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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

Firefox biggest annoyance: The download window. I feel like I've taken a time machine to the 90's every time it pops up.

Chrome's download bar on the other hand is quite neat and it doesn't distract your workflow.

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Have you seen the replacement UI?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:DownloadsPanel-Downloading.png

For reasons unknown to me, it's been delayed for ages. So long that even Safari has copied and deployed it before Firefox did.

I actually liked the download window in FF, and find this new UI (been using it on Nightly for a while) pretty annoying.

Agreed. Maybe I'm just too used to the download window, but I tried the recent Firefox nightly I instantly cringed when I downloaded a file. I prefer Chrome solution to both.

I like this. It is one less window to manage.

Too bad they didn't patent it.

That's the UI used in Safari 6. It's pretty terrible, in my opinion; it hides too much information in a single button. It's roughly equivalent to Chrome's download bar, except with less information.

What info do you need?

If I am downloading more than one item (and maybe I am waiting for a particular one), it's not telling me which ones are finished.

OS X postfixes files that are being downloaded with .download – so if you're looking at a file, you should see if it's done or not.

Safari has publicly had that since October 20, 2010, and of course it was worked on privately before that. That screenshot looks like it's from April of this year?

Why drag Firefox into this discussion? Firefox has options for customizing everything, and when it doesn't there's always extensions. That's one of it's best features.

If you don't like "taking a time machine" Firefox's download window can be disabled using "Show the Downloads window when downloading a file" option.

It's completely fair to judge Firefox on its default design decisions.

It's fair to judge Firefox's design decisions. It's not completely fair to compare Firefox's default design decisions with Chrome/Safari/IE's design decisions, which are more than just defaults.

If Firefox had a download bar, you would be able to download or write an extension to make it auto-hide, because Firefox's interface is entirely XUL and is relatively trivially extensible. With Chrome, you can star an issue and hope someone will listen to you, but you're probably going to be ignored.

>It's not completely fair to compare Firefox's default design decisions with Chrome/Safari/IE's design decisions, which are more than just defaults.

What do you mean by "more than just defaults"?

It takes <1 hour to write a Firefox extension that modifies its UI in a trivial way, and that Firefox extension can be distributed easily. You can do almost anything by modifying the XUL and/or CSS, and there is a good framework and good documentation for doing so. The default Firefox UI is just a default. There are many extensions and themes out there that make it easy for even non-programmers to modify Firefox to look and behave the way they want it to.

While it's possible to modify Chromium's UI by changing the source, it's far more difficult, and, unless your changes are accepted upstream, you have to maintain and distribute a whole new set of binaries yourself. If you want to do something like make the tabs square, make the tab bar scroll, or replace the download bar with a panel or a separate window, you're gonna have a bad time. Chrome's "themes" are really just different title bar and tab backgrounds. If you're a non-programmer, you can't really change the Chromium UI at all. The UI defaults are not just defaults; they're the only option unless you want to write a shitton of code.

Safari and IE are closed source, so it's extremely difficult to modify their UIs at all beyond the meager options provided to you in the preferences, even if you're a rockstar programmer.

> It takes <1 hour to write a Firefox extension that modifies its UI

Not for anyone using Firefox. Browser software is not just for developers, in fact, the majority of the users is not developers. I think this discussion was from a regular users default point of view of the Downloads window.

I think I addressed this pretty well already. Read the whole post.

Non developers like my mom can extend Firefox to fix a better UI for downloads – and that's and argument for Firefox not to have great defaults?

https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/download-statusb... and it works just like Chrome.

Actually it's much better: it takes much less space, can be configured to ignore certain file types and can disappear after the downloads are finished.

Safari's expanding download button is a lot better than the download bar. Ideally I'd prefer it if you could just disable it and it would open the download window in a background tab instead.

I wish it was more like Safari's download feature.

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