воскресенье, 14 октября 2012 г., 7:40:31 UTC+4 пользователь Brandon Cheng написал:
> I really feel like many people that come to this conclusion don't completely understand the reasons for changes such as these. I haven't seen any change or reasoning on Bugzilla that is "because other browsers do the same".
What would be your opinion on the reasons behind this particular change? Seriously, besides a clear wish to drop the functionality that some developers already consider obsolete, is there anything that makes removing tabs on bottom reasonable?
> > And then Chrome appeared. Sleek, minimalistic, inherently fast and shamelessly advertised. You started seeing offers to install Chrome on the Google's search page. It was really hard to avoid or miss. So the people started migrating on it. Including those who were pissed by the slobby form that FF has turned into.
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> > I guess that's when the Mozilla guys started to panic. It became obvious that Chrome was taking their share of the market as well.
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> Actually, no. There were many people that did not switch to Chrome because of the fact that its interface was new and alien. It did not really gain market share until this advertising started.
Well, you see, it's always a game of choosing the lesser evil. FF is what you're used to, but it makes you unhappy with its performance (well, for example. some other people might be unhappy with something else just as well). Chrome is all so new and alien, but it seems to be doing some technical things better. And its JS engine was better than FF's when Chrome was released.
It doesn't matter when exactly the Chrome rise to power began. What matters is that Chrome was taking the Firefox's share too. Even if it was after the advertizing campaign. Google is good at that, i can give them that.
> > But the interface changes were the biggest mistake. First it was that ugly gray default theme of FF4 that only colorblind people could call appealing, killing the status bar and the tabs on top which never made much sense to me. So i had to stick to the 3.6 branch until the awesome guys like Jeremy Morton and the developers of nice add-ons like Status-4-Evar made it possible to actually enjoy using the newer versions.
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> "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". I thought the Firefox 4 mockups were beautiful when I first saw them. ->
https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/1/17/Firefox-4-Mockup-i06-%28Win7%29-%28Aero%29-%28TabsTop%29.png
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> I'll admit the end result didn't come out perfectly like mockups, but it was indeed an improvement in my opinion. I remember being largely against Tabs on Top until using it on the Firefox 4 betas for a week.
Well, that mockup you showed us isn't that bad. But this picture just doesn't represent the way i use my browser. No Aero glass for me, the window about three times this size, bookmark toolbar and no fancy wallpaper on a background. This way, even with this mockup having been implemented as a FF real face, it wouldn't be perfect for me.
You see, this is not a "the new design must burn in hell, it sucks" debate. I can totally understand people who actually like it. But it's a debate about being able to keep having what you're used to having.
People can be divided into two groups. The first one is the "progressive guys". They embrace ANY changes and think that no change equals to stagnation and stagnation is bad. Such people would definitely consider the UX change that FF4 has brought a good thing.
The second group can be called the "conservative guys", and i'm gonna advocate for them now =). We just have too much unwanted change around us already, and we would prefer to at least keep the things we value the most the way we are used to see them. For such people, no change is required until you either have something extra super terrific which is absolutely a must have but demands some changes so it can be developed and integrated, or some absolutely obvious flaw is found in the current implementation which nobody, and i mean nobody, is gonna argue about and there is an obviously good way to fix this flaw, the way that, again, nobody would be going to argue about as well.
The way i see it, FF4 neither included something amazingly and terrifically useful that required its interface changes nor fixed some insanely obvious flaws that, for the reasons nobody could fathom, were presented in Firefox before. It was just a change.
Well, maybe the guys who invented that change thought that they were adapting Firefox for use in the environments other than the classic desktop/notebook ones. Maybe they thought that the new style is better suited for the netbooks with their smaller screens (it's funny that a few years have passed and netbooks are already a dying breed, Asus deciding to stop producing their EeePc line in favor of the new trend - the tablet devices).
Anyway, there was not so much to fear back then, because i could still revert to the classic look, and nobody was telling me that it would one day be treated as something old and not worth supporting. Otherwise, i'd start protesting right away, and the situation we're now in might never happen in the first place.
But anyway, at that point it seemed that Firefox just gave its users another option to choose from. And more options is always better than less options, so i was happy, with help of Jez and other guys who let me have my options back in full.
> Again, Mozilla hasn't forced you to use Tabs on Top. If you believe so, how have they done that? You're still entitled to change the browser as you wish.
It hasn't YET. You see, we're being said that it's only a matter of time before the move to the tabs on top style is done completely, and then i will be literally forced into it.
I believe that the reason why a lot of other people and i have gathered here is to make sure this time never comes. Not rather later than sooner, but in fact never. We are trying to influence the situation until not all is lost. And obviously it will be so in some close time in the future if we just sit still and do nothing being happy that we're still not deprived of this functionality YET.
> > If you (the people behind that idea i mean) really think that the tabs on bottom are really your main obstacle on the way back to the world domination, please think again, because you're missing something. I'm typing this message in the answer form of the Google Groups webpage opened with FF 15.0.1, and i can clearly see the text being entered with lags sometimes. Not to mention the lags i experienced when pressing the "Answer" button on this page to open the answer form. And this is happening on a Core 2 Duo powered laptop which isn't busy with any significant jobs right now.
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> I'm typing this on a 7 year old machine with 2.0 GHz and 2GB of RAM. Firefox is running smooth as it always has for me. I'm going to go ahead and say that something is causing your install to not run as great as it can.
Well, then you're a lucky guy. Or maybe you're not constrained with the add-ons that i have 17 of. Or maybe it's the non-default theme that is doing it for me.
Anyway, i'm not the one to blame. The current FF profile was built from scratch just a year ago, along with a clean OS install. I only imported the bookmarks from my older profile, but it should not affect the way the text is being typed. Nor should my add-ons, which affect the different aspects of the browser usage.
