A New Look For Firefox 416
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
I reported the leak on October 17, 2003: (Score:3, Informative)
I reported the memory leak on October 17, 2003:
Firefox 0.8: All instances crash. Memory leaks.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22266 0
(Copy and paste the link to view the bug report.)
Please add your experiences to the report.
I reported the same bug in Mozilla browser, a long time ago. Huge memory leaks have existed since Mozilla version 1.0.
A recent experience: After two days of opening and closing instances of FireFox, with two FireFox instances open and maybe 5 tabs total
Well he could... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well he could... (Score:3, Interesting)
But on a more basic level, while Microsoft can work to prevent thrashing, program authors also need
Something is wrong with MS memory management... (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that when you reach the memory limit in Windows XP, the OS often becomes unstable, and remains unstable until you reboot.
Something is wrong with MS memory management, but I have never been able to determine what makes it go bonkers.
You say, "All that you need to do...". That's a good nickname for Windows XP. It's an "All that you need to do..." operating system. Go a little bit deep into how it works, and you begin experiencing its sloppiness.
Re:I reported the leak on October 17, 2003: (Score:3, Informative)
Poppycock. In order to shrink the cache, only dirty pages have to be flushed. However, dirty pages have to be written much earlier than that in order to reduce the damaging effects
Re:How about... (Score:5, Informative)
(Not sure if this is gospel truth, but I sure hope not... kill -9 firefox is getting old...)
Re:How about... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 f
Re:It's just Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
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:It's just Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
I still write in HTML 4.0 Transitional and validate it. Why should I be left out? XHTML is unnecessarily complex for my needs. At the end of the day, I merely want a site that looks reasonably good and is functional. I don't really need the wizardry and features XHTML can offer.
Re:It's just Windows (Score:3, Informative)
The individual web developer will not extend XHTML in any fashion (he can, but then it's not of the same document type anymore and will therefore not work with the clients (browsers)).
XHTML is mostly a subset of HTML (although one or two new tags
Why bother? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:Why bother? (Score:2)
Re:How about... (Score:3, Insightful)
You act like IE is stable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You act like IE is stable... (Score:3, Interesting)
In short, while bugs are annoying, FireFox isn't buggier than any of the other browsers out there, and
Re:You act like IE is stable... (Score:3, Informative)
If I understand you correctly, there is a way to do this in mozilla as well. Set the pref browser.startup.page to the integer '2', and mozilla/firefox/et al will start up on the page last loaded.
Re:You act like IE is stable... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It is fixed... (Score:3, Informative)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id
Re:How about... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How about... (Score:3, Informative)
I liked the old look (Score:5, Interesting)
Whatever the case, 0.9 will be an excellent release and well worth trying. However, please remember this release will have some major new features (better extension/theme management, migration of prefs from other browsers such as IE, Netscape and Opera) and then focus will be on polish and stability up to a successful 1.0 release.
Re:I liked the old look (Score:5, Informative)
A welcome suprise and it means I can get shut of my 3rd party bookmark convertor.
Thunderbird? (Score:5, Interesting)
Will Thunderbird be following suite and changing default theme too?
Cheers,
Ian
Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:2, Informative)
While the new theme isn't *bad*, it is not nearly as profesional as QUTE is, and a terrible first impression for new users who are coming off of IE.
Sad, sad, sad. Wish this could have been discussed first like in the old days (pheonix).
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:2)
I disagree. I have been using the windows version of the theme for weeks, and it's really fine. Check this screenshot [kmgerich.com] for an example.
If you really want it to look windowsish, you'd have to use those big, kitch, flashy buttons that are used in IE. No thanks, the general window interface (flashy window frames) is already ugly enough !
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:2)
The current Qute buttons look a lot like IE's Small buttons.
IMHO, The theme in the screenshot you give is _terrible_. I hate those "apple" style buttons.. this is a web browser I'm running under Windows here, not an iPod.
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:2)
Everyone keeps saying this, but I don't get it. I run OS X, and nothing on my machine looks like those buttons. I'd say they were "apple style" if they were aqua, but those are an original style that just became the default on Firebird for Mac.
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:2)
An "Apple" button is a white box, with a rounded thin black border, and some dark-grey-but-not-quite-black colored shape in it.
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:2)
IE is just so horrible that both Qute and the new firefox theme are way ahead esthetically. However, if people don't want a new interface at all, would you push an IE looking default theme ?
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:2)
Idiots love skins (Score:5, Interesting)
Many, many thousands of machines out there run without having ever been update since install, with every service under the sun enabled, and probably with the default passwords still in place. However, these same machines have custom backgrounds, colour cursors, sound effects and a dozen screensavers.
Skins are big with people who don't know how to change the Start menu and believe Linux must be a windos program, because how can something run on a computer if it isn't a windos program?
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I'm more of an "I don't care how it looks as long as it works" guy but I agree that the Qute theme looks great and I always felt comfortable using it. I guess variety is a good thing but I'd much rather see them sort out their differences and stick with Qute.
