Firefox 4.0: Early Screenshots Released | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 4.0: Early Screenshots Released

mashable.com

28 pointsfoppr32 comments

This is about the thousandth time I've seen this idiotic proclamation. There's a difference between screenshots and mockups. Screenshots are shots of what is actually on the screen (a.k.a. the program running). Mockups are created in Photoshop from a number of elements.

These are mockups, not screenshots.

And thank god they actually used something plain (like the google results) instead of the visually detracting CNN screenshots they used last time.

Is there any kind of application, for which screenshots are less important than a browser?! Look, it displays google results just as every other browser AND it has tabs!

Tabs on bottom is the current norm in Firefox

Am I the only one who likes my tabs on the bottom, meaning under the content, above the status bar?

Much less mouse travel when switching apps and then switching tabs.. (I'm trying to use the mouse less and rely just on the keyboard, but its tough)

Personally I like them down the right side. Makes better use of a widescreen monitor, since most pages are still vertical in nature. Also can see way more tabs at once. If you want to see what I mean:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8045

I could see how that would be nice, though at work no widescreens and at home I usually dual monitor it with the laptop.

I personally go with Tree Style Tabs, since it lets you group related tabs. Otherwise I agree with you totally; I don't think I could stand going back to across-the-top tabs.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

There's so much wasted space on the side of a widescreen. I've never understood why people want them for their computers, as opposed to tall screens. After all, we read across a short way, and downwards a long way.

Because our eyes are side-by-side. Have you ever rotated a pair of 24" widescreens vertically? They are taller than your vertical field of view.

Widescreens make sense for all sorts of things, especially video. Just because they don't make sense for reading lots of text doesn't mean the space is wasted. With a tiling window manager (http://awesome.naquadah.org), you just put two windows side-by-side anyway.

I was wondering what the hell they were talking about when they said the tabs were on the "bottom" when they weren't - they're still out the top of the application.

Someone's posted links to sidebar tab mod, is there one that actually puts the tabs on the bottom of the browser?

I use Tab mix plus

http://tmp.garyr.net/

1) For your keyboard surfing: vimperator.org vim-style keybindings for mouse-free browsing.

2) The URL & search bars are for the currently active tab, so they belong below the tabs. Visual hierarchy really helps make things easier to use.

Cough-Chrome

But what matters is functionality and performance, hope they deliver. Looking forward.

looks more like a chrome + opera mashup.

A higher percentage of screen (whether on laptops or separate monitors) are wide-screen so I think putting the tabs on top to increase the amount of space to view the page is the way to go.

Chrome and Safari work great with it.

The "on-top" looks much better and includes a home button. But yeah does look a bit like Chrome. Having said that, Chrome was designed by people from Firefox right? So there would be similar influences.

I would miss the page 'title' -- my tabs are always too small to see more than the first letter or two. An optional title band under the URL bar, adjacent to the page content itself, would more than make up for the loss.

Something the pro/con list misses (and it's kind of a big point) is that distance to a UI element isn't the only thing that affects how easy it is to get to.

http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html#fittsLaw

Putting the tabs at the very top means that they're on the edge of the screen, which means that in one direction, they're (effectively) huge. Choosing a tabs-on-top design makes the tabs easier to get to, not harder.

Give the option for both. If that confuses or scares users too much, have one as the default and the other as an add-on that users who really want it will have to download.

As of right now, ff users have to settle for the tabs-on-bottom style unless they want to settle for a combination of 5 add-ons, which - i'll assume - significantly increases memory usage.

What's up with the style of the Google search button in the second mockup?

That whole mockup is badly done; the page shown in the browser there was almost certainly copied from a screengrab of a Mac browser without any thought for the fact that it was supposed to be a mockup of Windows.

Aurgh. Mockups!

Combo stop/refresh/go???

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!

The Stop Button, Reload Button, and Indeterminate Progress Spinner all represent exactly the same thing -- whether the page is loading shit. You only need one, with a lag between stop and reload to avoid accidental fail.

They also finally put the progress bar in the address bar, another Safari innovation.

I've used TinyMenu + StopReload + Fission, along with shoving the few UI elements I want into the "File" toolbar to get this UI in FF for years.

At least give me the option to customize the toolbar so I can put the buttons wherever I want.

Sure. You install the "Stylish" extension and then you use CSS to customize to your heart's content. This IS Firefox. I have all the chrome hidden when inactive.

Though Mozilla gimps the easy customizability more and more with each release.

For instance, starting in Firefox 3, the location bar and search bar are a single integrated UI element, for no apparent reason.

"Accidental fail" is the thing that would happen often. Two opposite actions, stop and reload, placed on one button. I'd rather give user two straightforward buttons, than one complex and modal.

Agreed. Merging stop and the spinner makes sense, but merging with reload none at all.

To me the first screen shot looks a whole lot like IE7/IE8, which I don't really like.

They're probably ultra-cool, but unfortunately Firefox 3 cannot render that webpage on my dual-core machine running Ubuntu.

Oh man. That actually looks pretty neat. I've got some anal dislikes, but they've removed almost all of the things that were red flags for me.

I'm just hoping they nativized the Mac version; I'd love to have a fourth major browser for tinkering with stuff.

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