clue if things have since changed.
tldr; no. Firebug is an independent (but with Mozilla's support and blessing) project and we're also building some great tools that will ship with the browser.
That said, "packages" might be a good idea. The "paranoid package" could bundle adblock, noscript, trackmenot, and foxyproxy. The "developer package" could bundle firebug and anything else that might be useful. Offering binaries with these packages pre-installed from a visible link on the main download page might not be a bad idea.
Whatever they do to the default layout in FF doesn't bother me, just keep giving me the option to put it back the way I like it. So far, so good... other than needing a plug-in now to get a bottom status bar.
I have to move the mouse around and play dodge-the-tooltip and hope I get lucky.
FF went and added an 'Add-Ons Bar' to replace the bottom real-estate that plugins wanted to sit in lost by the status bar removal. So now, if I use the Add-on bar, AND allow the Chrome style status pop-up, I loose even more space since the URL is now outside the bottom bar, and I'm left with a ton of unused space on the Add-on bar. FF should have just made the Status label a movable element and allowed it to go back in the bottom bar if desired. Since the bar is going to be there anyhow for some people with plugins then their effort to save UI space just cost me 2x the UI space. It frustrates me that what could have been a simple and flexible change (optional, draggable status label) has turned into a hodge podge of work-arounds.
However the Chrome pop-up has a tendency to obscure useful page content, especially on (oh, irony) Google docs.
I much prefer a devoted status bar. OTOH, I have a WUXGA screen (1920x1200) so I have less need to obsess over vertical screen space.
The rise of so-called "HD" screens is one of the tragedies of modern computing that ranks up there with Comic Sans.
I remember reading about how consumers wouldn't be able to adapt to a touch screen phone that didn't have a keyboard option.
Often it's the vocal minority that we hear loudest.
The alternative to not having your leg amputated in given example is likely eventual spreading of a disease and death.
With consumer goods and services often no one forces you to have to accept their changes.
No one forces you to use touch screen phones: there are plenty of alternatives which do include a keyboard.
Even if you don't like one input box does all approach, you can use previous browsers or browsers which retain the standard model.
If you don't like Netflix's price hikes, you can just use another service or don't subscribe at all. Your life won't decline because of it.
Same mistake ubuntu does sometimes. It's the best in general, but has more and more really annoying changes in my opinion.
You cannot "just switch" in many cases. In some other you'll have to choose between two things you don't like the least. That's not a good outcome.
Personally, I don't like this at all, because you never know what information is getting leaked to the search engine...
For example to search on Google "g search keywords", on Wikipedia "w epr paradox", Dictionary "d prometheus". Opera and Chrome have this too IIRC.
To search history "^ page keywords", bookmarks "* page keywords", tags "# tag words" (there are others, I blogged about them http://alicious.com/fast-bookmark-and-history-search-in-fire... or see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search).
Tree style tabs are the #1 reason I use Firefox (though many of Chrome's other advancements are mighty tempting).
Having pages like that is a shitty way to browse; people who do it are doing themselves a disservice by reading lines at that width, and screens are wider than ever, but people love full screen windows.
I'd be much more interested in a CSS extension that lets websites 'bleed' their background into the browser chrome.
If I wanted to use Google Chrome, I'd install Google Chrome.
http://jaket.is-a-geek.com/blog/linux/remove-titlebar-on-max...
also, chrome gives you the option of disabling the titlebar, so it must be possible.
The way they've been updating the UI so far has seen some improvements, for sure, but it's as if they've been patching it bit by bit. I just wondered whether this signalled a change of approach.
Could someone explain to me the correct way for a developer to handle this?
I've been aware of this problem for a while, and I've newly come to own a Mac, so I've looked into it more and looked at what other apps are doing. There doesn't seem to be a correct solution.
I looked at how Safari handles the Web Inspector, and it just adds a new, dedicated Debug menu to the menu bar. This is a no-go in my case.
Suppose you're developer faced with a problem similar to the Firefox–extension problem. You have something like an app-within-an-app, or maybe A and B are actually even more closely tied together than that, but independent enough that on any other platform it would be a no-brainer: each one gets its own menu. What do you do for OS X?
You can't re-use A's menu items in B, because A's items—in, say, the Edit menu—don't serve B. You can't just augment A's menu set to include B's menus and items, because B's menus and items are so numerous and specific to B and vice versa, that there's just so much clutter from the other's menus and items.
(I actually agree: when is that ever better than a dedicated app?)
Obviously when it integrates well with a web browser. :P
> something like an app-within-an-app, or maybe A and B are actually even more closely tied together than that
Interestingly I have the exact same issue with Firefox on Android. The address bar isn't a native text box, it's fake! I have two non-standard things happening on text boxes, Samsung's cursor indicator and the Swype keyboard, and nothing behaves quite as it should.
Are developers giving up on using native widgets?
I abandoned FF after having used it since it was "Phoenix 0.1", because it had become slow and bloated, like NN had been before. Would love to switch back, but not if I can open 5 Chromium instances in the same time it takes to open one FF window.
I'm not sure if it was buggy, or if Sync was intentionally not tracking the stuff that didn't get copied over. (cf mconnor's blog post a month or so ago about implementing Sync quota caps).
People seem to not realize this, for some reason.
This is prettier, yes. It's also a lot curvier and wastes a lot of space compared to Firefox 5. In particular, vertical pixels are at a premium for me, and Firefox 5 has done a lot to improve this... this is a step backwards, as the main bar at the top is larger.
And seriously, those curves take up a ridiculous amount of real-estate - compare those tabs to Chrome or FF5, how many can you get on your screen?
Really? Looks like an improvement to me, because tabs have now consumed the titlebar area. The tab area itself is larger, but the total change is a reduction in the amount of vertical space used.
> And seriously, those curves take up a ridiculous amount of real-estate - compare those tabs to Chrome or FF5, how many can you get on your screen?
The curve is only on the active tab, so I don't see how it's reducing the amount of tabs you can have.
I compared FF5 and these screenshots on my screen together, FF5 uses slightly less real estate. It's only a minor regression though, and hey, this is Firefox - I can customise it! It's just that prior to the current look, I had to modify Firefox quite a lot to optimise vertical real-estate, and it's quite nice that it's now good out of the box, so I selfishly want it to stay that way!
In these mocks, only the active tab actually looks like a tab. The other tabs visually communicate that they are another interface element all together. I would suggest that all tabs have a full tab outline. Currently, the S-shaped curve on the tabs feels too wide and takes up too much horizontal space. The curve on the corner of the tabs should be sharper to match the rounded corner of the window. The difference in shape of the s-curve near the traffic lights and the s-curve of the tabs is bothersome.
I am quite happy with the way Firefox 5 looks with a custom skin ("Default Mod") and some minor customizations. It would be nice to be able to move the tabs into the title bar to free up a little space.
The commands I personally wrote seem to be broken now, but I think the main pre-installed ones work.
[1] Get tip.xpi at https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity/downloads
this is something that chrome is awesome for. they have changed the UI around a bit since v1, but each change has been so minimal that nobody has really noticed too much.
I would likely switch back to Firefox if they executed this.
Would be great if they copied it too with regards to startup speed and JS execution speed.