121–130 of 234 posts
"Fear not my friends! I don't work for MS and this isn't a real proposal." Bummer :-( Is there a free JavaScript library that does that, by any chance? I miss clippy.
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I have been repeating the Chrome is the new IE meme for the last few years. I even had a boss that only cared about our code working on Chrome and would lose it when I was demoing / developing from FireFox. I only ever demoed in Chrome just to feed that illusion that I was adhering to Chrome but I honestly dont see anything special or better and I still made sure it behaved and worked the same in both. I know people…
I don't really agree with the "Chrome is the new IE" sentiment. They participate in the Web Standards process the same as anyone else. That their voice has different gravity in the process due to the fact that they are often the ones pushing the standards forward isn't something they should be compared to IE for. Devs old enough to recall the halcyon days of IE know it was quite different...
They were not as good at bending standards groups to their will as Google has been, for various reasons, which is why standards did not always match their proposed implementations. But trying to paint IE as not engaged in standards is pretty misleading.
(Now I don't think they were too engaged in things like XHTML2, but neither was any other browser, because that group was fundamentally not interested in browsers being engaged, as far as I can tell.)
For another and possibly more egregious example, look at Chrome's handling [0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/x/egl52...
The user (via their user-agent) should be in complete control of autocomplete, and sites that think otherwise are broken. Mechanisms to specify the semantic nature of a field are great; by all means, make it easy for a user-agent to know what to fill in. But "autocomplete=off" was originally invented because a few large sites (archaic bank sites of the same type that did browser detection and rejected any browser the…
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The connotations of "toast" as salutation are even worse here; hardly anything is similar between giving a toast and a transient message (that's in practice usually about failure, not success) showing up at the bottom of the screen. Out of all the reasons why they could've named it "Toast", the most reasonable one to me would be "because it's another kind of a pop-up notification, and the phrase 'pop-up notification'…
> The connotations of "toast" as salutation are even worse here; I don't understand your problem with the concept. It's pretty clear what it means and how it operates, and the UI concept has been extensively disseminated and adopted, not only in web-base UI and UX but also in GUI toolkits for mobile (android) and desktop (Windows 10). Exactly where are you having problems understanding the concept?
The concept is fine, I’m sure everyone understands that. The conflict is your assertion that it comes from the meaning related to “a small speech given while raising one’s glass.” It comes from the “bread that has been lightly re-cooked” meaning. Toast notifications would slide up from the bottom of the screen, then sink back down – moving like a piece of bread in a top-loading toaster. (The most common kind, at least in America, at least at the time.) This leads to bad semantics, on the web.
Here’s a citation from 11 years ago describing that: https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/whats-a-toas... I’m sure it’s even older, but “MSN Messenger” is my oldest personal reference, so I wasn’t sure what else to search for.
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What aspect of the Firefox UI bothers you?
Not the OP, but I'll chip in with my $.02. I really want to like Firefox, but everything UI feels wrong (on macOS). From tabs, where the close button is on the wrong side (right) and if you click the + button to open a new tab the cursor ends up over the new tab, not over the + button so you can click again to open a new tab. The whole UI looks and feels non-native. Pressing ESC in full screen mode does not bring the…
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> For me the most jarring thing is how Firefox’s omnibar works. It isn’t good at showing me the sites I’m looking for after typing just a few characters. Instead, it shows absolutely every page I’ve recently visited at one of those sites. Interesting! I think this may be a case where, over time, as you use a search mechanism, you get used to the kinds of searches that work well with that mechanism. I've had similarly…
When I type in ‘news.’ Firefox still gives me ‘hackernewsgrid.com’ as the first result, even though I haven’t visited that page in years, and in fact it is completely down. I’m not sure how the omnibar works, but I’m not extremely impressed.
Unlike the author, I do not think is a good idea. Elements are supposed to express semantics, but this just suggests behaviour. Not very descriptive behaviour either - since when does actual real-life toast smoothly rise and fall again? Possibly from the ceiling or coming in from the side? Why not just call it ? Or even better, don’t add anything - it’s surely just a that needs styling and animating with existing CSS…
But it's called a toast because that's what many UX people have called it for years, because it pops up and toast pops up. It's a specific kind of notification, not any notification. (There's also "butter bar" and "modal dialog" and so on.)
And yes it's behavior, but and and and define plenty of behavior too.
I think the big concern here is standards and process... not its name or concept in themselves.
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There is a difference though: when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch (like Opera was doing back then), and hence lively competition. Nowadays, with WHATWG HTML's feature creep (the HTML "living standard" spec alone weighing in at 1250 pages and 13.3 MB as a PDF, plus tens of CSS specs all over the place, and JavaScript a moving target), that's infeasible for even a nation-s…
I keep seeing this come up, that it's practically impossible to write a brand new browser. This got me thinking, what would it take to make a better browser? A browser is something that 1 out of every 2 people on earth [1] use frequently. That's a lot of people! All developers in the world use a browser. Lots of them really believe in open software. Some are 10x developers. A certain percentage are literal geniuses.…
In other words, we're toast ;( But hey, that might be exactly the kind of situation that motivates developers after all.
With my project [1], I'm attempting something less ambitious: I'm trying to re-establish SGML as an authoring format (HTML is based on SGML, and SGML is the only standard that can tackle HTML), to at least bring back a rational authoring and long-term storage format for content that matters and that you'd like to be able to read in a couple of decades still without an ad company or even a failed, over-complicated all-in-one document and app format of the 2010's getting in your way.
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I have been repeating the Chrome is the new IE meme for the last few years. I even had a boss that only cared about our code working on Chrome and would lose it when I was demoing / developing from FireFox. I only ever demoed in Chrome just to feed that illusion that I was adhering to Chrome but I honestly dont see anything special or better and I still made sure it behaved and worked the same in both. I know people…
I don't really agree with the "Chrome is the new IE" sentiment. They participate in the Web Standards process the same as anyone else. That their voice has different gravity in the process due to the fact that they are often the ones pushing the standards forward isn't something they should be compared to IE for. Devs old enough to recall the halcyon days of IE know it was quite different...
I'm old enough. It's not different. Chrome is the new IE.
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Firefox has rewritten its entire rendering engine, and its entire CSS engine. Writing a browser is incredibly hard, but not infeasible.
While writing rendering engine isn't easy to do, it's extremely easy compared to the HTML part. Even Mozilla isn't in a hurry to rewrite all that code.
The DOM code there's definitely less motivation to rewrite, in large part because there's a lot less benefit to be gotten from rewriting large parts of it (versus layout or style where there's much more entanglement across the codebase).