Design Principles Behind Firefox OS Explained 69
At MozCamp Warsaw, a presentation was given on the design principles behind the core Firefox OS experience. Layering of applications (if you're wondering why the Firefox mobile interface has that weird curve by the tab control, you'll find answers here), an emphasis on content over visual frills for their own sake, consistent iconography, and clean typography dominate.
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However Mozilla, has a tendancy of loosing focus. Ok we come out with a good design, then over time things get added and then you get a bigger and bigger pile. Becuase they don't know when to stop.
A lot of the design seems to be taked from Windows 8 land. And the real devil is beyond screen shots when things are running in real time. Fat fingers will just mean something is too small. Or the particular effect just cannot be optimes to run smothly enough.
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Oh, to have mod points...
But, (Score:3, Funny)
I'm guessing the main principle... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm guessing the main principle is to find ways to annoy people who liked the previous versions and to hide stuff from them.
How very Microsoft of them.
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Re:I'm guessing the main principle... (Score:5, Funny)
GNOMEphone, eh? I can see it now.
In the name of simplifications they'll remove some or all of the numbers from the keypad, because an internal user study told them that all 10 digits is simply too complex.
Then someone will write into the forum to complain.
"I frequently need the digits 5 to 9 (inclusive) to call a wide variety of my contacts. These are vital to my workflow"
"WONTFIX. Our dicision is final."
"FUCK YOU I NEEDED 9 BECAUSE A FIRE STARTED MY HOUSE BURNED DOWN"
"Please take your unhelpful comments elsewhere"
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Meh. You only need 4 buttons to dial up to 0xE.
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The daily quote on ./ was right on target today:
The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides. -- Andre Malraux
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You forgot upgrading the OS every hour or didn't you know that FF OS 39 is already in beta and will be available in 2 hours.
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If their design . . . (Score:2, Troll)
is anything like their punctuation, grammar or spell-check, I see bad things in the future.
Rounded corners have nothing on this... (Score:1)
It's almost a tit for tat copy of Windows Phone, in so many ways.
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It's almost a tit for tat copy of Windows Phone, in so many ways.
I was thinking the exact same thing: There's a lot of Metro those mockups.
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Heh. Anybody else remember when resizing a Netscape window would do a full page reload? Look ma, no cache!
They're like an asshole that does a line of coke at a party and turns into a raging cokehead, stealing from friends, sucking dick for drug money, etc. Then they turns to Jesus and insists on telling everyone about it. Moderation people! Do a couple lines of coke on Friday and Saturday night. Go to church on Sunday.
Deja vu (Score:2)
EmacsM-^H Firefox would be a great OS if only it had a decent text editorM-^HM-^H web browser.
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Amazing, I didn't know what M^H does until today, and I'm using Emacs for 4 years now...
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Do you 'set -o vi' on the command line? Emacs style keystrokes (set -o emacs) rock in Bash.
Try: M-b and M-F to move by word. (alt+b, alt+f, alt+backspace = M-^H for other readers)
Smoking crack (Score:5, Interesting)
Designing an OS? Are you serious? Have you ever looked at the documentation on Firefox beyond the user stuff? Mozilla's support for using Firefox on more than one computer at a time is so bad that the web is littered with abandoned effort after abandoned effort from end user to do it for them!
How on earth do they think they are going to support an operating system which /requires/ management when they can't even support a browser that requires management? You shouldn't have to go dozens of web sites to track down the settings and troll developer forums to get the settings needed to mass deploy an application.
Mozilla, you really, really need to spend some time talking to people in the enterprise and learning what their needs our for managing fleets of computers. I've been on more than one meeting where Firefox was axed from deployment - even though every single person in the room personally used it, preferred it, acknowledged it was more secure - strictly because it is completely unmanageable for an enterprise. Don't get me start on their administrative toolkit either. It isn't close to usable and doesn't begin to cover what is needed.
I'm sorry, until you can get your act up to speed for a single application support at least somewhere to the level of say, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, your simply being absurd. It's not about the technical capabilities of your applications, it's about the ability to use and administer it on an enterprise scale.
I'm sorry, the enterprise experience with trying to manage Firefox is so bad that the idea of a Firefox Operating System is going to cost the poor person who suggests it their reputation at best.
Re:Smoking crack (Score:5, Insightful)
lockPref("app.update.mode", 0);
lockPref("app.update.service.enabled", true);
lockPref("app.update.enabled", true);
lockPref("app.update.interval", 14400);
lockPref("app.update.auto", true);
lockPref("app.update.autoUpdateEnabled", true);
pref("toolkit.telemetry.prompted", 2);
pref("toolkit.telemetry.rejected", true);
pref("toolkit.telemetry.enabled", false);
Yeah, I think I got that memo. Now, I want you to find a single source me on their website that explains all of those settings, what they do, their values, what file you put them in, their context and how to implement them for all users at an enterprise level.
For enterprise deployments, your need to be able to set your configuration for any number of settings with ease. You can't do that with Firefox in the enterprise, I'm sorry but you just can't. I might need to configure any number of well over a thousand some settings, of which auto update is only one of them.
This is what Firefox needs to be able to stand a chance in hell of making it in the enterprise. Understand that the enterprise /wants/ to use Firefox - badly. /not/ programmers need to be able to readily research and configure Firefox the way they want it.
1. Enterprises need a single file that they can easily manipulate to change as needed for all users. Mozilla.cfg sort of handles this, but only in a limited capacity.
2. Central sources for documentation. Why does about:config only have some entries defined? I shouldn't have to troll developer forums or bug reports to find out how to manipulate something.
