The long expected, and often dreaded, Australis user interface for Firefox will have become fact a couple weeks from now. For those of us who don't immediately jump back to the last ESR build without it, rage quit web browsing entirely, start using lynx in protest, or just say fork it, Martin Brinkmann over at Ghacks has an interesting writeup on further UI changes being proposed. The only thing I found interesting are the changes proposed for the context menu but, as always, your mileage may vary.
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What's New in Firefox Post-Australis
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by marcello_dl on Sunday April 20 2014, @07:18PM
Potentially millions of hours wasted to adapt oneself. If adaptation is even possible.
The much lauded chrome, for example, failed miserably to let me keep its window above the others when I tried it out under avlinux, thanks to its non standard windows decorations.
If firefox is going to follow chrome in its fscking up of perfectly fine desktop experiences I will switch to seamonkey, which AFAIK is the only other one where I can have Noscript, which I like A LOT.
Let's hope for the best.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @07:41PM
I've been using Seamonkey since I got sick of FF breaking my extensions every few weeks, and it seems to be very usable, although there are a few UI irritations I have with it (about:config doesn't respect the setting for placing the `close tab' button ON the tab, for example).
For those who are swearing off Mozilla entirely, Midori [midori-browser.org] (based on Webkit) seems to have increased its noscript capabilities to the point where I can now pick and choose which domains to allow (instead of a global on/off toggle) on a certain page. You have to enable the `NoJS' extension, however. I haven't seen that on any other webkit-based browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:20PM
Midori doesn't run on Mac OS X? A webkit browser that doesn't run on Mac ... hmm. Their downloads page makes it clear that Mac is not supported, but its hard to tell what Midori's requirements are. From their website:
Those are some mighty nice meaningless words considering Midori doesn't list what its dependancies are.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 21 2014, @02:27PM
I've been wondering why NoScript doesn't already do this since I started using it...if I want to actually *use* facebook (I know, I know...) I *have* to unblock the domain. But then every other site can pull whatever shit from it that I specifically don't want them to be able to do.
For an extension that seems designed to minimize XSS*, it sure seems to have given up in the 8th inning.
* Yeah, I'm probably using the term wrong.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday April 20 2014, @07:47PM
Jesus fuck, It's hideous. If I wanted to use Chrome then I'd fucking download that instead.
The change in direction is Shuttle-worthy in scope, only instead of simplifying a good thing into ad-serving idiocy like Shuttleworth did, this new version is shitted-up with unnecessary clutter. So whenever you have to deal with a fresh install, instead of just tweaking a few privacy settings, now you'd likely have to disable a bunch of icons and other crufty shit to the best of your ability.
It'd be nice if the management of a good-enough popular project would leave good-enough the fuck alone already! Maybe all those noisy people spearheading that monstrosity should dedicate their time to OpenSSL instead, I hear it's in need of help these days.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tathra on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:06PM
what the hell is going on? first opera changes to chrome, and now firefox too? i've used opera for as long as i can remember, but havent updated past opera 12.16 for exactly that reason (i dont really like firefox either).
isnt firefox supposed to be open source? if they're making a change that most of the userbase doesnt like or approve, then a fork should be a foregone conclusion.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:48PM
I can't say that I really care.
Apparently I am in the minority, but I really like the UI for Chrome. It's not the same thing as /.Beta either. I see it as being as close and dense as you can get without directly going to full screen mode.
It's just a UI, and from the change log and attached screen shots, it doesn't seem to be terrible.
What I am more concerned about right now is that I don't run FireFox because it fucking blows. It's the worst performing browser out there with no stability. Everytime I go back to it, it's just painfully slow. I don't have the greatest impression from the rendering engine either. It breaks a lot of places that I go to routinely that render just fine in other browsers.
I would choose Internet Explorer over FireFox at this point, and if that isn't a sign of just how bad they are, I don't know what is.
Stop working on the stupid UI and make FireFox actually worth a damn again under the hood. I would quit Chrome in two seconds if they did.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by captain normal on Sunday April 20 2014, @09:57PM
Except that Google also keeps changing it's UI every few months. For some reason the chrome development team keeps trying to push something called "Unity" in a poorly thought scheme to make the browser the same on a PC or tablet as on a phone or watch.
I think all browser dev teams have caught this disease. In the last couple of years I've fired FF, Opera and Pale Moon. I still have IE on my machine, but refuse to use it. Mostly I just use Chrome. But if something with a simple GI like Chrome had a year ago, I'd jump on it.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:52PM
I just wish they would concentrate the majority of their efforts on function and not form.