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
If you want to take market share (Score:5, Insightful)
opera vs firefox? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:opera vs firefox? (Score:2, Insightful)
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:opera vs firefox? (Score:5, Interesting)
May I suggest you fire up Firefox again, and type
into the address bar and hit enter.More options than you could shake a very large stick at
Also, Character Encoding is in the view menu.
RegardselFarto
Re:opera vs firefox? (Score:2)
Seriously, opera allows the same "do whatever the hell you want with this software" attitude of open source, yet they keep the usability of a company that actually wants to make money. Give it a whirl and you'll be surprised.
Re:opera vs firefox? (Score:2, Informative)
And to celebrate (Score:4, Funny)
It's now known as ThunderFox.
Re:And to celebrate (Score:2)
Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta love it.
Re:Yay (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
I am glad he released this info.
Re:Yay (Score:2)
I am not talking about security. I am well aware it is easy to snoop through un-encrypted email. The same could be said for snail mail in an addressed envelope. However, I expect the recipient of a personal communication to treat that communication with respect.
I am not trying to let the Mozilla guys off the hook; they behaved badly as well. But if someone were to post in a pu
Fuck the Mozilla devs (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, Arvid Axelsson, the author of the current default theme (Qute), may have a bit of an ego himself, and may have been reluctant to freely license his artwork under the same MPL terms as the Mozilla codebase. But he's a reasonable person, and he's indicated he's willing to compromise and do a Free license that works for the Mozilla team, because he wants to make sure that Firefox succeeds, and has the best, most aesthetically pleasing look and feel possible.
For God's FUCKING sake you egomaniacs (and anybody who has followed some of these discussions over the last few years knows this is true - see the splashscreen debacle in Bugzilla, the many UI layout discussions, and the naming debacles for examples), we are relying on you and the excellent browser you have created and maintained. We respect immensely all the hard work the Mozilla and Firefox core developers have done, but their lackadaisical attitude towards branding of their product (Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?), the terrible aesthetics of the splashscreens and icon sets they keep putting back in are just unacceptable. Qute was the best thing that ever happened to Firefox and the Mozilla project - compare to the awful looking old versions of the Mozilla browser - ugh.
You are the developers and project leaders of a critical mass-market product. If there is truly an unresolvable licensing issue with the current icons and their author is unwilling to compromise, come out and tell us, and assign a group of artists or other aesthetically inclined technology professionals to consider submissions for a new default. Realize that your contributions, while critical, do not need to include drawing shitty icons or making terrible off-the-cuff aesthetic decisions that have a negative impact on the adoption of a critical product for the entire Internet's wellbeing.
Re:Fuck the Mozilla devs (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Fuck the Mozilla devs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You need a bigger "but" next time (Score:2, Interesting)
Read your own subject line and then tell me during which part of your response you were respectful of them and their work.
Re:You need a bigger "but" next time (Score:5, Informative)
Ben Goodger is the strongest anti-advocate for Mozilla I have ever seen. There are hundreds of other developers who have contributed lots of code to the original Mozilla project and the Firefox codebase. Many of these are great people who have quietly contributed tens of thousands of hours of their work over the years to the community. And those people I respect immensely. The ones who insist on repeatedly driving rifts through and disrespecting the fabulous community of Mozilla supporters that have evangelized their product and fought for a better, more standards-compliant internet everywhere else have been done a tremendous disservice to the rest of the Internet, and I have simply lost my respect for them.
Re:You need a bigger "but" next time (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:You need a bigger "but" next time (Score:3, Informative)
And 100% customizable. Tab->Edit Context Menu
Personally I wish Firefox had a similar option so I could get rid of useless options like "Send Link" and "Copy Link Location" without having to edit userChrome.css.
Re:You need a bigger "but" next time (Score:3, Insightful)
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
From my reading of it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fuck the Mozilla devs (Score:5, Interesting)
I still use Firefox but I don't particpate anymore. I don't file bugs and I don't post in the forums. If the developers are going to continue to not pay attention to the users then they are losing IMHO their greatest strength outside the actual merit of the products themselves.
Call me a drama queen. Explain how I'm wrong. But don't discount the fact that many people right or wrong feel the same way as I do.
Re:Fuck the Mozilla devs (Score:3, Interesting)
Already slashdotted... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons? (Score:5, Funny)
No or Yes?
Re:Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons? (Score:4, Informative)
The reason for it in Mac is because all apps should be that way due to the UI guidelines.
As for Linux apparently it's in the GNOME UI guidelines. However, I rarely use any other GNOME apps in Linux, most things I do are either in browser or in a terminal window - therefore the button ordering is frustrating for me when I'm in Linux because I switch between Windows and Linux more than Linux and Mac.
But technically they're doing the right thing - although ideally it'd only display in that order if you're actually using GNOME.
Re:Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Did they fix the Cancel/Ok buttons? (Score:3, Interesting)
Theme choice... (Score:5, Insightful)
HCI anyone?? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the most basic principles of human-computer interaction is consistency. Windows users expect to see Windows-like apps, Mac OS X ppl expect native OS X looking apps and likewise for GNOME, KDE and whatever else.
Anything that breaks that (for example an OS X app that looks and/or behaves like a Windows app goes against the user's expections. And ultimately that makes the app harder for them to use and hence less appealing.