3. Easier support. The fact that it's open source is meaningless when programmers are not the ones supporting and distributing Firefox into production. IT professionals who are
4. Don't make judgement calls for my organization. You feel wonderful about browser rights, that's nice. I'm not confusing 75,000 users with a prompt about their 'browser rights' and crap-flooding the helpdesk. I should be able to easily disable this kind of thing without spending a lot of time trying to find the right setting.
5. Whoever came up with a six week release schedule needs to be placed into a monastery where they measure time by the seasons to gain some perspective. This places a heavy burden on enterprises and is a support burden. No other software product has this kind of release schedule and it goes against industry best practice.
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It doesn't help that some settings disappear for no reason after an update. A lot of good those tweaks will do by next version... which will take all of a week.
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[rant...]
5. Whoever came up with a six week release schedule needs to be placed into a monastery where they measure time by the seasons to gain some perspective. This places a heavy burden on enterprises and is a support burden. No other software product has this kind of release schedule and it goes against industry best practice.
Simmer down and go here:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html [mozilla.org]
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That and when you point out issues to them i.e. memory leaks in Firefox they deny they exist. Then they finally admit to them when they fix them a couple of years later they deny ever denying they existed and basically try and troll you over it.
Between that sort of attitude, a concern I have that at least one of their devs didn't seem to grasp basic modular extensible software design, and things like the do not track debacle where they came up with some nonsensical reason as to why not to enable it by defau
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Why are we still complaining about how much memory ANYTHING takes up anymore?
How much will it take to replace my 1GB Eee900 (with 1G and almost impossible to upgrade to 2) with something which isn't any heavier? A lot more than $79, that's for sure.
Also, how do I plug that $79 DIMM into my android phone?
Your friendly neighborhood software development manager.
Ah, so you're personally responsible for the bloated monstrosities that pass a programs these days.
Please, PLEASE quit your job.
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Obviously, humor is not your strong suit.
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Where's the d@mn home button? (Score:1)
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The "Alt + Home" keyboard command will jump you straight to your home page, without mousing around.
I've started disliking the "firefox experience" since everything has become flashed up... a page with a flash window always steals the keyboard controls, so I can't, for example, kill it with a control W.
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a page with a flash window always steals the keyboard controls
Not quite - it's more Flash refusing to free they keyboard unless you force focus to a textbox or something. Then Flash finally relinquishes control to the browser.
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you know, that you can move the buttons in any way you want? right click the menubar, then select customize. now you can move buttons.
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just customize it ...
i am using no googletoolbar (because of web-shortcuts, gg is google) and the buttons left of the urlbar. the next/prev buttons are not shown when disabled via userchrome and with status4evar i even have an oldschool statusbar.
firefox might be quite unusable with its current defaults, but you can make it look like an old good version with some efford.
Looking more appealing than Android at the moment (Score:2)
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Why would you say that ? It can run on an Android Linux kernel or even the less obvious choice of running it on the Raspberry Pi:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gecko/B2G_build_prerequisites [mozilla.org]
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Firefox-OS-Mozilla-Raspberry-Pi,16883.html [tomshardware.com]
You did not read Slashdot yesterday ?:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/07/06/1551237/telefonica-shows-prototype-firefox-os-phone [slashdot.org]
The plan is to release a phone early next year:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/firefox-os-w [cnet.co.uk]
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I think your understanding is wrong. See https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/07/02/firefox-mobile-os/ [mozilla.org] (yes, it's basically a press release, but it's a convenient one-stop shop for a list of people who have plans, theoretical or not, to ship Firefox OS devices).
Design Summary (Score:2, Flamebait)
Make the app look like an Android app, make the home screen look like iOS (but circles instead of rounded squares).
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Here is the entire design document in one sentence: Make the app look like an Android app, make the home screen look like iOS (but circles instead of rounded squares).
This one has my vote. :-)
Looks promising (Score:2)
However it definitely seems a blend of Windows Phone meets iPhone with a little Android thrown in (just kidding).
Even if this fails as a product, it is important to get Apple aware that there are competitive forces out there creating better UI paradigms then "just a grid of app icons".
Mozilla should take great care however because a circle is just a rounded rectangle with corner radius = 1/2 height of rectangle.
First Chrome. Now Firefox. (Score:2)
We used to say that all programs evolve until they can send email.
Are we going to need a new saying: "Every web browser grows until it becomes an operating system."
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Looking forward to IE6OS... *shudder*
These are not design principles. (Score:5, Insightful)
These are styling principles.
Yes, I know the entire commercial world in 2012 has decided to remap the dictionary and call "design" what the world of commerce in 1982 would have called "style", and "architecture" and "engineering" what the world of 1982 would have called "design". And product designers no longer actually design things but just draw sketches of what the colouring of the pictures on the skin of the 3D printer will look like, while the product architects, who don't have architecture degrees, build flowcharts for the engineers, who don't hold engineering degrees, to build.
But darnit, I still remember when "design" meant how a product works at a technical level, and that's what I came to the article expecting to read, and that's the opposite of what I got.
Get off my perfectly manicured ironically Le Corbusier-inspired post-post-postmodernist lawn.
Once you go Native, you never go back! (Score:1)
As someone who switched from a browser based OS, WebOS, to iPhone 3GS, and now to Android, I can tell you I will never go back to another laggy HTML based OS. If anything, I'd like to see Android move away from its VM based apps to something like Apple's native apps. Many apps ran better on my 3GS than they do on my much more powerful S3. Mozilla is going the wrong direction on this one. Native > Java > JavaScript
The whole idea of using HTML, CCS, and JavaScript as the back end technology for a low-en