kef writes:
"The new Australis interface has finally landed in beta. Is this really a step forward or has the Mozilla user designers lost their mind once again? Sure, if you are ok with the default user interface and don't tweak it to suit your needs then the new UI is not too different from previous releases. But if you, like me, like to change the interface to suit your needs, then the new Australis UI will probably not rock your world, it certainly doesn't rock mine. I can no long get the stop/reload button out of the url bar, the forward/back buttons are locked next to the url bar and so on. Beta Sucks, anyone?"
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Firefox Australis is Now Available in Beta.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by mmcmonster on Friday March 21 2014, @02:42PM
It's just a Beta. Let's not get too crazy about this. Firefox has always had a customizable UI
Presumably by the time this hits the door the UI will be adjustable and you can put it back to the way you like it. (And allow us the about:config options to keep tabs on top and stupid UI changes like that.)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by everdred on Friday March 21 2014, @03:05PM
> Presumably by the time this hits the door the UI will be adjustable and you can put it back to the way you like it.
I don't know. It wouldn't be shocking if that's the next thing they drop in their quest to replicate all the superficial elements of Google Chrome.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 21 2014, @03:28PM
Mozilla's Firefox division stinks of an organization full of the developer equivalents of employees who shuffle stacks of paper and walk around all day in a bid to look busy because they are either unwilling or unable to do real work:
" Alright, just released version 47, now time to work on version 48...Hmm, let's put the 'reload' button back down in the bottom-right corner, like it was in version 32. Okay, now I'll put the 'stop' button back to top right, and -- hmmm, -- maybe I should do something revolutionary and put the the tab bar at the bottom so it can be with the Windows taskbar. Man, I'm sure it's gonna piss people off, like every new release does, but they'll suck it up and use it anyway; gotta do something, because working on bugs and memory leaks is too boring and hard. "
(Score: 4, Informative) by tibman on Friday March 21 2014, @07:49PM
They have some cool research projects: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/research/projects/ [mozilla.org]
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Informative) by geb on Friday March 21 2014, @05:13PM
The whole point of a public beta is to get feedback, and if that feedback is "the new look sucks, give us an option to turn it off" then it's right for us to say so.
(Score: 1) by adolf on Saturday March 22 2014, @01:29AM
I thought the the whole point of a public beta was to avoid the costs associated with actually paying people to test software.
I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kogspg on Friday March 21 2014, @05:28PM
No, fuck beta.
(Score: 2) by FuckBeta on Friday March 21 2014, @10:28PM
Came here to post this!
Quit Slashdot...because Fuck Beta!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by spxero on Friday March 21 2014, @02:43PM
Is Firefox's UI broken? I don't think so. If there's one browser interface I can't stand, it's Chrome. For those of us that have 10+ tabs open at any time and move windows back and forth between screens, this tabs-in-the-window-title interfaces sucks. Tabs for me are like thoughts or tasks- they stay open until the task is complete or I've read the content that I wanted to read in the window. Sometimes these need to go to a secondary window so I can focus on a different task or use them for research. Not being able to move the window by grabbing the title bar and dragging to the second or third monitor is a real... drag.
<stupid rant>
This isn't related to the interface necessarily, but this push to constantly load content when opening the browser or new tabs is similarly stupid. My nine most visited sites as a thumbnail? Great. My six most visited with some ads, or refreshing the content on load? No.
</stupid rant>
(Score: 2, Informative) by FunPika on Friday March 21 2014, @02:53PM
If a Chrome window isn't maximized, it will give some additional area above the tabs to drag the window actually. Although if someone wanted to move a maximized Chrome window with several tabs open to another window I could see that being a bit more annoying.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dublet on Friday March 21 2014, @03:21PM
Chrome doesn't really work well if you run it in a remote desktop. Its toolbar overlaps with the title bar. That isn't usually a problem, unless you have some stupid application that stupidly decides that a title bar is not just a title bar but a tab bar instead. Stupid Chrome.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by spxero on Friday March 21 2014, @05:50PM
That's kind of my point- I have multiple monitors running many programs, and if I use Chrome as a browser I can't leave it maximized if I want to use the title bar. As soon as it goes maximized the title bar is gone and makes moving the window impossible. Example: sometimes I'm browsing full-screen and find a bit of code or something to run. I like grabbing the title bar, moving it all the way to the left which defaults the program to taking up only half of the screen (on Windows). I can then do the same to the other program and essentially have a split-screen to run the commands while checking the site out at the same time. If I'm using Chrome, it's damn near impossible without leaving Chrome unmaximized or grabbing that little section next to the minimize button. In the end it's their program and their UI, but just because one company does something to their UI or UX doesn't make it better.
(Score: 3, Informative) by michealpwalls on Friday March 21 2014, @06:26PM
haha I love this community, you guys are the first group to feel my GUI pains!
I run with a very similar setup (Multiple monitors, many different programs running and tonnes of tabs in my browser window(s). I typically have many different browser windows, to organize my tabs.)