Granted there is a lot of similarity between the various desktop environments but they do each also have their own quirks. For example OS X apps have the toolbar along the top of the screen (not part of the app window) and have that little window-resizing thing in the bottom-right corner of a window (not part of the window's border). GNOME and KDE generally have different standard back, forward, reload etc icons for buttons that all apps should use rather than their own.
If you make Firefox look the same on every platform you will be breaking such little quirks and conventions on some (possibly all) platforms and the users will suffer.
I say make a different, native looking (and feeling) theme for each major platform and ship it as the default for that platform!
As for branding - you've got the name, you've got the firefox icon - they stay the same on every platform - surely that's all that's needed.
Personally I think that's a good thing too. I for one perceive it as really annoying and intrusive when I install an app that insists on planting it's icons all over my desktop, installing a pointless system tray icon and making itself the default player/browser/whatever (eg RealPlayer or QuickTime on Windows) - it feels like I get the branding forced down my throat and that does NOT make me a happy user! Apps that don't feel the need to do that are a breath of fresh air and it would be a real shame for Firefox to go down the road of excessive branding.
Re:HCI anyone?? (Score:2)
Good news is they've checked into the installer options where you'd like to place your icons on the Windows desktop so you've now got full control over this (I think you might have to do a custom install which I do anyways)
Re:HCI anyone?? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ca
To: Mozilla Devs (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Caution 0.9 will break ALL your extensions (Score:3, Informative)
do not install 0.9 until (if) the extensions have been updated as it will break
once again backwards compatibility has been sacrificed (and we are not even at 1.0 yet) we had now 200+ extensions have to be updated and some have been abandoned as they worked, now they will be broken and useless
i hope all this aggro was worth it, or you might find a lot of people just give up with it and go back to IE while its got a lot of failings at least you know where you are with it and it doesn't keep breaking every month
Re:Caution 0.9 will break ALL your extensions (Score:5, Informative)
It's a necessary change.
Re:Caution 0.9 will break ALL your extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Slashdot Rendering (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot Rendering (Score:3, Informative)
Plastikfox (Score:3, Interesting)
Screenshot of the New Default Theme (Score:5, Informative)
Screenshot of the new theme (Score:3, Informative)
http://kmgerich.com/archive/000062.html [kmgerich.com]
SVG Support (Score:5, Interesting)
FireFork? (Score:3, Interesting)
We can only hope.
Re:The new theme (Score:5, Informative)
This is a port of the Mac Pinstripe theme, although the new theme based on Pinstripe but called Winstripe (the GNOME version is called GNOMEstripe - not Linstripe!) I assume these names won't be used in the finished product though.
Anyway back on track, although Winstripe will be similar to Pinstripe the icons will look more Windows like and therefore not a total Mac lookalike.
Re:The new theme (Score:2)
Re:The new theme (Score:2)
As far as evangelizing new users go, screw 'em.
Re:The new theme (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Nope (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nope (Score:2)
Re:And what was Firefix was for, again ?? (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox was *supposed* to be a *fast* lean-and-mean browser. One reason was given that bundling IE with OS works because people are too lazy to download another browser. That gap WIDENS as the download size increases. Already Firefox is 10+ MB!!!!
Don't be such a troll. The download size for Firefox hasn't been anywhere near 10 meg (except perhaps before they stripped out all the app suite stuff).
If you look at the latest branch builds [mozilla.org] you'll see that the current download is below 5 meg on Windows.
Re:And what was Firefix was for, again ?? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And what was Firefix was for, again ?? (Score:2)
I do however think Opera is a very good peice of work for gettin g all that in 3.5MB, put I prefer FireFox for some reason for browsing, and I have all my mail on my iBook using Apple's mail.app (I think it's great... I don't understand why it gets such a slamming).
Re:great (Score:3, Informative)
If you click on a link to add a sidebar panel then it'll ask you where you want to file a bookmark, then to open the sidebar you can look in the appropriate place in bookmarks.
This bookmark approach also means you can turn any bits of HTML into a sidebar panel. Just bookmark a page, go to properties and check "Open this bookmark in the sidebar"
Re:GTK 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd be intrigued to hear why you believe GTK is so "fundamentally backwards", seeing as just about every useful Linux app (except for maybe KDevelop, K3B, and OO.o) is written in it.
Re:How about we fix the more important things firs (Score:5, Funny)
display:block and display:inline have nothing to do with how elements are aligned. They control the behavior of an element within the document flow. An inline element, such as an anchor, does not disrupt the flow. A block level element has breaks before and after; as such, it will interrupt the flow.
Your perceived alignment comes fromt this. When three inline elements follow each other, the act line words in a sentence and flow one after the other. When three block level elements follow each other, the breaks before and after the element cause each block to appear under the preceeding one.
Just a quick lesson. If I were you, I'd read up on CSS and prepare some testcases with a well written bug report before you talk about rendering issues. From your post you appear to be fairly ignorant of what's really going on.
Re:Grandparent is NOT a troll, proof! (Score:3, Insightful)
Basic CSS, confused by the fact you have nested it in another div.