A New Look For Firefox

ben writes "Regular users of Mozilla Firefox may be interested to know a new default theme is planned for 0.9 in preparation for the road to 1.0. 0.9 will also feature new improved theme and extension management, which will make it easy to make Firefox look the way you want it to."

How about...

[G-funk]

...They leave everything as it is, and fix the resource leak in windows? It's hard to try and convince people to switch to my browser when I have to "end process tree" the thing once a day.

Re:How about...

[linuxci]

Well remember the people who design themes aren't the same sort of people who can fix resource leaks!

Also have you got a bug number for this? I've not had any major problems with Mozilla or Firefox for ages.

Re:How about...

[hattig]

Definitely. It looks fine at the moment, but that resource leak is the biggest annoyance. Especially when everything stops responding because Firefox running as the only application starts paging on a 512MB machine.

Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs

[Xshare]

Qute was a great Default theme. It looked great as a default theme, and really made switchers from IE feel comfortable. This new theme just doesnt fit in Windows or Linux... it looks good for OSX, but just not in other OSes.

If you want to take market share

[Anonymous Coward]

in the browser market, you'd be looking to take it from Internet Explorer (duh). That's Internet Explorer on Windows ... not the Mac. I think that it is important to have a default theme that makes it easy for the mums and dads to identify with (because they are not likely to change it). I think the current default theme does this and the proposed change is a mistake. But what do I know?

Why bother?

[Safety Cap]

The important things like fixing the preferences, the weird [mozilla.org], fatal [mozilla.org] bugs can wait! We want fun eye candy!!!

Re:How about...

[Raven42rac]

First of all, it is a free browser, they have no obligation to fix anything. Buy a shirt, then whine. Second, if they are having legal issues with their art, then to ensure the continued existence of their browser, or else they will have no chance to fix the bugs. On another note, I have never had any problems with the browser from Phoenix to Firefox. Are you using the nightly builds or the official release. If you are using the nightly release, be careful what you wish for.

Yay

[W2k]

This is why I like open source software development. Just look at that forum thread. Inside a company like IBM or Microsoft, a debate like this would be kept covered up out of PR fears. Open source developers more often than not do not give a shit about PR (which is a good thing), they just want to make the best possible program. They also don't have to be afraid of losing their jobs, getting their salaries lowered, or whatnot. So we get to see the nitty gritty details of intra-project disputes and arguments from the front row, even silly things like what theme ships with Firefox as the default.

Gotta love it.

Re:opera vs firefox?

[pmjordan]

Some people prefer FireFox, some prefer Opera. It's really a matter of opinion. I'm tempted to say that for your average end-user, FireFox is the better choice, and for many power users, installing lots of plugins is the way to go.

Personally, I agree with you, I've been a happy Opera user for years. That doesn't mean that FireFox should be more like Opera, it's just a different approach.

Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs

[Xshare]

First off: That's not the new skin: This is. [cybertarp.com] Second:Exactly. You have been using this skin. You know how to change a skin. Hell, you know what a skin is. You are also a reader of slashdot. That already means that you most likely are an advanced computer user, prolly use linux at times, and etc. Most people aren't. The people who we want to convert from MSIE don't like change. They don't want to go into the skinning thing and get a new skin. It's too complicated. First impressions are also crucial, and most "new users" would see this new skin as alien to them, and they won't want to go through the trouble of changing it, and will just slump back to IE. Just my take on things.

Re:Fuck the Mozilla devs

[linuxci]

The problem is when you debate every little detail to death you get a browser like the Mozilla suite which progressed relatively slowly because everything was a committee decision.

Yes I do think this could have been handled a *lot* better because Arvid but a lot of work into this excellent theme and now is word will be getting a lot less attention as it'll now just be a downloadable theme on update.mozilla.org

Also as you can see from the forum thread mentioned in the original article you can see the information process wasn't the best.

However, ultimately difficult decisions have to be made and they can't satisfy everyone all of the time.

If you look at the original charter [mozilla.org] for m/b, Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox you'll see that they intended from the very beginning to have only a small group of people making the decisions.