*That* disease (Marketers and Execs were the ground zero monkey) of spending all your efforts on form is far more widespread on the Internet. You think I'm happy using Chrome? Lord no. I'm not a fan of Google, I just need to get my work done every day.
Chrome is not perfect either. Every other day all the tabs will crash until I kill a single process (have to find it) and then it kills every Chrome process. Starting it back up allows me to restore everything without major incident.
It's a travesty that Mozilla can't make a decent engine in FireFox. A travesty.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 21 2014, @02:36PM
Being a different brand of rotten from one rotten thing is better how?
I don't understand why everybody has a hard-on for fullscreen either. For desktops/laptops, we've got plenty of screen space anyway. I've never really understood why games generally fullscreen themselves either...in shooters maybe, okay, but Civ 2 was the last windowed Civ I think.
Yeah, you might have a point about stability.
I thought you had questioned why anyone would bother using Firefox somewhere, but I guess I'm just imagining things. Anyway: Plugins. Plugins plugins plugins! From what I'm seen Chrome's widgets aren't allowed to interact with the browser enough to accomplish much of anything of consequence. Maybe that's changed in the last few years, though.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Monday April 21 2014, @11:35PM
Not vertically we sure as hell don't! I was shopping for a new laptop just last month. Couldn't find a single one with even as much vertical resolution as a freakin' 12 year old dirt cheap Dell desktop.
Personally, I've been using this since it was first announced in the nightly, and I love it. Condense the UI, spread it out horizontally a bit more, and let me use the full vertical real-estate for the website I'm actually using.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday April 22 2014, @04:28PM
I use a vertical tab bar more for the fact that you can fit in like twice the tabs (legibly!) that way and I'm a tabaholic. It's a bit weird though if I want two windows side-by-side, even at 1680x1050.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:09PM
first opera changes to chrome
Opera abandoned their own Presto rendering engine and switched to WebKit.
Fewer species makes for a less-healthy ecosystem; look at how many folks were using OpenSSL and all got caught with their butts in the breeze.
Genetic diversity is a Good Thing(tm).
A while back, Maxthon (originally MyIE2) switched from M$'s Trident engine to WebKit[1].
It's a bit of a trend.
and now firefox too?
The feel has changed, but it's still Gecko underneath.
Kunasou, down in the thread, pointed to a fix for the UI.
a fork
That was covered by Kunasou as well.
My response to him has options for Linux users.
[1] On the plus side, Maxthon is now cross-platform.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday April 21 2014, @04:04AM
I hate Chrome myself. Don't like FF much either, I use the PaleMoon variant when forced to, but it'll never be my fave browser. Changes like this pretty much ensure I'll stay with SeaMonkey for the foreseeable future.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 21 2014, @02:30PM
I keep wishing someone would fork Firefox 3.6 and just keep it patched up to date. I can't remember off the top of my head a single thing since 3.6 that I actually considered an improvement.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 21 2014, @02:39PM
*security patched up-to-date
Realized I didn't make that clear. Oops.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday April 20 2014, @11:50PM
Adaptation is definitely possible. I'll be forcing the UI to "adapt" itself back to what I find useful via addons, just like I did with the last UI redesign they did. My Firefox looks nothing like the default, and I'm happy with that.
Thanks to addons that allow moving, modifying, or replacing default UI bits, I ditched the menu bar, have a modified compact-menu instead of the default menu buttons, put the tabs vertically along the right side, and have drop-down buttons for bookmarks.
By the time this change lands in Debian (they keep non-ESR versions in experimental) there should be plenty of options to fix it, so I don't care if they keep chasing Chrome's bad decisions; it'll be fixable by the time I get stuck with it. Customisation is Firefox's best advantage against the other browsers and, sometimes, itself.
I'm not sure if this Chromium-specific or in the "proper" Chrome as well, but there's a setting for that in chrome:settings. Under "Appearance" there's a checkbox for "Use system title bar and borders". Doesn't make the browser itself any more usable, but it helps fix that specific issue.
(Score: 1) by crutchy on Monday April 21 2014, @06:14AM
ff + web developer plugin (Disable>Disable JavaScript>Disable All JavaScript) = noscript
can also disable css, java, cache, referrers, etc on the fly
works for me
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 21 2014, @02:24PM
Yup. Got my finger all ready to go hovering over the Seamonkey button here as well. At least Chrome had its shittastic UI from the beginning so I knew not to bother.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by black6host on Sunday April 20 2014, @07:47PM
So what IS new in Australis? That doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere, though we do get a link to what will possibly be new -after- Australis.
(From the article: "Mozilla on the other hand is already thinking about Firefox's future. A new set of design mockups have been released recently that show other areas of the browser that could receive a design overhaul in the future.")
