Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called usability through famiarity. Customising UI elements is a usability antipattern. Per [1], predictability and familiarity are key in creating usable interfaces. Making things look nice "because you can" doesn't necessarily mean you should. > When designing your interface, try to be consistent and predictable in your choice of interface elements. Whether they are aware of it or not, users have become famili…
Have you ever seen a game built entirely out of default OS windows and buttons? If you are building an accounting program, sure use all the defaults but if you are building a piece of art I think you can afford to change a scrollbar.
Firefox 64 Released
401–410 of 527 posts
Re: Firefox 64 Released
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Extensions used to have carte blanche to change the browser, which was a security risk … I don't buy that. It's my browser running on my computer, it's my choice whose code I choose to run on it. If, say, emacs or vi had this kind of handholding, neither one would be much more than a text editor.
Emacs or vi don't handle potentially malicious third-party code...
Re: Firefox 64 Released
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Implying there's some intrinsic reason browsers can't have customizeable scrollbars.
It's called usability through famiarity. Customising UI elements is a usability antipattern. Per [1], predictability and familiarity are key in creating usable interfaces. Making things look nice "because you can" doesn't necessarily mean you should. > When designing your interface, try to be consistent and predictable in your choice of interface elements. Whether they are aware of it or not, users have become famili…
Re: Firefox 64 Released
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called usability through famiarity. Customising UI elements is a usability antipattern. Per [1], predictability and familiarity are key in creating usable interfaces. Making things look nice "because you can" doesn't necessarily mean you should. > When designing your interface, try to be consistent and predictable in your choice of interface elements. Whether they are aware of it or not, users have become famili…
Just curious: does this principal apply only to scrollbars or should sites not be able to change the appearance of other controls -- like buttons, for example?
> Does this principal apply to X for y?
In a vacuum, yes it's a principal.
In reality, while it's an antipattern it doesn't mean you should be afraid let alone disallowed the ability to exercise good judgement and make a call.
Full window, emersive games are the perfect example of UI elements like buttons that should probably be reskinned - wisely. I say wisely because you can still reskin buttons in a way that affords familiarity you can also reskin them in a way that makes them abhorrent.
A converse example is windows based skinnable hardware interface software like MSI afterburner and the like. That sort of thing is absolute unthought, untested garbage.
For website buttons I think the ship has sailed and the default elements actually look alien.
In fact a lot of CSS frameworks improve net usability from defaults anyway.
Now, is it an antipattern to use them? In essence yes, but considering everything no. Caution, many css frameworks have UX issues and you need to make a judgement in your evaluation about which features to use. I like to see how their autocomplete / dropdown features work it's usually a good litmus test because those things are basically impossible to do right.
And this why we have UX people.
It is the marriage and trade off of usability/hci and designers to create a usability experience that delights.
Though things still tend to lean toward design first approaches. Which aren't incorrect approaches but do tend to lack emphasis on circling back to fix usability later.
I think website internals are widely debatable but do have norms you must consider.
I draw the line at breaking out of the window sandbox and altering browser UI. It assumes all browsers work the same and creates a dependency on the browser for a shared experience.
An inconsequential example: setting browser ui color on mobile version of Chrome. Now your whole website design feels very native and is reasoned about with that native feel. That can them lead to inconsistent design assumptions being made on the desktop. Maybe your color selection clashes badly with the desktop grey.
Like I said, inconsequential, but might illustrate why messing with it might be a bad idea.
The other big reason I throw down at the browser window line is accessibility. Messing with things like button sizing / scrollbar sizing and things wrecks absolute havoc on these users. They also make English centric assumptions about designs that are almost always wrong eventually.
Re: Firefox 64 Released
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Brave is running circles around Chrome for you in general, that's likely a result of cognitive bias, since last I checked it's the same rendering engine. For pageloads Brave might do better if it blocks various stuff by default, of course.
> if it blocks various stuff by default This is one of the key differentiating factors of Brave. Maybe next time don’t lead with accusations of cognitive bias.
Re: Firefox 64 Released
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called usability through famiarity. Customising UI elements is a usability antipattern. Per [1], predictability and familiarity are key in creating usable interfaces. Making things look nice "because you can" doesn't necessarily mean you should. > When designing your interface, try to be consistent and predictable in your choice of interface elements. Whether they are aware of it or not, users have become famili…
Have you ever seen a game built entirely out of default OS windows and buttons? If you are building an accounting program, sure use all the defaults but if you are building a piece of art I think you can afford to change a scrollbar.
Re: Firefox 64 Released
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called usability through famiarity. Customising UI elements is a usability antipattern. Per [1], predictability and familiarity are key in creating usable interfaces. Making things look nice "because you can" doesn't necessarily mean you should. > When designing your interface, try to be consistent and predictable in your choice of interface elements. Whether they are aware of it or not, users have become famili…
That page has a custom scrollbar.
Re: Firefox 64 Released
#408> We’re excited to introduce multiple tab selection, which makes it easier to manage windows with many open tabs. Simply hold Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. Once selected, click and drag to move the tabs as a group — either within a given window, or out into a new window. Yessss. It doesn't happen often, but the times when I open up 6-10 tabs for research but then decide…
Re: Firefox 64 Released
#409Re: Firefox 64 Released
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Scrollbar One thing I like about the Firefox (Gtk?) scrollbar is that it finally removed (a few version ago already) the "Click on it somewhere, but it doesn't move there but just acts like PgDown/Up", i.e. the non-warping to the exact click position but just inching towards it. This is completely unnecessary in the time of wheels and touchpads and I already miss it everywhere else.
> This is completely unnecessary It is completely necessary for me to have “move one page up on click.”