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Redesigning the browser window

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Re: Redesigning the browser window

#51

Post by joe42 »

tiddchristopher wrote: post #31
dagw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing about the technical details of font rendering algorithms, but isn't that just an implementation detail? How hard would it be to write a font rendering algorithm that works when each RGB triplet is a vertical line? And having done that how hard would it be to implement a font renderer that switches between the two algorithms depending on screen orientation?

My gut reaction is that well-made typefaces for digital use, which are often designed with hinting in mind, would lose their benefits. For most fonts, though, it shouldn't make a difference whether antialiasing or subpixel rendering is done vertically or horizontal, and I know you can manually specify your subpixel information in Linux. Edit: natesm posted a response to the grandparent of this comment with a screensh…

I've read that the RGB (horizontally) allows better rendering than VRGB (vertically) because (at least in the Latin alphabet) extra horizontal resolution is more often more useful than extra horizontal resolution.

Eg. 'm' and 'w' would benefit more from extra horizontal resolution, while 'e' would benefit more from extra vertical resolution.

Re: Redesigning the browser window

#52

Post by dpark »

[deleted] wrote: post #43
jannes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with trying that on a laptop.

[deleted]

I code on a laptop full-time. I know plenty of other people who do so, for various reasons. This is not an uncommon thing, any more than it's uncommon for writers to use a laptop full-time.

Re: Redesigning the browser window

#55

Post by justinschuh »

adimitrov wrote: post #35

I'm already doing this with Opera, and I think Opera has it figured out a bit better, too. The curious thing here is, I guess, that I not only don't have an Apple Cinema display, I don't have a wide-screen display at all, and I even pivot my monitor by 90 degrees (the one I browse the web on.) I've made the experience that having a tall browser window is much more useful than having a wide browser window. See the scr…

The address bar is the only security indicator you have in the browser. Hiding it to the extent you're suggesting leaves you pretty much defenseless against phishing attacks.

Re: Redesigning the browser window

#57

Post by dpark »

derefr wrote: post #11

Regarding the use of horizontal space: This is what the Reading List feature of Safari 5 is for. (Example for comparison: http://i.imgur.com/x2tkl.png ) Tabs are really only supposed to be used for things you're actually looking at simultaneously ; any time you're just middle-clicking everything on a page (e.g. the HN frontpage), in order to queue those pages up for reading after you close the index page, you should…

> Tabs are really only supposed to be used for things you're actually looking at simultaneously; any time you're just middle-clicking everything on a page (e.g. the HN frontpage), in order to queue those pages up for reading after you close the index page, you should be putting them in the reading list instead. It's kind of sad that Apple hasn't made a larger push to get people to notice it; it's a much better solution for the bottom-80% of what people use tabs for today.

I appreciate the time you spent putting together a long response and a good explanation of the reading list, but honestly this seems like broken UX. Tabs and the reading list have a massive amount of overlap conceptually. The only true distinguishing feature seems to be that the reading list syncs. Other than that, it seems like the user is being asked to take on extra cognitive load to decide whether to open a link in a tab or the reading list. There are times when I know I would like to read something later or on my tablet, and that's the use-case for the reading list. Most of the time I just want to open a link now, and that's what tabs are for. If a vertical tab design is better, then tabs need to go vertical. I shouldn't be forced to open everything in the reading list to work around a UI deficiency.

Re: Redesigning the browser window

#58

Post by [deleted] »

albertzeyer wrote: post #22
derefr wrote: post #11

Regarding the use of horizontal space: This is what the Reading List feature of Safari 5 is for. (Example for comparison: http://i.imgur.com/x2tkl.png ) Tabs are really only supposed to be used for things you're actually looking at simultaneously ; any time you're just middle-clicking everything on a page (e.g. the HN frontpage), in order to queue those pages up for reading after you close the index page, you should…

This sounds interesting. I use Chrome. Does somebody know if there is a similar feature there?

[deleted]

Re: Redesigning the browser window

#59

Post by BhujangiJedi »

albertzeyer wrote: post #22
derefr wrote: post #11

Regarding the use of horizontal space: This is what the Reading List feature of Safari 5 is for. (Example for comparison: http://i.imgur.com/x2tkl.png ) Tabs are really only supposed to be used for things you're actually looking at simultaneously ; any time you're just middle-clicking everything on a page (e.g. the HN frontpage), in order to queue those pages up for reading after you close the index page, you should…

This sounds interesting. I use Chrome. Does somebody know if there is a similar feature there?

I made an extension for browsing sites like HN and reddit: http://msssk.bitbucket.org/

I have a 1920x1200 monitor and find that a lot of my web browsing wastes a lot of my horizontal space. Tabbed browsing certainly beats single-window browsing for content aggregation sites like HN, but it's still kind of cumbersome... and there's all that horizontal space not being used. So I wrote clikkit - it creates an iframe and starts loading the page as soon as you click the link (unfortunately, it's up to Chrome how much priority it gives to fetching the page, and it doesn't start rendering it until the iframe is added to the DOM).

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