To quote:
The size of the team working on the trunk is one of the many reasons that development on the trunk is so slow. We feel that fewer dependencies (no marketing constraints), faster innovation (no UI committees), and more freedom to experiment (no backwards compatibility requirements) will lead to a better end product.

Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs

[Xshare]

I'm not. I'm pushing Qute. Qute looks perfect. It's natural to both users of IE and those who aren't. Thats what we need. Not something thats only natural to those who aren't. Hell, not something that's downright ugly and noone likes.

Already slashdotted...

[Momo_CCCP]

...poor forum server is screaming...
Consistency across platforms or within platforms is quite a non-issue to us KDE users : the Plastik and Keramik themes for Mozilla and Firefox are beautifully integrated in the KDE desktop, so whatever the default themes becomes, we'll still be happy.
As long as skinning is avaible, everybody should be happy.

Re:Fuck the Mozilla devs

[Fnkmaster]

Those difficult decisions should not be made by Ben Goodger. I'm sure he's a great, stand-up guy. I've worked with engineers like him before - their code may be fabulous, but their sense of aesthetics is fundamentally broken. I support the idea of a small group *of artists and UI designers* making UI decisions, and a group with some marketing experience to make branding decisions.

I've managed plenty of software development teams before, and you just don't assign any random engineer to make important UI decisions. Some people have the talent for this and some don't. It's part aesthetics, part usability, part style. Very important stuff, and not something you learn getting a computer science degree, hacking Unix, writing HTML rendering engines and so on.

Re:Yay

[geeber]

This forum thread was started by taking a private email and posting to a public forum without the author's permission. This is not the sort of behavior that should be celebrated, whether it is done inside a private company or in an open source community. It is a serious violation of ettiquite.

Theme choice...

[Epistax]

Now I know you can just download themes to your heart's content. I'm using a tiny theme because that's the way I like it. However there's no reason not to have several default themes to choose from at install time. I would suggest the themes be "Default", "Internet Explorer", "Netscape", "Opera" and perhaps a Macish theme. As long as it is explained that this is simply the look and feel and has no real functionality differences (explained in a calm and simple manner), things should be less scary. Previous posters are absolutely right-- the more different it looks, the more scared the user will be, even if everything is in exactly the same place.

To: Mozilla Devs

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't end up like the XFree86 developers, and completely ruin your project. Listen to the users, just give it a try. Now that wasn't that hard now was it?

I love Firefox, without doubt the best browser yet, and it isn't even 1.0. Keep it fast and light, bloat is what made regular Mozilla suck, face it.

From my reading of it

[Chuck Chunder]

The Mozilla devs did the right thing and asked about having Qute freely licenced 6 months ago. They were apparently told no and have therefore taken the only reasonable course left to them, sourcing another theme.

The new theme might not be brilliant but it is a work in progress and rather importantly is freely licenced so other people will be able to tweak it over time.

You act like IE is stable...

[gtaluvit]

I've seen IE barf on pages before. No browser is going to be perfect and I think explaining to people that you may have to close and restart a browser during the day (if they keep it open THAT long) is a lot easier than saying "ok, if you close those 5 pop ups and uninstall CometCursor, you'd see the page you're lookin for."

Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs

[j7953]

Qute was a great Default theme. It looked great as a default theme, and really made switchers from IE feel comfortable.

I agree. Replacing this comfortable feeling with a uniform cross-platform look is a stupid idea. Who benefits from a uniform cross-platform look, anyway? Most computer users use only a single platform. They probably don't care at all how the browser looks on some other platform (hell, many don't even know that there are other platforms), but they do care if it looks like it was designed for the platform they use.

People who use multiple platforms are likely to be experienced computer users anyway, so if they want a uniform look, they'll probably be able to install whatever theme they prefer on all the platforms they use.

But I use KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

The backwards HIG does not apply.

So it is a bug.

Re:I reported the leak on October 17, 2003:

[Pieroxy]

If Bill Gates weren't so poor, he could fix that

You are just an ass. What could Bill do when you reach your physical memory? Blue Screen? Kill the faulty app? Start paging?

