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Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

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Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#121

Post by yAnonymous »

k00pa wrote: post #120
joev_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff. I disagree. I think the point is that it's not useless, by its own existence. It saves dev time (which allows more - and better! - programs to be built), it allows richer features and interactions, it lowers the barrier to entry for maintenance work, and most of all prevents constant re-inventing/implem…

Adding HTML to the GUI coding is re-inveting the wheel. There are native toolkits for UI, there are crossplatform UI libraries for a reason. They work, they are fast. No need to add extra layers on top of those.

Most desktop applications have a terrible interface compared to modern websites. That wouldn't be the case if the UI libraries were half as good as some people here claim.

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#122

Post by Moru »

yAnonymous wrote: post #121
k00pa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding HTML to the GUI coding is re-inveting the wheel. There are native toolkits for UI, there are crossplatform UI libraries for a reason. They work, they are fast. No need to add extra layers on top of those.

Most desktop applications have a terrible interface compared to modern websites. That wouldn't be the case if the UI libraries were half as good as some people here claim.

Most new desktop applications have a really crappy interface. Mostly because they are trying to copy some new homepage layout and instead is missing lots of information and buttons and fading in/out text and buttons instead of letting me click them directly. Not to mention taking several seconds to load a form that on my 8MHz Atari would have loaded instantly. Yes I'm old, get off my lawn!

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#123

Post by eurleif »

k00pa wrote: post #120
joev_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff. I disagree. I think the point is that it's not useless, by its own existence. It saves dev time (which allows more - and better! - programs to be built), it allows richer features and interactions, it lowers the barrier to entry for maintenance work, and most of all prevents constant re-inventing/implem…

Adding HTML to the GUI coding is re-inveting the wheel. There are native toolkits for UI, there are crossplatform UI libraries for a reason. They work, they are fast. No need to add extra layers on top of those.

Firefox's UI is already built using XUL markup, which is rendered using the rendering engine.

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#124

Post by kristiandupont »

com2kid wrote: post #93
joev_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff. I disagree. I think the point is that it's not useless, by its own existence. It saves dev time (which allows more - and better! - programs to be built), it allows richer features and interactions, it lowers the barrier to entry for maintenance work, and most of all prevents constant re-inventing/implem…

I'd argue against it saving dev time. See my above comment, HTML+CSS is not the fastest way to design an app. If it is all you know then yes, it is faster, but inherently it is not a /good/ system. It gets worse even faster if you add JS to the mix!

I think it's a great system. It's surely the fastest way for me personally, in spite of it not being "all I know". With Bootstrap or Foundation, you need very little code to make something look nice, there is great documentation and lots of online resources.

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#125

Post by RyanMcGreal »

welly wrote: post #104
joev_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff. I disagree. I think the point is that it's not useless, by its own existence. It saves dev time (which allows more - and better! - programs to be built), it allows richer features and interactions, it lowers the barrier to entry for maintenance work, and most of all prevents constant re-inventing/implem…

Isn't inefficient coding, which is what we're discussing really, possibly needlessly forcing the specifications of hardware to be more and more powerful rather than getting the best out of the hardware we have now by better coding?

I rather expect causality flows the other way: coding is getting less efficient because hardware is getting faster. Or as the old saying goes, "Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away."

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#126

Post by JacobEdelman »

blueskin_ wrote: post #115
JacobEdelman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the idea of developing for current machines. With the constant advances in computers the next generation of applications, "developer apps" should be made for the next generation of computers, meaning that its okay if it's a bit of a hog. I mean, 200MB is just a drop in a bucket now.

...and fuck those people who can't afford to build a new bleeding edge gaming rig ever year, right? Developer arrogance like this is exactly why all software sucks. It's actually a lot worse than it used to be due to mobile phones, which are hugely underspecced but attract the same mentality of "my code is surely the only important thing users will ever run so it's ok to use 700MB for a browser".

If you want to have bleeding edge developer software than you may need bleeding edge developer hardware. To clarify, I don't think mainstream applications or even betas should aim at bleeding edge hardware, just that when we plan on making some new piece of software that may take years to build its okay to assume that people in the future will have better computers.