I've always followed the installation instructions, i don't have my machine swarming with viruses or spyware, so if there's anything wrong with my FF performance, i think it has to do with the browser itself.
Or maybe you're using FF on Linux or MacOS, and my Windows Vista installation is inherently flawed. But then again, it's not a non-Chrome UI issue.
> > You see, the non-Chrome UI isn't what makes the people run from FF to Chrome. It's the slowness of your product. FF is nowhere near Chrome when it comes to the JS processing speed, memory management and security. It's their turf now, and i doubt that you guys have enough manpower to challenge Google on that.
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> Actually, it is. Since Firefox 7, it has been the most memory efficient browser, topping Chrome. Most users that claim Chrome has better memory are only counting one of its tabs, due to Chrome having a process for each tab (resulting in multiple chrome.exe)
Memory management isn't only about allocating memory. It's also about freeing it in time. I am too used to have a single-window single-tab Firefox instance eat more than 1Gb of memory because i already closed the windows/tabs with the heavy stuff but FF just doesn't wanna clean up after itself.
With Chrome, the cleaning up is done by the OS. And while i agree that Chrome eats maybe even more memory cumulatively compared to FF (if we compare the same sets of windows/tabs), at least i could close the tabs or windows i don't want anymore and see the result right away.
It's even more crucial if you're using more memory than you physically have. When the swap usage overhead starts to bug me with Chrome, i close the unwanted tabs or quickly read through them and then close - so i'm back to the physical memory only. With FF, only an application restart might help.
It's not the benchmarks that have meaning in my everyday life. It's the websites i use. If the Gmail window scrolls with lags for me, or my favorite social network's website based on the JS navigation works slow as hell, i can't just tell myself "but the benchmarks said that FF does it just as fast, i must be hallucinating". It's especially noticeable if i use the "Save energy" mode on my laptop: FF becomes insanely slow, while Chrome makes due more or less.
It of course can be related to something having gone wrong in my installation. But i'm not an FF insides guru, i'm just a user who knows some tricks but has never coded a single JS script in my life. And i don't wanna sit around and profile my FF installation just to find out the bastard who slows me down. I want it to work okay for me out of the box.
Hm, just to be more objective: i launched Firefox on a fresh profile. No add-ons, no themes, no other burdens. Logged into my Gmail account and tried to scroll the inbox. Lags are there. Definitely, there's something wrong. Because Chrome, with all its add-ons, scrolls around like there' no tomorrow.
> Maybe it's just me, but I still see a huge visual difference between Firefox and Chrome. And like you said before, functionality also matters, not just appearance and speed.
Well, like i also said above, it hasn't gone YET. But that visual difference is getting less and less. I just don't wanna wake up one day and see no visual difference between them at all.
> Wait. Every change has had user studies (collected from betas) and/or large evidence to back them up. The "don't fix what ain't broken" logic doesn't apply here when there's stuff to improve.
Like Jeremy said already, why is removing tabs on bottom considered an improvement? What is there to improve other than the internal development stuff?
Also, how many people of the "conservative" kind are actively using the betas? If they are happy with what they have and just don't need any unwanted changes, why would they break their habits and use the beta versions which are altered all the time?
Such people as me only see something only when it's released. And when it's released, it's usually too late to change something.
Luckily, Jeremy Morton made us realize what's going on before it's too late. He just decided not to update his theme, so when FF16 was released, i saw the change right away. My tabs are still there, but my colors are already gone. But at least it's not too late to turn everything back, that's why we're all here - because we all believe that our voices have some importance.
> That's a great point, but you're missing the part where these people (I included) are mostly not involved with Mozilla and thus, their decision. Mozilla hasn't forced Tabs on Top on anyone. The option to switch this is still there, so the "developers decide keep deciding what's good for users" and "Mozilla is preventing user choice" claims are invalid.
The option to switch is actually not there anymore. It's already hidden under the hood, so it's being clearly shown to the users that this solution is no longer endorsed.
The claims you're calling invalid may be so for now. But when Mozilla really leaves us no choice it will simply be too late to complain. So we're all complaining while it makes sense. Because we see that what's still invalid for today may become a sad truth very soon, unless we turn that around.
> > PPS: To those whose position is "whatever makes development easier is THE right thing to do". Each time i download Firefox, its website tells me that i'm getting something "different by design", a "browser that's got your back". Ever wondered what this means? For me, it means that Firefox is being made with respect to its users, and with taking their opinion into consideration.
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> > You call us the vocal minority whose voice can be ignored because we're just a drop in the bucket of the Firefox user community and the rest doesn't seem to give a damn. But you see, right now the people who you're trying to ignore are mostly the most devoted FF users, with years of FF experience behind their backs. They were with you from the beginning, they were a part of that Firefox miracle that once showed the world that there can be an alternative to Internet Explorer. Well, maybe we really are a drop in the bucket, but does it seem that the rest is gonna be so passionate and determined in defending your decision? Or maybe they just don't give a damn as well and use whatever there is to use.
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> But the Mozilla community doesn't call these users the vocal minority they can ignore. This thread is proof of that. Developers that are actually responding is proof of that.
Like i said, that passage was directed towards the people whom i saw above saying stuff like i mentioned. I never said they were the Mozilla guys. And i really hope that no Mozilla guy would ever say anything like that.
Unfortunately, from what i've read in the Bugzilla discussion of the related "bug", some developers really think of tabs on bottom as of some nuisance that has to die. For them, it's only a matter of time. But like Jemery said, if one's gonna remove this feature anyway, let them do that now instead of prolonging the life of what's deemed to vanish. At least this way people would not be having any false hopes and would have time to prepare their migration to other products (be it Chrome or Opera or SeaMonkey or whatever) until their Firefox is not completely ruined.