One thing that helps is the winFlag+arrow hotkeys..
You can pin a window to the left of the current Monitor (winFlag+leftArrow) and vice versa with the rightArrow and upArrows. win+downArrow minimizes the window and focuses the previously active window, much like alt+tab (But without the switcher GUI appearing in some random monitor LOL)
It's not an ideal solution, although it works somewhat.
(Score: 1) by spxero on Saturday March 22 2014, @02:57AM
I'll have to start doing the Win+Arrow - my biggest pain is getting a window half on one side, but because the other isn't an "edge" it doesn't fit perfectly there.
Plus, anything to keep hands on the keyboard and not use the mouse!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @03:49PM
Not to detract anything from your criticism of Chrome's UI, but as a solution to your problem you can use the win key in combination with the arrow keys to do the same as dragging to the right, top or left borders - win + left or right gives you the half screen window of the used direction and win + up maximizes. As a bonus, win + down minimizes. This works even with multiple monitors and is in fact a nicer way to use the functionality on the edge between both screen areas.
(Score: 1) by islisis on Friday March 21 2014, @04:46PM
i guess you are not on linux or you would know. for windows, try altdrag [google.com]. i often hide title bars, to maximise vertical space or whatever. alt+left click move, right click resize
(Score: 1) by spxero on Friday March 21 2014, @05:57PM
I do run Chromium on Linux, but my point still stands- when I grab the title bar from a window on one monitor to the next the window moves- with multiple tabs on Chrome/Chromium I have to grab the specific non-tabbed area. Just because Chrome does this doesn't make it a good thing.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RobotMonster on Friday March 21 2014, @02:45PM
I tried looking at the mockups using Safari, IE10 and an old Firefox. They were broken differently in each browser. Perhaps the mockups only work if you use Australis?
Yay for the modern web.
Get off my lawn.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Popeidol on Friday March 21 2014, @04:49PM
it's not just you. Here's what it looks like using a current version of firefox: http://i.imgur.com/ok99AxF.png [imgur.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by RobotMonster on Friday March 21 2014, @04:53PM
Yeah, that's similar to what I was seeing. Perhaps that's what it is supposed to look like -- a bold new UI to set a new standard in awesome? :-)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @08:03PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by michealpwalls on Friday March 21 2014, @06:01PM
Yea, I tried them in every major browser and it's broken.. So I put the beta in a virtual machine and really, I don't see what the point is.
You can see my dual-screen shot [tinypic.com] with FF28 running natively beside FF29 running in an XP guest... There's no screen real-estate saved and yet I have lost functionality..I have customized the "new" UI as much as possible to bring it back in line with my workflow. As you can see, it's nowhere near close and still takes up just as much space as it did before.
With the old UI, individuals were left in control of how they wanted their browser to look. You could drag individual controls virtually anywhere, including the search address bars themselves..Now we've lost those basic abilities and are stuck with a very Google Chrome-looking GUI.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:00AM
It's no wonder that it takes as much space as the previous version, if you disable the space-saving features (placing the tabs in the title bar and hiding the bookmarks bar)
(Score: 1) by michealpwalls on Monday March 24 2014, @07:38PM
I don't mean to be pedantic, but I did not disable any "space saving feature" I in fact re-enabled a convenient feature called the Bookmarks Bar... Taking away a useful feature is not a "space saving feature":
I put two screen-shots together so you can see.. The only "space-saving" was the removal of the Bookmarks Bar. Using all the old UI with a Bookmarks Bar hanging from both, there is absolutely no difference in vertical size.
Except for the fact that it now looks shamelessly identical to Google's Chrome, I miss the point entirely:
Iceweasel v24.3.0 and Firefox 29 Beta on Debian Wheezy 7.4 [tinypic.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by michealpwalls on Friday March 21 2014, @02:56PM
What a wasted effort, unless it either decreases the memory footprint of Firefox or address the hardware-acceleration issues associated with the old UI.
The current UI is very customizable.. Simply right-click on a control, select customize and start dragging things you don't like off and moving things into places you want them. It's a no-brainer.. Re-writing this UI is a massive waste of time, when there are 5 year old bugs in Gecko [mozilla.org] that IE, WebKit(Chrome/Safari) and even Opera's Presto engine have all worked out at this point.
I think their focus is completely misguided..FirefoxOS and etc. Unless their goal is to let Gecko fall into irrelevancy and simply adopt WebKit (Opera has done this, switching away from their Presto engine)
All I see when I crawl BugZilla is old, show-stopping bugs simply being re-organized, re-filed and continuously ignored... Mozilla Foundation is doing more good for Google/Chrome than they are Firefox, to be frank. That's weird!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zyx Abacab on Friday March 21 2014, @03:32PM
I can't be the only one who wants a consistent user experience between applications. I don't just use the browser all day, and it's very annoying to use several vastly-different looking programs at once.
