151–160 of 266 posts
My 2c: i spend 8 hrs+ a day in a vnc session to a remote computer where browsers are running. In the last months firefox has begun crashing every few hours, apparently because of an xsystem exception. on the other hand chrome after a few minutes from starting will stop accepting return keypresses along with a few others (pressing 5 not only will not work, but sometimes causes unexpected behavior) i suspect my non eng…
The main issue I've had with their new UI is the massive size of everything, it's fair enough for fat finger phone displays but is annoyingly wasteful for any regular sized desktop. This is partly due to the increased padding as per the article, but also because they removed the "compact" UI density option. However you can bring this back under about:config browser.compactmode.show Then go to menu > more tools > cust…
It's strange, I much prefer a substantial amount of padding to my interfaces. Having a good amount of padding lowers the visual noise/clutter and gives everything room to breathe, which may not give a specific practical advantage, but makes me feel less anxious looking at it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it's still broken, because the "Paste and Go" feature doesn't work. Common sense suggests "Paste and Go" would be equivalent to using "Paste" (which correctly inserts text from the clipboard at the cursor position) followed by "Go to the address in the Location Bar." But if you unselect the automatically selected URL, position the cursor within it, then use "paste and go", Firefox ignores the previous URL and sim…
For non-technical people it would be a huge security risk of not behaving that way, similar Clear, Past and Go would just be unnecessary confusing. Technical people have the tendency to use keyboard shortcuts.
The same happens with Thunderbird. The new UI is a mess I can't find anything now. I fear when the rename K9 mail for Android to Thunderbird they break the UI too.
It's (almost) every major software. I mainly use Chrome, and in their newest M121 release they made not one, but three major UI changes and I hate every single one of them. For the curious, they are (together with my rant): 1. the new "simplified" bookmark save flow which is more complicated than the old one; 2. loss of the ability to disable system notification (i.e. to use Chrome's built-in one, which I prefer); 3.…
It's not hard at all, Vivaldi does it. I consider Vivaldi the least worst browser.
The main issue I've had with their new UI is the massive size of everything, it's fair enough for fat finger phone displays but is annoyingly wasteful for any regular sized desktop. This is partly due to the increased padding as per the article, but also because they removed the "compact" UI density option. However you can bring this back under about:config browser.compactmode.show Then go to menu > more tools > cust…
So we have people in the camp "don't waste space with padding, please" and then, each time a KDE discussion appears "how the hell can they cram so many information and text with no padding, it's unreadable" camp. Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
I mean, in a tab it's included the URL bar, but the bookmarks toolbar has nothing to do with the page we're at. It should be above Tabs!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How I find Lepton? In the addons store there's nothing listed under themes for that name. Or is Lepton a previous generation UI for Firefox that no longer exists except on old releases? Sorry if these are stupid questions, I did read the article but I may have missed some things.
Since Mozilla does not allow it as an add-on, you must download and install it yourself. Yes. I know it's really uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the fact that it was this popular is also proof that the existing UI was inconvenient. https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/Installatio...
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/make-address-bar-placea...
Better browser UX, in my strongly-held opinion, starts with vertical tabs. With horizontal tabs, you can have maybe 6 to 8 tabs open before things tabs get difficult to manage or track. With vertical, nested tabs; links that open in a new tab are automatically made a child tab. From that you can infer structure and context more easily than horizontal tabs. Then you add colours to indicate different sites and now you…
I implemented tabbed window with pie menus for UniPress Emacs in 1988, and still miss them! Later in 1990 I developed several other versions of tabbed windows with pie menus for NeWS that let you manage any NeWS and X11 windows, and drag the tabs around to any edge.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38338008
DonHopkins 3 months ago | root | parent | next [–]
UniPress Emacs for NeWS, with tabbed windows and pie menus: 1988.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38337808
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Vertical Tabs in Visual Studio Code
This is why you should be able to choose which side and position any tab is positioned along any window at any time, and change them at any time by dragging them to where you want. Then you can assign meanings to each side, depending on your workflow, for example (this should be under user control, not set in stone, of course):
Tabs on the top for important stuff.
Tabs on the bottom for administrative stuff.
Tabs on left for things you haven't read yet.
Tabs on right for things you've already read.
Then drag the tab from the left to the right after you read something (like moving it from your "in box" to your "out box"), or pin its tab on the top or bottom of it's important and you want to keep it around and easy to find.
And if you really want, you should be able to hide the tab to save space.
And not only tabs for apps like browser and IDEs, but also the desktop window manager should support tabs on top level windows in a consistent manner, so you can drag tabbed windows in and out of other window frames, as well as arranging them in hierarchical outlines along the edges.
All this is super obvious, and saves a lot of time and effort, so it bewilders me why tabs like I described and implemented in the 1980's aren't universally supported on all desktops and applications by now.
