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."
when it's not broken, do not fix it. (Score:4, Insightful)
when it's not broken, do not fix it.
The Next Firefox UI (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't care for it, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tailfins (Score:5, Insightful)
Browsers have now reached the maturity of 1950s American cars. They more or less work, still break too much, use too much fuel, and have lots of chrome and tailfins.
Dear Mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)
Please stop trying to make your browser fit on a 2" screen. I have 20"+ monitors. I can spare the pixels.
Further, burying the menu bar makes it very hard for me to support people who get confused when I say "Go to Edit and Preferences".
Innovation is not simply following Chrome's lead. Kthnx.
Yeah, great (Score:4, Insightful)
Another new UI that makes getting to the thing I use regularly (like, you know, bookmarks) slower and more annoying.
WTF is up with FOSS developers these days?
Whatever happen to UI consistency? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever happen to UI consistency? "Back in the day" UIs used to use the same toolkits, have their menus and toolbars all in the same spot and work consistently across applications. Today all those UI elements are kind of splattered around the application and there is really no consistency where you can find something anymore. There are also things in modern UIs that I really don't get, Firefox4 for example will present you different menus depending on if you click it with a mouse or if you activate it with the keyboard. What's the point in that? Didn't we figure out that changing menus where a really bad idea back when Windows tried it many years ago? Once up-on a time the menu was full of all the stuff the application could do, now its like playing hide and seek with the functions an application might have and hiding them from the user is really not helping.
Re:Fix what isn't broken (Score:4, Insightful)
What happened to function over form?
Well, they've had the function working right for a while. Now they're paying lots of extra attention to the form, they just happen to be getting it wrong!
Re:Dear Mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:waruuuuuuu! (Score:4, Insightful)
Observation: Thud547 seems to have no problem finding his water dish and it works very well for keeping him hydrated:
Firefox developer: I'll bet he'd like it if we put his water dish at a remote location along the Amazon river! I'll bet nobody has ever thought of this, much less tried it! This is going to be so f'ing awesome!!!!!11
Just me here? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm probably alone, but I rather like the new UI. Reminds me of Chrome. I switched to Chrome recently because FF5 on OS X was just crashing too much and had gotten too slow, might switch back if this works similarly faster and is stable again.
If UI designers listened to the tech community we'd still be using something that looked like an early Netscape. There was plenty of room for improvement there, and a lot of things just don't make sense anymore and never really did anyway. Permanent status bars are a good thing to be rid of, for instance.
Like Ford said, if I'd asked people what they wanted they would have told me a faster horse.
Dear Mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand you are designing for the lowest common denominator. It makes sense, and I can see where you are going with this design direction.
However, please be sure to allow configurability at the very least, and even better resist the urge to remove UI elements and hide them behind menus.
I dont want more buttons hidden behind more menus that require more clicks. On my desktop I have a large amount of room and like all my important options in front of me. That's why it's a great computing device for work. On my mobile phone, a sparse UI is much appreciated. But I dont really need it, nor want it, on a desktop. It doesnt make any sense in keeping with the idea of easy "discoverability" in user experience design. It also could easily confuse users even more than you think.
Most users can learn to recognize that a little "house" icon is the home screen. However, many users will not understand that setting the home page is under [alt] > Tools > options > General tab. Non-tech savvy people dont understand all of this multi layered categorization. They may not think the same way the developers and designers do, and may not put the option under the same category if they were doing the organization. They also may understand what they need, but not what the categories mean. Simple UI controls work better for most people. As an example: almost everyone understand lists and scrolling, even if they are very long lists.
It would also be nice if the bugs regarding new versions of FF corrupting profiles be looked into. And I don't know of any users that really feel the new "rapid release" stuff is worth a dime. The people who know what it means think it's silly, and the people who don't wouldn't care anyways.
Don't get me wrong, you guys have done fantastic work over the years. And the world owes you *much* gratitude. But I feel the need to speak up at some of the recent changes in direction Mozilla has been making with FF and TB. A need I have never felt before regarding either product. As a fan I wish you all the best though and hope to keep using FF and TB as I have never been that interested in Chrome or Gmail.
Re:Tailfins (Score:4, Insightful)
.
It is beginning to look like the Mozilla developers are now at a loss for new things to develop in order to feed the voracious appetite of the rapid release cycle that they pushed upon users.
Re:when it's not broken, do not fix it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, personally I end up disabling these new UIs and putting it back to normal anyway.
The day they don't let me disable it and set it how it always was is the day I stop using it most likely, with each and every new design ever other version I'm concerned one day they'll see classic as too legacy!
Re:Dear Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, the way that the traditional menu bar has been tossed aside is distressing. It was invented to create a consistent user interface between programs (as well as provide a consistent API) in order to eliminate the issue of everything being drastically different.
But now we're seeing most of the major browsers playing follow-the-leader by clumping menu operations into a single button, putting things indifferent places, and then Microsoft's ribbon bullshit that thinks every operation should be presented to you in a big kludgey mess of buttons and symbols. At least the web browsers and Windows Explorer allow you to tap the alt key to get a temporary glimpse of the old menu, but who's to say how long before that is removed?
Re:Whatever happen to UI consistency? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite: try pressing the green "make the window as big as it needs to be to display all the content" button.
Oh, that's awesome. Not only does it not actually "zoom" the application, what it actually does is what the "collapse" button (the little bar on the right of certain windows) is supposed to do.
Although the Zoom button has always effectively meant "do something random" so I've gotten in the habit of never touching it.
I always find it hilarious when Apple shits all over their own guidelines, especially when there's a ton of research and design behind them. Microsoft can get away with crap like making the Office windows not behave like any other window in their OS, because they've never sold themselves as being "the user interface experts," but Apple?
Come on, your HIG is enormous and generally explains why it suggests what it suggests. Why do you then ignore your own guidelines?
Incidentally, it's worth reading the Microsoft HIG for using custom window frames [microsoft.com] for examples of Microsoft applications that ignore their own guidelines. It's nice to know that Microsoft's interface people are aware that the Gadgets window is broken, even if they can't convince anyone on the Windows team to fix it.
Re:Don't care for it, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Please post that file. Please!
How about multiple defaults? (Score:3, Insightful)
On upgrade you could choose between:
Re:when it's not broken, do not fix it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Next Firefox UI (Score:5, Insightful)
Can the developers take over again, please? (Score:4, Insightful)
The last few releases of Firefox have had the UI driven by graphics designers, rather than programmers, and these have been by far the shittiest Firefox UIs ever. Each one strips away more and more useful features, and hence becomes much more difficult to use.
Can we please have the programmers come up with the UI design? At least with the earlier Firefox releases, they put together something that was usable, even if it wasn't as "pretty" as what the designers might come up with.
Frankly, I don't use Chrome because it has a shitty, stripped-down UI that intentionally hides all of the useful functionality. That's why I used to use Firefox. But if Firefox is going to imitate Chrome, why the fuck would I use Firefox? Even Konqueror is more usable than recent Firefox releases, so I'll stick with it until Firefox's UI isn't a compile cesspool.
Re:Don't care for it, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
The impact may seem small but because title space is limited instead of companies displaying their titles like so:
Document Title - Site Name [- Browser Name]
Because companies want their brand name read it will most likely become:
Site Name - Document Title [- Browser Name]
Now put this in context of tabs, as you start to have more tabs open at once you'll see less and less of the actual document title and tabs will start looking the same until you hover over or switch tabs. This is counter productive and inefficient.
Re:Fix what isn't broken (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll believe that with Firefox 5 stops leaking memory like a sieve.