Re: Location bar proposal
John Bird
John Bird
>> 6 - [My favourite] Or if you want to be radical and very swish - you
>> could track where the mouse is, and once it is in the body of the page
>> the toolbars could either one by one smoothly disappear or fade out, say
leaving
>> finally only the Location bar. All these could re-appear smoothly when
the
>> mouse comes back towards that top part of the screen. Why not some
>> transparency effects? As far as I understand it is available on XP,
>> Vista, Mac and most linux, so you could well use tansparency if it is
>> there. I have written windows programs that show transparency on XP
>> and just ignore it on earlier versions such as Win 98 etc...having
>> screens that fade in and out.
>Aargh :-(
Well you could at least imagine it......Its the sort of thing Apple might
do, and many DVD disk players, eg the Intervideo DVD player have a control
console that disappears automatically a while after the mouse is not moved,
and re-appears when the mouse is moved.....its very efficient.
A browser, like a DVD player to a degree is a front end to the content and
in some ways the more it has a refined simple interface and steps out of the
way the better!
Re the status bar, yes it is crucial while a page loads, but after that what
use is it?. Notice that Opera does fine without one - it puts temporary
displays elsewhere on the screen.
Another example of a program that alters what is on the screen according to
what is happening is Skype.
Although I prefer Firefox as it has lots of quick keyboard shortcuts, I
would say you have to think more radically than you are so far - static
areas on the page that only have use some of the time could well be hidden -
I am sure the programmers could do it if the imagination was there....in
general appearance Firefox is much more a plain work-day browser in
appearance, considerably less flash than either IE7 or Opera, and way more
plain than other software like DVD and music players. The functionality is
tops, but Firefox does not look really that different from IE4 or IE5 in how
overall it uses the screen and general appearance - I mean in that Menus,
toolbars, buttons, status bar, all are static and fixed on the screen. The
colours and themes in other browsers are nicer, more refined: eg the
highlighted tabs in Opera, or the 2 colour ones in IE7.
There are so many similar ideas I could come up with - another would be
having the current tab a bit taller and with a slightly larger font/or
bolder. It's a small issue, but when I routinely have 50 tabs open it is a
BIG issue finding the current one. Having groups of related tabs with the
same colour.....
I also really liked my menu search idea too for bookmarks and menus - as
these get enormous there has to be a very different way to find any bookmark
with a simple search, like Spotlight or Vista menu search...(but just within
the Firefox menus and bookmarks). A lot of cool functionality is already
there e.g. with the many different ways to search a page (whoever designed
the search options obviously grew up with vi :) - good on ya!). Just extend
the same real cool functionality.
I think of the areas I waste a lot of my time doing - finding bookmarks in a
huge list, finding the last tabs I was looking at in the big list of 50
tabs, bookmarking a site and wondering if its already in there (you cannot
tell what is in a folder already when you are adding a new bookmark - now
that's a nuisance!). One of the reason I leave a pile of tabs open is that
there is no easy way to "minimise" or "hide" a group of tabs that I may want
to come back to later in the day.....etc! Hierarchical tabs (like Windows
explorer....hmmm there's an idea)....
How about the drop down list of open tabs at the right end of the tab-bar
has columns for date and time last looked at, so you can sort this list by
date and time (as in explorer) - a convenient way to find your last active
tabs.....now that is not hard to do and would be so cool! :)
My 2 cents worth.
Tony Mechelynck
After that I have found a use for it, with status displays from a number of
extensions.
>
> Another example of a program that alters what is on the screen according to
> what is happening is Skype.
>
> Although I prefer Firefox as it has lots of quick keyboard shortcuts, I
> would say you have to think more radically than you are so far - static
> areas on the page that only have use some of the time could well be hidden -
> I am sure the programmers could do it if the imagination was there....in
> general appearance Firefox is much more a plain work-day browser in
> appearance, considerably less flash than either IE7 or Opera, and way more
> plain than other software like DVD and music players. The functionality is
> tops, but Firefox does not look really that different from IE4 or IE5 in how
> overall it uses the screen and general appearance - I mean in that Menus,
> toolbars, buttons, status bar, all are static and fixed on the screen. The
> colours and themes in other browsers are nicer, more refined: eg the
> highlighted tabs in Opera, or the 2 colour ones in IE7.