(Score: 1) by black6host on Sunday April 20 2014, @07:59PM
Uh, never mind. I misread the title. Mea culpa.
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:10PM
I dunno - what was new in Firefox 28? According to the changelog, we got
some UI things,
integration of new codecs,
removal of new "old" code,
these were all listed under "Developer", so I assume this is how they break extensions this week, and
an obligatory security fix.
Not to be too cynical, but it looks like some UI components got shuffled around, somebody pulled the latest codec updates (from Google), somebody else pulled the latest spdy updates (from Google), extensions were broken, and somebody else pulled a security researcher's patch. For Australis' ChangeLog to be "A LOT of UI components got shuffled around" would seem to be par for the course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:01PM
...beta?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:06PM
Rrrrrrraaaawwwwrrrr!
Beer good! BETA, BAD!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:12PM
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by Kunasou on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:07PM
I found this on a blog: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cla ssicthemerestorer/ [mozilla.org]
I tried to use Australis but I didn't like it so I moved to Pale Moon. Maybe this extension makes me try Firefox again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @09:43PM
ClassicThemeRestorer
So far, you're one of the few guys I've seen in this thread who should be up-modded.
Pale Moon
Had you mentioned that that is Windoze-only, you would deserve a +5.
More ideas (more Firefox forks):
Iceweasel; IceCat; Abrowser (None ported to Windoze)
We'll have to see what tack all of these take.
The guy who mentioned the SeaMonkey suite is another who deserves up-mods. ...meh.)
(Using the suite here since 2002 when it was called Mozilla; tried FF once
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday April 21 2014, @01:42AM
Pale Moon is not Windows-only. I looked into it earlier today. The Linux builds are unofficial, but they're there.
---linuxrocks123
(Score: 1) by freesword on Monday April 21 2014, @01:20AM
Oddly enough, the extensions are the main reason I am still a Firefox user. Particularly a few functional ones like adblock plus with it's element hiding helper add-on. and quickjava for one click enable/disable javascript. Unfortunately, it seems that an ever increasing percentage of my extensions are for undoing Mozilla's UI changes. This is a trend I am most definitely not happy with.
When their latest abortion of a UI drops I plan to test it in a VM to preserve my existing browser install in case I can't fix it with extensions. I also plan on looking into any forks that maintain the classic UI and testing their support for extensions.
Unfortunately, my options for functionality equal to what I get with FF extensions on linux seem somewhat limited. Unless I'm missing something.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Ken_g6 on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:17PM
I'm on the Beta channel, so I got Australis a month ago. I just right-clicked next to the tabs, re-enabled the Menu Bar, and almost everything else was fine. The main other thing I had to update being Tab Mix Plus, to the latest development version.
I guess the main thing people are complaining about is the tab shape? I don't care about that.
(Score: 2) by tempest on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:54PM
Can you still put tabs on the bottom? I have no idea why, but that's always been a big deal to me.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jackb_guppy on Sunday April 20 2014, @09:18PM
Can these guys learn to keep-blazing-a-trail vs. becoming another nondescript browser?
White back ground with gray letters - Unreadable! Ever heard of contrast?
It is as bad as not marking what is click-able with an underline or making a button. It is hide-and-go-seek not a good design. Do you hear that Microsoft!
One of my favourite apps on my phone was "My Data Manager", I nice simple interface clear and readable. Then they haul off trashed it, with white backgrounds with tiny gray letters, un-resizable screens... it is just awful wish I could rate it with a 0!.
Now, get off my lawn!
(Score: 2) by emg on Monday April 21 2014, @04:15AM
It's the new fad in 'UI design'. You're supposed to guess which parts of the screen can actually do something, because showing them to you confuses users.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sir Finkus on Sunday April 20 2014, @09:34PM
Am I the only one that actually likes the new UI in australis? I think it looks much "neater" and I haven't had any complaints usability-wise. Are the objections to the aesthetics, or some change in functionality that I'm missing?
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Angry Jesus on Sunday April 20 2014, @09:56PM
I think the new UI is fine, no big deal for most cases.
I'm a lot more concerned with the new version of the sync protocol that is being rolled out with FF29.
They now require an email address and that you send them a copy of your encryption key. They promise not to keep the key around, but we all know what a promise is worth nowadays.
https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-auth-server/wiki/on epw-protocol [github.com]
(Score: 1) by ButchDeLoria on Monday April 21 2014, @06:47AM
The sync is also not complete shit now, though it doesn't have anything on Chrome's syncing capabilities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @10:20AM
> The sync is also not complete shit now.
