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Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

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Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#141

Post by romaniv »

Okay, let me go over the things I don't like about this concept.

1. Everything is hidden by default. No signifies. That looks less confusing... until you want to find something or something changes and you don't even notice until it's not "there" anymore. It's not clear what will happen when you interact with the UI.

2. Everything is mushed together. I type something and zillion things pop up on the scree. How am I supposed to know what are they and where they come from?

3. No settings in this context sounds like no choice. I don't want every download go to Downloads folder, because it will become a bloated mess in about 3 days. .

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#142

Post by webwanderings »

TuringTest wrote: post #134
webwanderings wrote: post #114

I would like to run this browser on an OS which is nothing but CLI. This imagined CLI based OS will come with two things only: A gigantic and thoroughly indexed PDF file containing hundreds of commands to do all kinds of things (so you would only use Ctrl+F to search what you're looking for); and a modern browser with least minimum settings.

If you haven't yet, you may want to read The Humane Interface [1] (and test is working prototype Archy). It's a description of a user interface that works exactly as you say, yet looks completely different that what you describe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface

Well, this idea came to mind as I was taking that Linux Edx MOOC course. I am not a programmer, but if I were, I would have built that kind of OS for myself. I think the GUI movement in the history of computers, has fundamentally diverted the real nature of computers. I am not a CLI-Nazi but going back to basics in a substantive way, is not a bad idea. Besides, there has been too much significance for mouse/pointing-device. Could we possibly have directly jumped from keyboard-only computing to touch screen? I see why not.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#144

Post by Pacabel »

acdha wrote: post #103
Pacabel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a very good point. That sensible and effective approach has become yet another victim of the failed quest to "improve the user experience" by throwing away or changing stuff that was working perfectly fine before. The new approach is almost always far worse than whatever minor flaws might have existed with the earlier approach. And allowing the old, working approach to be toggled back on through some prefere…

> When I start using a fresh installation of Firefox, I have to spend at least a good 10 minutes installing various extensions and reconfiguring it just to get a minimally usable experience out of it. That's not acceptable, and it's not justifiable. You're assuming that this is widely applicable — very few people have spent a decade building a highly customized browsing experience and most people don't customize much…

I think your understanding of the history of computing is flawed.

As somebody who lived through the events you mentioned as an adult working in industry, I can assure you that the sentiment you believe was felt was actually not felt.

Mouse wheels were seen as a very good thing when they first came on the scene. They gave the power of the three-buttoned mouse, but also made scrolling much simpler.

The same goes for tabbed browsing. It was one of the best features of Opera for a long time. Everyone I showed it to at the time thought it was very useful. And it was one of the best features of Firefox, too, when it was still Phoenix.

And the same goes for fonts, and CSS (although to a lesser extent). Their benefits were obvious from the beginning, and I don't remember them facing really any resistance.

Contrary to popular belief today, JavaScript was not seen as good when it was first released, and it should not be considered good today. In the mid-1990s it was generally seen as a rather bad and limited language. That's why it didn't see much use until the mid-2000s. The first generation of developers who experienced it found it inferior to existing technologies and generally refused to use it. Even today, it's still a very flawed language (the problems with it are well know; I'm not going to regurgitate them here).

The problem with Firefox lately isn't that there has been chance. Of course change can be good. In the case of Firefox, though, the change has been utterly horrible, and caused far more problems than it brings in benefits, for a huge number of people. This is reflected very well in Firefox's ever-dropping market share.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#145

Post by Pacabel »

phlsa wrote: post #83

Hi, I'm one of the people who worked on this and I wanted to provide a little background and a few clarifications. Lightspeed is currently not a product. It's a collection of sketches and thoughts. It is also NOT the next version of Firefox. While some ideas might find their way into mainline Firefox at some point, many of the assumptions on which Lightspeed is based are the exact opposites of Firefox core values (e.…

Based on the comments here and those that appear under the article, people in general are not at all impressed by these ideas.

I don't think the hatred is as universal as it is for, say, Australis, but it's close enough that it should be discomforting.

What is your response to this? Do you think it's right to continue work on a project that the majority of people dislike for a variety of very legitimate reasons?