It's not because they're patented. Adobe tried, and sued Macromedia over it, but that patent (illegitimate in my view, since it ignored the prior art, and was extremely obvious and not patentable) has long since expired.
https://www.metafilter.com/2805/Adobe-sues-Macromedia-over-i...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38337876
DonHopkins 3 months ago | root | parent | next [–]
Also, not everything is a file. Tabs should apply to all edges of all windows, including top level windows, not just one edge of only windows with files in them. And you should be able to drag any window out to top level and it still has its tab attached, then move it around to any position along any edge, or hide it, and of course snap windows together along their tabbed edges, either tiling or overlapping.
How do you control all of that? That's where the pie menus on the tabs come in, of course. Thanks to the tabs, you can even pop up pie menus on windows that are completely covered up, and perform commands on them even though they're not visible, like bringing them to the top (stroke up) or down (stroke down), or closing them (diagonal stroke for confirmation submenu, then stroke up to confirm), or whatever (paste into terminal emulator, evaluate code in editor, etc).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347429
DonHopkins 3 months ago | prev | next [–]
And as long as you can have tabs on any side of a window, how about multiple tabs on the same window? Like child tabs as well as label tabs, that are links to other windows.
Another cool use of vertical tabs is for the tabs on the left to select between windows, and the tabs on the right select between children of the current window (not sub-windows, but related windows or sub-directories). And you can use the tabs along the top as breadcrumbs to navigate back up the tree.
Some IDEs kind of do that with a directory browser on the left and a function browser on the right, but with outlines and scrolling lists instead of actual tabs.
You could navigate the tab tree by clicking or gesturing left or right with a pie menu on a tab, sliding the right column of tabs over to the left to descend into the tree.
Like a Finder window that shows directories as tabs on the right instead of icons inside.
You could also have top and bottom edge tabs for different kinds of children (i.e. xml attributes vs elements, object methods vs properties, different views or editors, etc).
The original NeXT file browser had breadcrumbs along the top (but not tabs):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrTag7nSHlw&t=701s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341279
donatj 3 months ago | prev | next [–]
VScode started with vertical tabs only back in the day. It was a very interesting design choice. They switched to horizontal tabs from pressure.
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | next [–]
I just can't get my head around the mentality of making that decision for all of the users, hard coding it, and forcing it on them, not allowing you to choose for every window, or change your mind at any time, and simply drag any tab to any edge you want, whenever you want. What makes user interface designers so arrogant and sure of themselves and lazy that they think one particular side is the only side, and the best for everyone, no matter what your screen size, resolution, aspect ratio, layout, number of tabs, icon or label size, workflow, direction of text flow, handedness, visual acuity, physical dexterity, task, and preference?
And then when you inevitably run out of space for tabs along the one edge, instead of simply allowing you to put more tabs along the other edges, you either add more horizontal rows along the top, so you get this abomination [1], or you have tiny little hard to use scrolling arrows at each edge so you can't see all the tabs at once, so you get that abomination [2]:
Is it ever okay to have multiple rows of tabs?
[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/is-it-ever-okay...
Awesome Scrolling For Wide Tab-Interface Applications - ScrollTabs:
[2] https://www.jqueryscript.net/layout/Awesome-Scrolling-For-Wi...
It's like only putting only one arrow key on the keyboard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38337425
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Vertical Tabs in Visual Studio Code
I've been implementing and using vertical tabs since around 1988, with I released a commercial product with tabbed windows, the NeWS version of UniPress Emacs, and used it to develop a hypermedia authoring environment for HyperTIES at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...
Vertically tabbed windows combine synergistically well with pie menus, and are great for window management, especially when you have many windows.
They are purposefully NOT patented, since the idea is so fucking obvious, but it's disappointing they took so many decades to catch on finally. Still there aren't any decent desktop window managers I know of that implement tabs the right way. (tvtwm is not the right way!)
The later NeWS Toolkit versions from the early 1990's let you drag the tabs around to any side of the window you like: left, right, top or bottom, to any position along any edge. The user should be able to decide which edge and where the tabs are attached to for each window, it should not be hard wired like the tabs in VSCode and web browsers typically are. Being able to choose which edge the tab is on and where the tab is gives users better more flexible ways to organize and manipulate their windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)
HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS, tabbed windows, pie menus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
I had a video of the NeWS tabbed windows, demonstrating dragging the tabs to different window edges, but youtube took it down because it contained copyrighted music (Herbie Hancock's Rockit).
Oh, here's the original video you can download from my server:
https://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov
Here are some different version from 1988-1991 for different versions of NeWS:
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tabwin.ps
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tab-1.ps
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tabframe-1.ps
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tab-3.0.2.ps
Here's another NeWS program that uses vertical (by default, but any edge if you want) tabs on windows around PostScript objects that you can push and pop on the stack with "direct stack manipulation":
The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...
PSIBER Space Deck Demo:
Is anyone else not at all bothered by the tabs "being buttons"? I feel like I'm the only one sometimes. Are they really that jarring for first-time users?
#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg){kind=link}