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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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Paradise is exactly like where you are right now ... only much, much better.
-- Laurie Anderson
(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.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(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?"