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#146

Post by Someone1234 »

ckluis wrote: post #98
phlsa wrote: post #83

Hi, I'm one of the people who worked on this and I wanted to provide a little background and a few clarifications. Lightspeed is currently not a product. It's a collection of sketches and thoughts. It is also NOT the next version of Firefox. While some ideas might find their way into mainline Firefox at some point, many of the assumptions on which Lightspeed is based are the exact opposites of Firefox core values (e.…

Search operators are super powerful and awesome to use in google - providing a way to use those from the browser itself can help provide a distraction free environment, but also opens up new possibilities: bm:“tag" - show list of all bookmarks with that tag Just a thought.

Windows tried to do that with their search (in Vista, 7, and 8). It has been a disaster. Hidden functionality is a UI and UX anti-pattern.

How do people know to type "bm:" for Bookmarks? Google? Is a Google search now part of the UI's workflow? Or will people simply stop using Bookmarks because it is so obscure (you're seeing this with mobile browsers, Bookmarks are hidden so go unutilised).

Ditto with Windows. In Windows 9x you had a nice UI for search that allowed the user to: Search file/folder names, search within (contents), and to filter by file type and file date(s). In Windows Vista+ it is now hidden strings like "filetype:" (and that is the least obscure example, try doing the between-dates thing WITHOUT googling how first). Plus now "unknown file types" cannot be search within at all (even if you alter the indexer's settings it no longer works, you have to add each file type in the registry as a "text file").

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#147

Post by sdrothrock »

chc wrote: post #135
sdrothrock wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frequent usage should just percolate autocomplete suggestions to the top. This design doesn't really need them, and tbh I've barely used bookmarks in any browser in a long time. BECAUSE address bars autocomplete sites I frequently go to, the bookmarks end up being a way to store sites that I go to /infrequently/ and use for reference or only check up on every few months.

That's the same way I use bookmarks. I won't bookmark, say, Hacker News, but I will bookmark a recipe site that I know I'll want to refer to for ideas sometime down the road.

That's one of my biggest use cases: bookmarking individual recipes. That's a perfect example of something I'm not going to be looking at every day but do want a list of to browse occasionally, or to find specific ones.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#148

Post by dblohm7 »

lucb1e wrote: post #68

Something about the "there are no settings to adjust" makes me want to fork Firefox and only apply security updates from the version before this new UI gets out of beta. And tabs a click away? That's a nightmare. Mixing what I type with search results, history and suggestions? Hello Chrome lookalike. I thought the separate search bar and awesomebar was one of the killer features for Firefox. Once that's gone, odds ar…

That's like selling your car because you came back from an auto show and didn't like the manufacturer's concept car.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#149

Post by blazingfrog2 »

sdrothrock wrote: post #147
chc wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same way I use bookmarks. I won't bookmark, say, Hacker News, but I will bookmark a recipe site that I know I'll want to refer to for ideas sometime down the road.

That's one of my biggest use cases: bookmarking individual recipes. That's a perfect example of something I'm not going to be looking at every day but do want a list of to browse occasionally, or to find specific ones.

You may already be aware of this but a fellow HNer operates a service I use frequently for this exact use case called historio.us. I use the chrome extension to add stuff that I might want to revisit and, when I do need to, I have historio.us as a "search engine" in the chrome omnibar.

Think of it as your own private search engine.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#150

Post by lucb1e »

dblohm7 wrote: post #148
lucb1e wrote: post #68

Something about the "there are no settings to adjust" makes me want to fork Firefox and only apply security updates from the version before this new UI gets out of beta. And tabs a click away? That's a nightmare. Mixing what I type with search results, history and suggestions? Hello Chrome lookalike. I thought the separate search bar and awesomebar was one of the killer features for Firefox. Once that's gone, odds ar…

That's like selling your car because you came back from an auto show and didn't like the manufacturer's concept car.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I meant something like not buying the new car but getting the spare (security) parts from the new car and incorporating it into the old one. Or in the case of switching to Chrome, it would simply be switching to a different manufacturer once the old model is not secure anymore.
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