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Introducing a new HTML element – welcome

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Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#211

Post by eitland »

jazoom wrote: post #185
Jach wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried customizing the UI? Last time I tried out-of-the-box Firefox it disgusted me pretty quickly due to how Chrome-like it was, but that's because I never liked the default Chrome UI. In any case I bring up customization since while I've never left Firefox, their last good out-of-the-box UI was like Firefox 1.4 or maybe 2. Firefox is incredibly customizable though (even if less so now) and so it looks and f…

Even extensions in Firefox can't customise the page you see when you open the browser! I used a "new tab" extension, but for some reason Firefox doesn't treat the first tab you open as a "new tab"(1). I quickly noticed heaps of annoyances like that when I recently tried to switch to Firefox. 1. I'm pretty sure there is an issue for this in their tracker but they don't seem to think it's important enough to fix.

It used to be in settings. You could typically choose between something like:

- restore pages from last time

- start page (input url)

- default new page chrome

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#212

Post by eitland »

Aeolun wrote: post #73
JoshTriplett wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Just type newsy then until it gets used to it.

(And on a general note: some people here might want to verify they haven't touched the settings;-)

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#213

Post by lostjohnny »

notus wrote: post #136
m0nty wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome is the new IE Some software houses who supply the company I work for, are refusing to work with anything but Chrome. So it really does seem like the bad old days all over again.

It is nothing remotely like the bad old days. I'm assuming you never had to support IE6.

It is, in fact, worse. We didn't have to support mobile platforms back then.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#214

Post by lostjohnny »

robocat wrote: post #186
giancarlostoro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js And that shows why Chrome is not IE... Chrome jumped in and supported WebAssembly even though they already had a mature equivalent (pNaCl) which they have now deprecated. I just don't understand why there is so much hate for Chrome out there. Sure, we don't always get our way. To me the Chrome team seems to listen to developers and users, an…

> IE6 did none of that

IE6 had just different users than Chrome has.

But MS did listen to them, even too much actually.

MS had their customers intranet developers to make happy, Chrome has its giant father, Google, the AD company.

Chrome is much worse in perspective for users freedom.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#215

Post by millstone »

finchisko wrote: post #76
JoshTriplett wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What aspect of the Firefox UI bothers you?

What bothers me, are dialogs and windows not written in html and css (not sure what it is, maybe XUL?). Chrome basically eats it own dog food = everything is html. Firefox still has settings done in non html way. It may sound marginal problem to you, but IMO browser should be showcase for html and html should be used everywhere. Also amount of popup dialogs/windows should be reduced. Again settings, about, ... should…

UI elements written in HTML are hella buggy. For example, Chrome's hamburger menu (I don't know if it's written in HTML but it sure feels like it):

1. Spacebar doesn't select items

2. Key equivalents don't work while it's open

3. Cut/Copy/Paste often does not work, depending on where the keyboard focus is

4. Inapplicable menu items don't disable properly

5. The caret continues blinking in text fields even though keyboard focus is in the menu

etc etc. This sort of basic bugginess is embarrassing and entirely avoidable by using the native platform controls, instead of re-inventing them poorly.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#216

Post by jazoom »

eitland wrote: post #211
jazoom wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even extensions in Firefox can't customise the page you see when you open the browser! I used a "new tab" extension, but for some reason Firefox doesn't treat the first tab you open as a "new tab"(1). I quickly noticed heaps of annoyances like that when I recently tried to switch to Firefox. 1. I'm pretty sure there is an issue for this in their tracker but they don't seem to think it's important enough to fix.

It used to be in settings. You could typically choose between something like: - restore pages from last time - start page (input url) - default new page chrome

Thank you. Unfortunately I've moved on to Vivaldi (happily). If your solution works I didn't find it, nor did any internet searching help me to find it.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#217

Post by millstone »

packet_nerd wrote: post #105
tannhaeuser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

IMO writing a better browser is not that hard. The trick is to just focus on reader view.

When you can click the reader button, it makes every website better. Reader view defeats modal dialogs and dickbars. Reader view renders faster than AMP, because it skips web fonts. Reader view always scrolls and zooms without jank.

Build a better browser by embracing the web as it was meant to be: the best document publishing platform. Let the other guys build the world's worst application platform with clippy and toast and the rest.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#218

Post by iforgotpassword »

untog wrote: post #194
iforgotpassword wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you didn't. You had to code exactly one copy: for IE6. Nobody cared about anything else. Just like nowadays more and more pages only get coded for chrome and might or might not work on Firefox.

The scale is massively different though. When you make a page today 95% of it works on all browsers. Back in the IE6 days that wasn't even remotely true, which is why things like jQuery came into existence, not to mention the insane CSS hacks required. IE calculated padding differently to every other browser, requiring you to rewrite any code that used it. There's no equivalent to that today. Today isn't a dreamland,…

But that's not the IE6 days. That was when other browsers were already well established and IE6 was that zombie feeding off corporations never upgrading that you just couldn't kill.

But in the early 2000s, you only ever targeted IE6 and maybe 5. Opera was that weird European thing, Netscape disappeared by 2003 and Firefox was that silly open source stuff used by people without friends or any sort of social skills. That was the IE days.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#219

Post by BlueTemplar »

xtf wrote: post #39
moreira wrote: post #13

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whateve…

Simply put: Don't write for chrome, write w3c conform. Or better: Use standards which match most browsers at caniuse.com

Even better : Develop for Firefox / Gecko in mind, and ignore Chrome / Chromium / Blink / V8 / Node.js

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#220

Post by BlueTemplar »

dangerface wrote: post #72
tannhaeuser wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe MS wants to reconsider stopping development of Edge. I think it might give them a lot of positive publicity without astroturfing.

If google is the new Microsoft does that make bing the new google? I suddenly have the urge to try it for the first time.

Sadly, no. Any startups in the search engine business ?
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