Well, it looks like they chose the best of all three options...

Re:It's just Windows

[E_elven]

It may be just me but when the 'lean', 'no-nonsense' and 'stripped' version of software requires 27MB to run with two open tags I think it's perfectly fine to blame the developers of that software, even if there were no extra resource leaks.

I hope someone will write a browser that will parse only valid XHTML 1.1/CSS and nothing else. Would cut the executable in half not to try to support the horrible code people put on the web a few years ago.

Re:Fuck the Mozilla devs

[Anonymous Coward]

Since AOL spun off Mozilla it's been the fastest developing major scale Open Source project in the world, and immensely popular. It's a ridiculous argument to make that because 'bogie' didn't get personalized service their development model is a failure. If you think I'm wrong, please try the same thing with Microsoft, Apple, or Sun and report back on your success. Damn, where do these people get off thinking the open source development model has some equivalency to ordering re-fills on ice tea at the local diner?

Re:HCI anyone??

[per11]

If I wanted Firefox to look the same on all platforms, I would just use Mozilla.

Well he could...

[rsilvergun]

write his OS so that applications that aren't in use get put out to swap and stay there. I'll admit I don't really understand the technical aspects here, but the complaint seems to be that the this is 'thrashing'; which usually means _sustained_ memory swapping for no really good reason. I've had plenty of instances of that in WinXP, and a lot less of it in Linux (and I've heard great things about the BSD's but I'm too lazy to install them right now). Anyway you cut it though, I think we'll all agree the memory management in WinXP (and probably every other OS on the planet to be fair) could use some work. The grandparant is just ticked off that with all the money XP costs, something as basic as memory management isn't a top priority.

Re:Why bother?

[irokitt]

Well, in my experience, they key to getting software to be accepted in the wild world out there is the way it looks, not the performance or reliability. After all, look at IE. When a friend of mine switched his families browser to Firefox, the biggest beef was "it looks hokey" (he hadn't installed any of the pretty themes). So perhaps the dev team has realized that the development path should include parallel development on the eye candy, instead waiting until everything else is done to work on the interface.

Re:How about...

[thakadu]

I am sorry that you are experiencing these leaks as I am fortunate enough not to have had them yet. I also am running a 512MB machine (WinXP) and I have almost always got at least 3 FireFox tabs open and I very seldom reboot. The one thing I don't have is the Flash plugin. Could it be this causing the leaks you are experiencing? The only instability problems I currently have are:
1) Bookmark icons on the bookmarks toolbar seam to come and go as they please. (Also happens in IE)
2) Text entered in a form field before the page is fully loaded often gets blanked out once the page has completed loading. (Not in IE)
Otherwise I have found 0.8 to be at least as stable as IE and certainly much snappier.
Good luck.

Re:The new theme

[chunkwhite86]

And here is a complete screenshot of the new theme. I think this is a huge step backwards.

Remember that to gain market share, you have to design the product for the average idiot. Yes, you know the one; the guy that thought his CDROM was a cup holder.

To win the average idiot, you need simple layout, bright colors, and hand-holding wizards.

Re:Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons?

[tepples]

KDE has been using that standard longer

Calendar priority examples are bad examples. Mac OS has used (Cancel)(OK) since January 1984.

Re:HCI anyone??

[douthat]

I don't see other [musicmatch.com] popular [winamp.com] media [microsoft.com] players [real.com] using the standard windows UI. Do you?

The above is a moot point, anyway. Keeping the UI of an application consistent with the UI of all the other apps on a particular OS is very important if you want to increase the rate of adoption. Media players are an exception because just about every media player fux up the UI to a confusing level.

