The Next Firefox UI 401
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has been constructing a new user interface for Firefox, and the layout seems to be revealed in new mockups that show the integrated Home Tab app and the streamlining of tabs and browsing buttons."
Re:Don't care for it, but... (Score:4, Informative)
There's a reason my personal firefox config log is labeled "the hoops I jump through.txt". Every release they give me more of what I don't want, and break the add-ons that give me what I do want. It's getting pretty tedious stripping these things down just to build them back up again.
I think the home tab is a good idea... for people who use a home page and also only have 1 of them and also actually revisit it multiple times in the life of a window. So long as the other 85% of us can hide it, that's fine. But there comes a time when "you can customize it" stops being a feature, and starts being an excuse to ignore user wants and do whatever the hell you want. Really, is the UI something that needs to be continually re-defined? Couldn't we spend the effort on something else? Something other than badly imitating Chrome?
Re:The Next Firefox UI (Score:5, Informative)
They've been swiping bits from Opera for years. The most recent versions even have the right click "Paste and Go" for the address bar which was always one of my favorite obscure Opera-centric behaviors.
I'm quite happy it's there, too, but then I'm one of those freakish Opera fans and anything that makes Firefox more like Opera is A-OK with me.
Much ado... (Score:5, Informative)
Please read the comment appearing at the top of the web page [mozilla.com], and then un-wad your knickers, folks.
We appreciate your interest in our design experiments!
The UI mock-ups shown on these pages were part of a meeting, and were for discussion purposes, and to explore different design directions. Some of them are already out of date.
Mozilla works in the open, and the way to get the latest in UI improvements to Firefox is to download the UX channel build for your OS, which will auto-update every night with various design experiments we're looking at.
Re:Don't care for it, but... (Score:3, Informative)
I'll be the first to admit that I was very hesitant about putting tabs on the title bar, but after letting myself get used to it for a while I see a at least a couple distinct advantages. First the obvious, you gain some vertical screen space, which is always handy on modern widescreen monitors.
Tabs above/below the address bar I couldn't care less about, but I do not like tabs in the title bar. That comes at the cost of losing some vertical grabbing range for the mouse and no longer having a place to put the (full) page title.
On removing the status bar I couldn't agree with you more though...
And yet you like the extra vertical space from removing the title bar? (Not that I'm a fan of the loss of a status bar.)
Re:Don't care for it, but... (Score:3, Informative)
I've been using Chrome for... a year? Maybe longer? (How long has Chrome been out at this point anyways?) And i _still_ keep missing when i try to grab the window and move it, especially if there's another window behind and just above it that does have a title bar. Or even worse i'll try and close Chrome and actually close the window behind it because the little "x" isn't where i'm expecting it. Over a year using it and i _still_ haven't gotten used to the difference. Maybe that's because Chrome is the only program that lacks a title bar, but i don't think mixing things up even more with a title bar-less Firefox is going to help. Title bars are visually distinctive, they provide a little bit of useful information (ie the name of the program or document or web page or whatever) and they provide a reasonably big target to grab. (Even when i do remember ahead of time that Chrome doesn't have a real title bar, the area you can grab it by seems rather small and hard to hit, even though it doesn't work out to a huge difference when you count the pixels.)
And when it comes down to it, even when "restricted" to 1024 pixels of vertical space i really don't feel so desperate for more room that i need to remove things like the title bar and menu bar. If other people feel that claustrophobic and need some kind of solution that's great, but please don't force it on the rest of us. So far Firefox has been reasonable about that. Even if they're catering to people like you they still allow people like me to do what we want. Just so long as they don't copy Chrome's attitude of "we know what's best for you and you're going to do it our way whether you like it or not."
Re:Much ado... (Score:4, Informative)
(Now all Mozilla needs to do is actually listen to the comments, and stop trying to imitate Chrome, Mac, or cellphone UIs. But, as another commenter said, so long as I can change the default, I'm not hopelessly hot and bothered.)