Great, so they upgraded a honda to a bmw but now it has a permanent flat tire.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 21 2014, @02:44PM
If they don't retain the key, why the fuck would they need to ask you for it? Do they do an initial encryption of your user data or something?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @04:29PM
Read the link to see their process, they have both a graphical flow chart and a step-by-step list, it is not hard to understand.
There goal is to have something that is nominally easier to recover from losing your key.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday April 20 2014, @09:37PM
Is it news yet if it hasn't happend?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday April 20 2014, @10:03PM
I am now running PaleMoon. It is a fork of FF, done a while ago by a single guy in Europe. Works and looks exactly as one of older FF builds without that fancy URL bar. All extensions work.
I did that after the well-known bout of political intolerance within Mozilla Corp. From that point on, I am no longer interested in Mozilla products, do not install them, and do not recommend them. I am not interested in UI changes either. It is not important. Often a compact GUI robs you of the wealth of controls that you can access directly. The IE for Metro/Modern is at the end of that road; I am not even sure what kind of a user it is designed for. I am glad that PaleMoon does not promise an upgrade treadmill with new versions shoved down your throat every couple of weeks. Maybe a few years from now I will look for updates; or maybe not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @01:08AM
I would like to have a fork of firefox 3.6.x
Any hints from people that have done things like this?
I bet there is half a zillion things to think of too
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday April 21 2014, @01:47AM
That was apparently done back in the Firefox 4 days. It's called Pale Moon; there are official builds for Windows and unofficial builds for Linux. I plan on looking into it sometime; perhaps ChickenFoot will work with it!
---linuxrocks123
(Score: 1) by yellowantphil on Monday April 21 2014, @02:03AM
Interesting, thank you. I learned about Pale Moon last time I tried to drop Firefox, but I passed it over because I thought that it was for Windows only. I may have to try it now.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 21 2014, @02:51PM
Do you have an opinion on the unofficial Linux builds vs. running the Windows version in Wine? The FAQ claims Wine "shows very decent speed in that setup."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday April 21 2014, @05:05PM
I've never used Pale Moon, so sorry but no. I plan to look into it sometime, but not necessarily soon. A Firefox Betapocalypse would make the issue more urgent, but that hasn't happened yet :)
---linuxrocks123
(Score: 1) by yellowantphil on Monday April 21 2014, @01:53AM
What are some other good web browsers for Linux? Firefox used to be the small and light version of Seamonkey, but these days it seems like we need a small and light version of Firefox. And with the Mozilla foundation bumping up the major version number every other day, adding their enormous JavaScript PDF engine that nearly crashes my computer, recently getting into politics, and apparently now changing the UI, I really want to find an alternative. (I will admit that my computer is grievously underpowered for 2014, but I don't want to buy a new computer just so that I can try to use JavaScript to display PDFs.)
I have been using Gecko-based browsers for over a decade now, from Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox, but I am willing to try other rendering engines. I briefly tried Chromium and Opera, but I found them both to be frustrating to use. Maybe I should give them another chance.
I tried using Konqueror, but I couldn't even get the damn search bar to work (it keeps switching back to Google, and if I hit enter or click search, nothing happens). Maybe something is screwed up in my KDE configuration, but even if I can fix it, is Konqueror worth using? The last time I tried it was several years ago, but it seemed like quite a few web pages would not render properly.
I guess I'll try Seamonkey, and hope that it doesn't follow Firefox down the path to madness.
On top of all that, I would really like to have Ghostery or a similar extension. Are there any good (graphical) Linux browsers out there that I have overlooked?
(Score: 1) by yellowantphil on Monday April 21 2014, @02:00AM
Now browsing this discussion some more, linuxrocks123 informs me that Pale Moon has an unofficial build for Linux. I may have to try that one.
(Score: 1) by yellowantphil on Monday April 21 2014, @02:12AM
And now, having read the rest of the comments here, I need to look at Midori [midori-browser.org] too.
[Score: -1, replying to myself too often]
(Score: 1) by petecox on Monday April 21 2014, @02:40AM
rekonq is KDE's webkit based browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @03:28AM
other good web browsers for Linux?[...]small and light
For the adventurous, here's a seed that will find pretty much everything available:
Lynx+eLinks+Dillo+NetSurf+dwb [google.com]
You sound like you want it to Just Work(tm) out of the box, so you can eliminate a bunch that are text-only, sans JS, etc.
I would really like to have Ghostery or a similar extension
That limits things a lot.
Seamonkey
That name is written in CamelCase: SeaMonkey.
I think you'll be pleased with the direct descendant of the original Mozilla.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by meisterister on Monday April 21 2014, @05:15AM
Fork it, fork it, fork it, fork it, fork it, fork it
(etc)
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Monday April 21 2014, @04:56PM