A Firefox-only minimap (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#31

Post by danShumway » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:36 PM UTC

RandomWorker wrote: post #21

The first thing I do when I work in an editor with a mini-map is -- turn it off. I find it mostly the most useless feature for coding, and for sites it seems to be equally useless. Why? 1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating. 2. Short or long pages, both don't really benefit from the loss of screen real-estate. Or the distraction really. 3. Other tools like a proper index with descript…

I will say that I kind of love minimaps. I don't think that they should be required and I absolutely get why you'd want to turn them off, they take up a ton of space. If you're splitting files more often I could also see it getting really annoying.

But I think of code very visually and spatially and I don't split files until I have to, so it does help me quickly navigate to be able to sort of see the "shape" of a file and to be able to quickly jump around in it, especially if the file is divided into clear sections. Mostly just personal preference, and I agree they should never be mandatory.

And agreed on the large images/maps, most image editors have a viewport feature like that and it's pretty useful when doing detail work.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#32

Post by dralley » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:37 PM UTC

RandomWorker wrote: post #21

The first thing I do when I work in an editor with a mini-map is -- turn it off. I find it mostly the most useless feature for coding, and for sites it seems to be equally useless. Why? 1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating. 2. Short or long pages, both don't really benefit from the loss of screen real-estate. Or the distraction really. 3. Other tools like a proper index with descript…

>1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating.

It's for looking at the shape of the code, not the contents. Also VSCode for example will show errors visibly highlighted in red in the minimap as well, which makes them easier to navigate to.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#33

Post by nicolaslem » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:40 PM UTC

isanjay wrote: post #24

iends wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding one once every few months sound about right but usually the bugs impacting Firefox users are major PITA. Some I’ve had over the past few years: * myADP had some kind of bug preventing firefox authentication that lasted months. * Elan financial redid their credit card site for fidelity visa and had a CSS bug that hid the card total balance. This lasted for about a month. * bitbucket (work required) had this bu…

Opening fastmail in Firefox crashes the whole browser. I don't know why. I stopped my subscription due to that.

I have used fastmail in Firefox daily for years, never had an issue.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#34

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:41 PM UTC

RandomWorker wrote: post #21

The first thing I do when I work in an editor with a mini-map is -- turn it off. I find it mostly the most useless feature for coding, and for sites it seems to be equally useless. Why? 1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating. 2. Short or long pages, both don't really benefit from the loss of screen real-estate. Or the distraction really. 3. Other tools like a proper index with descript…

I think minimaps can also be great at improving on the 'preview' function of the classic scrollbar they iterate on. A scrollbar can tell me how long a page is and, therefore, give me an idea of whether I want to continue reading or not. But a minimap can help to differentiate between the "short article followed by pages of comments I can ignore" case and the "article far too long to even bother with" one.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#35

Post by eek2121 » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:43 PM UTC

RandomWorker wrote: post #21

The first thing I do when I work in an editor with a mini-map is -- turn it off. I find it mostly the most useless feature for coding, and for sites it seems to be equally useless. Why? 1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating. 2. Short or long pages, both don't really benefit from the loss of screen real-estate. Or the distraction really. 3. Other tools like a proper index with descript…

I leave it on. It acts as a larger scrollbar when I use the mouse/trackpad/whatever pointing device to scroll. Operating systems these days are all about hiding the scrollbar and/or making it as small as possible. The minimap not only solves that issue, but also gives a bit of a visual representation of the file contents. Sure, you can't read the text, but if you've worked with a file long enough, you know exactly what you are looking at.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#36

Post by stefanjudis » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:52 PM UTC

lexicality wrote: post #26

The minimap is cute, but more entertaining to me is the screensaver that kicks in after 3 minutes of leaving the tab idle. I'm glad there's still whimsy on the web

Haha, glad that my screensaver sparks some joy. :)

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#37

Post by joshmarinacci » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

I’m pretty sure this remains unimplemented for security reasons. Other apis that would let you render part of the page to an image are similarly blocked. We ran into this a lot when working on WebXR.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#38

Post by stefanjudis » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

taink wrote: post #23

kevingadd wrote: post #8

It's impressive how well the minimap works for bigger articles, I clicked around randomly and ended up at https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/should-responsive-images-w... and the minimap feels slightly magical since it appears instantly and updates synchronously if I do things like select text. It feels kind of disappointing that I can't interact with it to scroll around like in i.e. Sublime Text, but I imagine that's…

Weirdly enough I can't see it on this article but it's showing just fine on the OP. Maybe my extensions?

Site author here: there's some logic to only show the minimap when there's enough screen estate and it generally fits.

Couldn't be bothered to scrolling/dragging logic. :D

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#39

Post by krylon » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #16

williamdclt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I exclusively use firefox, have a pretty normal browsing pattern, and that almost never happens to me! Much less that once a month, maybe once every 3 months

Normally it's something else, like a plugin. To be honest I don't notice much, frequently I assume it's some tracking that's blocked which courses the site to not function and just move on. Between blocking tracking, with DuckDuckGos privacy plugin, and using Firefox I'd say that blocking tracking breaks WAAAAY more sites.

I recently installed adguard on my home server, and it did indeed break a few sites.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#40

Post by predmijat » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

RandomWorker wrote: post #21

The first thing I do when I work in an editor with a mini-map is -- turn it off. I find it mostly the most useless feature for coding, and for sites it seems to be equally useless. Why? 1. Stuff is too small to really make out where I'm going or navigating. 2. Short or long pages, both don't really benefit from the loss of screen real-estate. Or the distraction really. 3. Other tools like a proper index with descript…

You can use `figlet` to create banners which are readable in the minimap.