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Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

blog.mozilla.org

121–130 of 185 posts

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#121
post #109
post #32

This is what they killed the rust and mdn teams for? Oooff...

No? Like there is enough surface area to work on multiple unrelated parts of Firefox at the same time. Also, Rust team is most definitely not killed, Servo is, which frankly, made perfect sense. Developing one browser engine is hard enough as is, let alone two.

You contradict yourself. If there's enough surface area, then there's enough for alternative and better engines.

Rust & Wasmtime: https://mobile.twitter.com/tschneidereit/status/129386814195...

Dev Tools & All of MDN: https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333...

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#122

Anyone else see the heat map of the Back button being one of the most-used elements, and far more used than the Forward-button, and flash back to much, much earlier FF designs where the back button was, in fact, larger than the forward button and more prominent than most other UI elements? Just Googled, actually, and it looks like 3.0 did that. 2008. Sigh. Also, as a dedicated UI-depth proponent, I find myself in the…

I believe internet explorer introduced the asymmetric navigation buttons with Windows Vista, if I’m not mistaken.

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#123
post #12

Their video on the front page contradicts itself. They highlight the UI coded by "user interaction" and no surprise, the Pocket button in the URL bar has tiny usage. And yet, in the new design? It's bigger and more prominent. And they try to say this is data-driven in the voice-over. Now, yet again, I'll have to just pin Firefox and stop updating it everywhere for a few months until the inevitable "undo all these cha…

> As expected, the new tabs take up substantial vertical space I just tried it, the vertical difference is 5 pixels, horizontally it’s about twice as much with 5 pinned and 9 normal tabs. Amazing? No. But that doesn’t really seem substantial. This is with compact mode in both versions.

Compact mode is hidden and not supported now. Count on them removing it.

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#126
post #115

I’m excited for native context menus on macOS! This 21 year old bug is fixed in the next version of Firefox! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572

That’s great. Finally they’ll match the dark mode setting. Hopefully that applies to the window decorations too?

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#127

For the Pocket haters: 1. Why? 2. How would you implement a replacement functionality, whether in or outside the browser itself? 3. If you're using an alternative now, what is it?

FF user (off and on) since Phoenix chiming in. I'm going to level with you: I've looked at that Pocket button and all the Pocket ads FF throws at me on new tabs and on their obnoxious new-version announcement tabs, for years , but I do not actually know what Pocket does. I think it's some kind of cloud bookmarking or something. Maybe also something like the Reader view? I'm not sure. Whatever it is, I don't miss it o…

So summarizing: its intent isn't clear?

FWIW: Pocket is similar in general design to a number of "read it later" services (the Android app is still identified as "com.ideashower.readitlater.pro"), such as the now-defunct Readability, still-extant Instapaper, Maciej Czeglowski's Pinboard, and the FS/OSS Wallabag. There's a ... (very?) loose kinship with tools like Zotero, Calibre, and Elsevier-owned Mandelay, also knowledge-management / article management tools.

Pocket lets you:

- Save articles for later reading.

- Display many (though not all) of them in a simplified and standardised "reader" view.

- Apply tags. (I abuse this feature horribly.)

- Add highlights. (3 per article for the free version, unlimited for pro.)

- There is of course a social feature allowing shares and recommendations. I avoid this like the plauge.

- There is, inexplicably, no way to share, export, or otherwise save a bibliographic reading list, say, of articles on some topic.

- Exporting the article listing is possible (JSON format). You'll have to re-fetch items individually if you do this.

- Articles are not saved and you're still subject to linkrot, edits, or substitutions at the origin source.

- Saved content is accessible from any device by account, either from a Web client, from Firefox itself, or through Mobile apps (iOS, Android).

The functionality exceeds that of bookmarks, sacrifices local control and storage.

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#128
post #101

I hope this is a step forward for Firefox. I hope this is not yet another redesign for a desktop app that tries to make it look like a mobile app by removing features and adding gratuitous amounts of whitespace. Desktop is not Mobile and they should not have the same interface. Windows 8 showed us what a disaster that was, but every company since seems to have to learn this lesson themselves. (Looking at you spotify…

> I hope this is not yet another redesign for a desktop app that tries to make it look like a mobile app by removing features and adding gratuitous amounts of whitespace.

I've got some bad news for you.

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#129
post #115

I’m excited for native context menus on macOS! This 21 year old bug is fixed in the next version of Firefox! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572

That’s great. Finally they’ll match the dark mode setting. Hopefully that applies to the window decorations too?

Yes, the menus match the dark mode setting. And they look great!
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