Firefox is quite flashy enough for me, thank you. Any more, or making Toy
Factory the default theme, and I'll seriously consider leaving it altogether
in favour of SeaMonkey. However the future switch of SeaMonkey to a
Firefox/Thunderbird-like toolkit fills me with some trepidation as it would
mean not only a "sensible" add-ons manager (which is good) but maybe also
leaving the nice "subdued" look of the Sm Preferences UI for a "flashy" one
like Fx/Tb's. Ah, well, I guess I can live with that if I have to.
>
> There are so many similar ideas I could come up with - another would be
> having the current tab a bit taller and with a slightly larger font/or
> bolder. It's a small issue, but when I routinely have 50 tabs open it is a
> BIG issue finding the current one. Having groups of related tabs with the
> same colour.....
Making the current tab taller and wider wastes real estate, which is a serious
thing for me, as I often have upwards of 100 tabs open. I make the current one
a different colour by means of a simple rule in userChrome.css. You could
still make it higher and bolded in current versions of Firefox by similar means.
>
> I also really liked my menu search idea too for bookmarks and menus - as
> these get enormous there has to be a very different way to find any bookmark
> with a simple search, like Spotlight or Vista menu search...(but just within
> the Firefox menus and bookmarks). A lot of cool functionality is already
> there e.g. with the many different ways to search a page (whoever designed
> the search options obviously grew up with vi :) - good on ya!). Just extend
> the same real cool functionality.
Bookmarks can be organised tree-wise; then finding the one I want isn't difficult.
>
> I think of the areas I waste a lot of my time doing - finding bookmarks in a
> huge list, finding the last tabs I was looking at in the big list of 50
> tabs, bookmarking a site and wondering if its already in there (you cannot
> tell what is in a folder already when you are adding a new bookmark - now
> that's a nuisance!). One of the reason I leave a pile of tabs open is that
> there is no easy way to "minimise" or "hide" a group of tabs that I may want
> to come back to later in the day.....etc! Hierarchical tabs (like Windows
> explorer....hmmm there's an idea)....
>
> How about the drop down list of open tabs at the right end of the tab-bar
> has columns for date and time last looked at, so you can sort this list by
> date and time (as in explorer) - a convenient way to find your last active
> tabs.....now that is not hard to do and would be so cool! :)
>
> My 2 cents worth.
>
>
I added code in my userChrome.css to kill that drop-down list: tab bar
real-estate is at a premium with me. IMHO the "rightful" place of that
drop-down is on the menubar -- as with the Tabs Menu extension; and just the
tab name already makes the list quite wide enough, thank you. Anyway, I want
the list in the same order as the tabs themselves.
Yeah, and of course, just /my/ 0,02€ worth.
BTW I think we're drifting off-topic for the thread: should we start a new one?
Best regards,
Tony.
--
We've sent a man to the moon, and that's 29,000 miles away. The center
of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away. You could drive that in a week,
but for some reason nobody's ever done it.
-- Andy Rooney
Robert Kaiser
> However the future switch of
> SeaMonkey to a Firefox/Thunderbird-like toolkit fills me with some
> trepidation as it would mean not only a "sensible" add-ons manager
> (which is good) but maybe also leaving the nice "subdued" look of the Sm
> Preferences UI for a "flashy" one like Fx/Tb's.
Nah, the prefs dialog of toolkit-based SeaMonkey will be very similar to
what current SeaMonkey has - and probably even be able to include
extensions' pref panes there in some way, we'll see about that once we
have it running (there are patches already in circulation, so it's
possible in principle) - anyways, that's a bit off-topic on a Firefox
group ;-)
Robert Kaiser
Tony Mechelynck
Yes, discussing SeaMonkey (other than for comparison) is OT in a Fx group so
let's set followups.
Robert, that's good news (to me) because I really like the "subdued" look of
the Sm UI as opposed to the "flashy" look of the Fx/Tb UI. Of course, tastes vary.
IIUC, the "tree-like" structure of the left pane of the Sm UI should make it
easy to add a submenu for each extension (with prefs for each extension having
a prefs UI -- for others, I guess "Uninstall" and "Enable/Disable" buttons,
and "Name" (linking to home site), "Version" and "Description" texts should
probably be enough, with "Check for Updates" "Install..." "Enable/Disable
compatibility check" buttons and "Get more add-ons" link at the top "Add-Ons"
level). That would be real cool. :-)
Best regards,
Tony.
--
"I'd love to go out with you, but the man on television told me to say
tuned."