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A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

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Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#101

Post by keithxm23 »

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…

A lot depends on your use-case and the kind of website you're using this on.

I would find this very useful on a site like Wikipedia where I often know the section I want to jump to before landing on the page. (e.g. I want to see the number of goals Messi has scored each season at Barcelona and I know there's always a table at the bottom of most wiki articles regarding historical stats for soccer-players). I could see from the mini-map where the tables are jump straight to it.

Like you said, the the text is too small to make out where you're going or navigating. But most often I find myself visiting sites that I've visited in the past and for those I have a good mental image of what the page already looks like. I can use the hints from a minimap to jump to the relevant section of the page.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#102

Post by judah »

cal85 wrote: post #89

Crazy that `element()` has been fully supported (with `-moz-`) in Firefox since 2011 while no other browsers seem to even partially support it [0]. I can think of a few powerful use cases (not just minimaps) if this had cross browser support. Does anyone connected to the Chrome or Webkit teams have any idea why? Is there a lack of interest, is it hard to implement with good performance, does it create any tricky secu…

Chromium-based browsers have -webkit-box-reflect [0], which does some of the things that element() does.

Specifically, it does reflections of elements. That's really the big use case for -moz-element IMO.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/-webkit-box...

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#104

Post by iKlsR »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #28
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 do the exact opposite. I use the minimap a lot, as a much better scrollbar. I tend to work on long files and even if I am rarely looking directly at the minimap, it is in my field of view and I often subconsciously glance at it. This kind of feature is clearly no one-size0-fits-all, but it would be a mistake to consider it is useless because you don't like it.

Same, also in vscode disable the text rendering (which is actually useless), increase the block sizes (shape of the code) and you can recognize bits of your code easily.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#105

Post by sangriafria »

JohnFen wrote: post #100
eek2121 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Isn't it funny that scrollbars are deemed too space-wasting to make a reasonable size anymore, but there's plenty of space for nonsense like minimaps? Bring back actual scrollbars! Or at least make it possible to turn them on.

The irony is that the future of scrollbars, especially with narrow webpages and wide monitors, could have been minimaps. But instead we got disappearing scrollbars and reading indicators…

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#107

Post by aetherspawn »

williamdclt wrote: post #4
aetherspawn wrote: post #2

Every day I hit sites that literally only work in Chrome.. it’s time to fight back :)

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

It's usually super critical things that don't work, for example:

I couldn't apply to become a registered engineer in my state using Firefox because the form was in an iframe, and for some reason the iframe didn't render on FF.

The credit portal for Shell Fuels only works in Chrome and doesn't display at all in FF due to a console error. (Enough of the page renders to make you think that the page is complete but i.e. the buttons to apply or make a payment don't render).

The field for setting the date of a consultation (work) in our accounting package doesn't work in FF, and no matter how many times I write to their support team they just write back with "Firefox is not supported, please download Chrome". There was a similar attitude at a software company I worked prior, but I managed to wear them down and get Edge (modern), Firefox and Safari on the QA supported browser list with the reasoning that they are the default browsers for Windows, Linux and macOS respectively.

But come on, browser standardization is so good these days I honestly don't understand how people are making pages that only work in Chrome?

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#108

Post by cubefox »

cal85 wrote: post #97
CursedUrn wrote: post #96

This seems like something that would be heavily abused by sites that deliberately try to break basic browser functionality (like being able to right click images, or select text). If they render the whole page as a background image, you'll no longer be able to inspect, save, translate, etc. any of the content. That's just the first thing I thought of, I imagine there's all sorts of nefarious ways to screw over the re…

I agree it feels like something that could be abused, but not with the example you've given. It already only takes a tiny bit of CSS or JS to do those things you mentioned; no need to do anything complex with element canvases. So the reason that most websites don't do those things cannot be that they don't have the ability. It is because they do not, in fact, have the inclination, and that's because there is an econo…

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36749766

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#109

Post by entropie »

eek2121 wrote: post #35
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 wh…

> Operating systems these days are all about hiding the scrollbar and/or making it as small as possible.

At least while coding this is actually pretty old school to have no scrollbar at all. My emacs has no gui elements. I dont need them. I see a 89% to know where I am right now but this information is actually not really useful.

I move expression/function/method/bookmark wise for and backward or I just search and leave marks where I to jump back later. I really avoid touching my mouse and my window manager (xmonad) and development environment are entirely keyboard driven. I tried minmaps, its just distracting eye candy maybe a bit usefull while reviewing a codebase or looking for something.

Re: A Firefox-only minimap (2021)

#110

Post by gymbeaux »

Firefox has always been the browser that supports the cool stuff. I remember messing around with auto-enabling dark mode for my websites based on the reading of the ambient light sensor of my MacBook. Of course now our OSes decide when an app or website should use dark mode.
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