Take the look and feel of another popular open source media player [videolan.org] as an example. When my mac buddies look for a video player capable of playing mpeg-2 (or whatever file-type it is they're having problems with that day) if I point them to VLC, they love it! It looks and feels exactly like any other mac application they use, from the metal UI, to the menu at the top of the screen, to the double-clickable .app bundle and high-res icon. They end up accepting it alot more easily than an application that didn't fit the Mac look and feel. Similarly, when you run VLC in Windows, it LOOKS and FEELS like a windows app, and on linux, it LOOKS and FEELS like a linux app. Hell, on BeOS, it looks and feels like a beos app.

I think it would be a step backwards for FireFox to consolidate on a single theme across all platforms.

Re:Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons?

[damiam]

No, the decision is because they did think about it. Cancel/OK makes more sense and is fundamentally easier to use than OK/Cancel. That's why Apple uses it.

It'd be nice if Firefox could detect KDE and switch its button order. However, as Firefox is written in GTK and KDE already has its own non-Gecko browser, probably most of the Firefox developers aren't KDE users and don't care. If you do care, go ahead and code it.

Re:Grandparent is NOT a troll, proof!

[colinramsay]

Please. This just shows your lack of understanding of the entire issue. The reason that your examples appear under each other is because display is not inherited. Therefore the divs inside test and test2 have a display:block - the breaks caused by such a block level element cause them to be displayed on a new line.

Basic CSS, confused by the fact you have nested it in another div.

Re:Caution 0.9 will break ALL your extensions

[Eil]

once again backwards compatibility has been sacrificed (and we are not even at 1.0 yet)

Uh, hello? How did this get modded up?

Rather than feeding this relatively obvious troll, I'll simply remind folks that the whole POINT of the pre-1.0 development cycle is to break things. And nobody's forcing anyone else to use Firefox, stable or not. End of story.

Re:You act like IE is stable...

[Kyouryuu]

Just because IE isn't stable doesn't mean Firefox can't aspire to be. IE is an archaic browser as far as I'm concerned, and that's why Mozilla and Netscape are actually gaining momentum. Prior to Mozilla 1.0, IE dominated. Now, at least according to my statistic, it's more of a 90%-10% or 85%-15% distribution. And although that may seem small, in something as gigantic as the browser market, that's actually quite a lot of people.

Why are they gaining? They offer technologies people want. Tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, and are generally less crashy. They are also generally more immune to the various sorts of crap unscrupulous advertisers have been pulling that "infects" IE. To keep gaining, these browsers need to keep doing this. That means not allowing large and highly documented bugs like the memory leak in question to be ignored.

No...

[Overly Critical Guy]

To win the average idiot, you need simple layout, bright colors, and hand-holding wizards.

To win the average idiot, you need to do two things:

1.) Make something fun to use. That encompasses everything from a pleasant visual look to a simple yet powerful interface. Something most OSS lacks.

2.) Don't call them "idiots." They're not idiots just because they have enough of a life to not treat browser and operating system wars like religious crusades, like we do.

Re:You need a bigger "but" next time

[stewby18]

You are clearly talking about a larger issue, which I can't really speak to, but I can definitely say that the thread you linked to does *not* support your case.

I read it through, and here's what I saw:
1) A professional email from Ben Gooder saying that Firefox was taking a new direction due to a combination of licencing and UI considerations
2) A less-than-polite response from the Qute designer, with both the original and the reply posted to a public forum in violation of basic decency
3) A lot of ignorant flaming of the decision and back-seat driving from people who were not privy to the details of the decision and ignored what they were told about it by Ben Gooder's follow-up post. Interestingly, the people doing said flaming all seemed coincidentally to prefer the Qute theme.
4) Many people who either didn't like Qute or were reserving judgement one way or the other until they had time to make an informed decision based on the complete theme and actual use.
5) The Qute fanatics almost exclusively ignoring the people in 4) and claiming that everyone likes Qute better, and that ignoring "the preferences of the end users" was completely against what Firefox should be about (I'll leave the hypocricy in that as an excercise for the reader).

I certainly did see a lot of disrespect in that thread, but it was all *toward* Ben Gooder, and not *by* him. After reading that thread, what I'm left with is a lack of respect for people who lash out ignorantly and disrespectfully against someone who spends a whole lot of time working on a browser that they all use and enjoy.