It's possible, although difficult for the uninitiated, to make GTK and QT play nice together; but, if Firefox forces this custom UI upon us, I'll have to deal with yet another non-native-looking interface in my workspace. At least that Aurora interface abomination has the option to be disabled.
I agree with you: this is a waste of effort that is sorely needed elsewhere.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zafiro17 on Friday March 21 2014, @04:01PM
I'd say it's safe to assume the mozilla team is so deeply ensconced in "Bike Shed Mode" [1] these days that can't even see the sunlight. Maybe they no longer have developers who can fix - or want to fix - the big issues. But it's fun to wank about with endless iterations of UI stuff. UI changes are like opinions - everybody has one and nobody's is fully, indisputably right.
I barely run Firefox anymore, and this is one reason why. I got sick of my extensions breaking, of having to deal with "your X.Y.00.2.2222 versioned theme won't work with X.Y.00.22.2223" stuff, and of endless wankerism. I still run Opera - and they've got issues too, believe me - because I don't trust Chrome. But crap, it's no fun using web browsers anymore.
Firefox - you're spending too much time and all your money dealing with issues no one cares about. And you are totally avoiding issues people do care about. Sound like anybody you know? Sounds to me like Microsoft in the '00s. And look at how it worked out for them.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_tr iviality [wikipedia.org]
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Bill, Shooter Of Bul on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:36AM
Exactly this. I can't get any Mozilla dev to see the light. I don't know what will become of them. The best response I got to the question about Firefox OS, was $$$. Mozilla wants another revenue stream besides google. They think firefox os will do that....
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tierack on Friday March 21 2014, @03:20PM
I've been using Australis for a couple of months now and there are two things I really like about it:
Admittedly, I don't do much customization of the UI, but that's because I don't really use the chrome UI. It's all keyboard and context menus for me. I'm happy to see everything that's not the page I'm looking at get smaller.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @05:24PM
Bullshit. Myth busted. [imgur.com] Without a menu bar, it takes up as many pixels as the old interface and shows less information; the rounded tabs cuts off the page title "Soylent news is pe..." where with the old square tabs the whole title fits. WITH the menu bar it gets even worse, the rounded tab still cuts off titles and now takes up more precious vertical pixels.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tierack on Friday March 21 2014, @06:52PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 22 2014, @12:04AM
How you tried maximizing the window? It *does* reduce the vertical space used. Myth confirmed.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ashbory on Friday March 21 2014, @05:22PM
The only things that keep me using Firefox are the extensions and the ability to customize the interface.
I am currently using "Classic Theme Restorer" and "Status-4-Evar" to keep the UI useful.
The "new customize" function does not allow you to customize any of these things which annoy the heck out of me:
- No status bar
- no stop button.
- Back and forward buttons attached to address box.
- Forward button is hidden in new tabs.
- Refresh button is stuck at right side of address box which itself fills width of address bar, moving the refresh button as far as possible from the other navigation buttons.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @06:14PM
I use Pale Moon, a fork from Mozilla/Firefox that keeps a simple, stable UI. Thus far the project maintainer has rolled bug fixes from Mozilla in at a decent pace. All the Firefox plug-ins I use work with it fine.
If (when?) that project is no longer sufficient I'm just going to throw up my hands and use IE11. I just don't care anymore about damn browsers. Although that might be because Usenet is starting to seem like a good idea again...
(Score: 5, Informative) by zafiro17 on Friday March 21 2014, @08:45PM
You're joking of course, but a huge number of FuckBeta-ers wound up on Usenet at comp.misc and it's pretty good. I still visit this site and I like Pipedot.com quite a bit. And I still visit that other site once in a while.
But give Usenet a try and you'll be surprised. There are some decent newsreaders for iOS and Android too, and it's very bandwidth efficient.
comp.misc for the win.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Friday March 21 2014, @07:05PM
The summary provides the Windows 8 mock up: https://people.mozilla.org/~shorlander/mockups-int eractive/australis-interactive-mockups/windows8.ht ml [mozilla.org]t eractive/australis-interactive-mockups/windows7.ht ml [mozilla.org]t eractive/australis-interactive-mockups/osx.html [mozilla.org]
While most of us are either Windows 7: https://people.mozilla.org/~shorlander/mockups-in
osX: https://people.mozilla.org/~shorlander/mockups-in
or Linux users : ???
compiling...
(Score: 3, Informative) by kbahey on Friday March 21 2014, @11:50PM
Tired of the pace of upgrades that Mozilla (and Ubuntu) forces on you?
Well then, install the Firefox ESR on Linux [baheyeldin.com], and stay for a year without changes ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @11:58PM
I CAN NO LONG
i can no long i can no long
(Score: 1) by DNied on Saturday March 22 2014, @01:46PM
The preview page crashes Firefox ESR 17.0.11, at least here.
Anyway. For me, the only thing FF's GUI must do is stay hidden and let me use Pentadactyl.
(Score: 1) by bart9h on Monday March 24 2014, @01:36PM
as long as Vimperator still works.