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Firefox Australis: One browser interface to rule them all

extremetech.com

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Re: Firefox Australis: One browser interface to rule them all

#41

Post by chris_wot »

sho_hn wrote: post #34
kijin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only difference between Chrome's tab design and Firefox's is that Chrome's tabs have rounded corners and Firefox's tabs are rectangular. You refuse to use a browser because it has rounded corners? Really? Anyway, there will probably be add-ons to bring back the rectangular look if enough people prefer it to the rounded look. If I were a real fan of Firefox's current look, I'd be more worried about the big orange…

> The only difference between Chrome's tab design and Firefox's is that Chrome's tabs have rounded corners and Firefox's tabs are rectangular. While I'm overall not a fan of Chrome's UI and this may speak correctly to the present state of affairs, I feel there's something worth adding to give credit to Chrome for advancing the state of the art: They implemented a bunch of smart behaviors Firefox later copied. Good pi…

My goodness! Finally, someone giving Apple a run for their money in terms of obsessive design! I love how they do tabs right to left when using an Arabic locale... They've really thought it out.

Incidentally, no idea who voted you down. That was a very insightful link!

Re: Firefox Australis: One browser interface to rule them all

#42

Post by sho_hn »

chris_wot wrote: post #41
sho_hn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only difference between Chrome's tab design and Firefox's is that Chrome's tabs have rounded corners and Firefox's tabs are rectangular. While I'm overall not a fan of Chrome's UI and this may speak correctly to the present state of affairs, I feel there's something worth adding to give credit to Chrome for advancing the state of the art: They implemented a bunch of smart behaviors Firefox later copied. Good pi…

My goodness! Finally, someone giving Apple a run for their money in terms of obsessive design! I love how they do tabs right to left when using an Arabic locale... They've really thought it out. Incidentally, no idea who voted you down. That was a very insightful link!

Just to add to that, re reversing in Arabic locales: All KDE/Qt apps will do the same with their tabs and have done so for at least a decade, and you can even get a feel for it in an LTR locale by running them with --reverse (useful for devs to check for issues in custom widgets).

(And thanks for the kind words. :)

Re: Firefox Australis: One browser interface to rule them all

#43

Post by SkyMarshal »

sho_hn wrote: post #8
acabal wrote: post #5

I actually prefer when apps respect the UI guidelines of the OS they're running on. I understand the desire for one unified interface, but there's also much to be said for intra-OS UI consistency. FF has done really well in the past with that, but I guess they're jumping on the Chrome bandwagon.

Speaking as a Linux user, I don't think they have. Their use of and integration with the UI primitives of the GTK+ toolkit has been, well, primitive and unsatisfying, and Qt support is virtually non-existant (there was some porting done, but not enough to be anywhere near usable). However, even on OS X and Windows they don't use, say, native tab buttons. In fact, looking at the live demos I linked earlier, I don't th…

> As for Chrome, the sin Chrome commits on Linux in particular is that it defaults to something called client-side window decorations, that is it tells the window manager not to display the decorations it would normally put around the client area and then proceeds to draw its own inside this client area, which behave potentially vastly differently from whatever the user has configured for his native system decorations.

One man's sin is another man's salvation. That's one of the main reasons I use Chromium and Chrome as my primary browsers on Linux, besides their superb performance optimization. It works well with Ubuntu's integration of the top OS info bar and the app's menu bar, and saves noticeable screen space. I love it.

I'm hoping Firefox at least provides that as an option in future builds as well.

Re: Firefox Australis: One browser interface to rule them all

#44

Post by sho_hn »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #43
sho_hn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a Linux user, I don't think they have. Their use of and integration with the UI primitives of the GTK+ toolkit has been, well, primitive and unsatisfying, and Qt support is virtually non-existant (there was some porting done, but not enough to be anywhere near usable). However, even on OS X and Windows they don't use, say, native tab buttons. In fact, looking at the live demos I linked earlier, I don't th…

> As for Chrome, the sin Chrome commits on Linux in particular is that it defaults to something called client-side window decorations, that is it tells the window manager not to display the decorations it would normally put around the client area and then proceeds to draw its own inside this client area, which behave potentially vastly differently from whatever the user has configured for his native system decoration…

Right, no objections if that makes things better for you. I would like to mention that in Plasma Netbook (the netbook-optimized edition of our workspace) we've tried a sort of alternative approach where if windows maximize, we disable the borders and merge the window controls into the top panel, to achieve the space saving. You can also set that up in Plasma Desktop of course.

As for app menu in a panel: That's actually something we had back in KDE 3.x but are still lacking in the KDE 4 mainline at present, mainly because it's taken a while to coordinate the standard with folks like Canonical and because we really wanted the core patches to be integrated at the Qt level. Things look to be coming together now for the upcoming 4.9 release, though I believe (K)Ubuntu has actually been shipping the patches for a while already, for the benefit of KDE apps running in Unity, but also to support the same sort of arrangement in KDE workspaces.

As for CSDs, there's bunch of other things they break that I didn't list in the original post. For example, with WM-provided decos, the window manager can detect when you're trying to interact with a frozen app and offer to kill it, which is in fact something we're doing. If you move the deco into the app process, though, well, then it hangs together with the app, and things get a little more complicated. And there's performance issues in some remote desktop cases, and so on.

Re: Firefox Australis: One browser interface to rule them all

#45

Post by UIZealot »

sho_hn wrote: post #4

Web-based live demos of the new UI: Linux: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design... OS X: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design... Windows 7: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...

Thank you for the links, as I wasn't going to visit the brain dead extremetech site on my iPad.

OS X mockup: the window control traffic lights don't line up vertically with the toolbar/tab bar icons, looks jarring. The close tab button is still on the right, tab titles are still left-aligned instead of centered, not impressed.

Firefox team: stop trying to ape the Chrome UI and think for yourselves for once, put the tab bar on the left or right side.

Re: Firefox Australis: One browser interface to rule them all

#46

Post by ktizo »

debacle wrote: post #22
generateui wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser is an exempli primus of an app allowed to break the OS UI guidelines. This is becase the browser is becoming the OS, and the OS becoming the browser. Said differently, the only UI on the OS is coming from the browser. This of course is not yet the case, but soon it will be.

Tell that to anyone who uses their PC for programming, document creation, graphics design, or is comfortable with the command line.

Thanks for reminding me of half of my html5 "todo" list.

[edit] whether I find the free time to get around to any of it is another matter, admittedly.

Re: Firefox Australis: One browser interface to rule them all

#47

Post by lloeki »

sho_hn wrote: post #37
kibwen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that these demos are early mockups from September 2011. Some details of the UI are bound to have changed since then.

Are you sure? I do remember a mockup from that timeframe that showed all platforms on one page, and was static rather than interactive. Given the greater sophistication in these and the fact that they're still linked from their wiki ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Theme_Refinement_a... ) I had assumed these to be recent. Edit: The older set I was referring to: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/ux-pres…

Hmm, in the new ones I was derailed by the icons of background tabs being not lined up with the OSX color pills. Yet the old mockups show a curve similar to the tab shape that creates a very welcome break in the design, explaining that "here are the tabs", and "here are the window controls", while the curve slant explained the height position difference between the pills and the icons/text (notice how the line linking the green pill center to the home icon center looks perpendicular to the centermost part of the separator curve, which cuts this segment in half). Without that curve, the new design simply feels broken. What's worse, since it's right there on the top-left, this is the absolute first experience of the software from the user's eye. It does not feel robust at all.
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