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#127

Post by err4nt »

dreen wrote: post #117
com2kid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've often wondered why OS's just don't host browser render engines internally and draw their UI with that. CSS is, by far, not a good way to try and do UIs. It sort of works, and it is getting better, but it started out with lots of legacy cruft and things have only gotten worse. One can make any sort of layout imaginable in any of the modern UI frameworks within a few hours. Want 3 columns boxes at a precise posi…

I agree with this, despite that as a web developer I have written most interfaces in my life in CSS. I did, however, have brief exposure to various native toolkits in Java and would love to see a proper constrained-based scene graph in the browser. CSS is good for styling but not for layouts.

Im workong on having a plugin built that will give us the flexibility of constraint-based control in CSS but in a way that makes more sense to the CSS way of doing things.

I want to build unbreakable responsive lauouts!

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#128

Post by sjogress »

rancur wrote: post #58
valarauca1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a guy who works with primarily back end server code. I hate UI stuff primarily because even creating small input UI windows requires jumping though hoops of fire it feels like with strange API calls, and documentation that says, "Just follow the example it'll all be fine in a couple minutes." But I'm 8 inheritance levels deep trying to figure out why my text box isn't rendering. I've often wondered why OS's just d…

no more software layers please! my PC was much faster when my programs were native. Apps rendered with chrome rendered with webkit...8GB used to be enough, then all these "developers" with their "development machines" who think it's no big deal that their Hangouts implementation takes 200MB when Pidgin takes 20. people used to complain about Firefox hogging memory, I think it's Chrome we should be worried about...

It doesn't have to be a big memory hog though.

At my day job I create apps for TV decoders. Most of those render and run in browsers.

The boxes have 1 GB memory, the browser uses just a small fraction of that. A lot of the browser memory is used for graphics (think bitmaps), the JS-heap is only 4 MB, not sure about the rendering engine.

Granted, we use SVG, not HTML/CSS, for most of these apps.

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#129

Post by Napoleon1963 »

Moru wrote: post #122
yAnonymous wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most desktop applications have a terrible interface compared to modern websites. That wouldn't be the case if the UI libraries were half as good as some people here claim.

Most new desktop applications have a really crappy interface. Mostly because they are trying to copy some new homepage layout and instead is missing lots of information and buttons and fading in/out text and buttons instead of letting me click them directly. Not to mention taking several seconds to load a form that on my 8MHz Atari would have loaded instantly. Yes I'm old, get off my lawn!

Desktop apps from the late 1980s to around 2004 or so were very usable. There were clear UI standards in place for most platforms, and thus a high degree of consistency between applications, even from different vendors.

Even Java's AWT, which came at the tail end of this and pretty much only targeted UI functionality that was common between different UI systems, could create desktop apps that were and are much more usable than the inconsistent web-inspired desktop apps we deal with today.

Re: Firefox.html: Rebuilding Firefox UI in HTML

#130

Post by donniezazen »

realusername wrote: post #118
donniezazen wrote: post #109

I have been running Firefox for almost a month now. The divide between firefox and Chrome is getting bigger and bigger. 1. What do you guys think about sidebars and multiple toolbars? There is only a limited space available on screens these days for most people. I find them very archaic. 2. Dropdown arrows - I also don't understand the purpose of actually showing that if you click here a menu will open. A folder expa…

It depends on your point of view, I could bring up similar arguments with Chrome. There is still no way in Chrome to open more than 25 tabs without the tabs being so small we can't see them and the Settings page of Chrome is not an example of clean UI either.

They both are great browser. I am not trying to say one is good and other is bad. What I am trying to say is that because of the reasons mentioned above it has been hard for me to adopt to Firefox. Chrome is Google's platform they want to push their services and has become more of an application platform with Chrome only apps and less of a browser. I would like a browser that promotes a free web.

For example, Diigo's addon doesn't have overlay icon so it is impossible for me to tell if I have already bookmarked a page or not. Like many addons on Firefox Diigo has both sidebar and toolbar. So basically they have developed 3 UI elements and none of which work well. There is clearly Diigo's fault here but applications are as good as platform.

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