A million little questions

[patrickjdempsey]

Doesn't mean much. They've been announcing compatibility with AMO well in advance of when it's actually compatible with the product for the better part of the year. It used to be they tried to sync their compatibility with the product releases but it would sometimes be a mess if you wanted to put up your finished theme slightly before the release. So now they are more liberal with the numbers.

[patrickjdempsey]

mcdavis, have you started playing with Tab Groups yet? It's a doozey.

[mcdavis]

mcdavis, have you started playing with Tab Groups yet? It's a doozey.

No not yet, although I've taken a close look at the code (JS and CSS) a couple times just so I won't be too surprised. (Last time = a couple months ago.) What are you seeing?

[CatThief]

Has anyone else received this post in his/her developer hub? "Add-ons can now be compatible with Firefox 4.0.*."

Just after a similar blog was posted on December 2nd, there was quite the discussion on a final decision regarding icon sizes for various platforms - see Bug 616472, then the blog from December 2nd appeared with an "Update" above the original article. This has all yet to be resolved.

I realize this affects extensions more than custom themes, but I thought you should know that not all UI code is finalized for Firefox 4 just yet.

[patrickjdempsey]

What are you seeing?

A broken and inconsistent POS that has entirely too much custom style code for as simple as it appears. The lack of notes and the confusing naming scheme of the elements make it really difficult to decipher let alone debug. I just don't know... the further 4.0 comes along the less and less I even enjoy using the product... the developers seem to have finally boldly struck out in a direction that is not at all to my liking... which is really too bad because I really think 3.6 is the absolute best web browser I've ever used.

[mcdavis]

A broken and inconsistent POS that has entirely too much custom style code for as simple as it appears. The lack of notes and the confusing naming scheme of the elements make it really difficult to decipher let alone debug. I just don't know... the further 4.0 comes along the less and less I even enjoy using the product... the developers seem to have finally boldly struck out in a direction that is not at all to my liking... which is really too bad because I really think 3.6 is the absolute best web browser I've ever used.

Sounds like theming that will be, ahem, "interesting".

You're talking as an end user, though, and not just as a theme developer, right? Why do you like 3.6 better? Do you think the UI is moving away from "just works"? I think the overall Windows theme is a definite step up from what we had before, at least for people running on Vista, although the Add-ons Manager look and feel isn't there yet in my opinion. (Neither is mine. )

What I came away with from looking at TabCandy/Panorama was that with all the animation effects, we should be able to style colors and backgrounds, and hopefully borders too, but anything having to do with size or shape was at risk. All at risk because they're being set in JS: position, height, width, margin, padding, min-height and min-width, max-height, max-width, and anything else being set in there. Maybe border-radius. This impacts (as you well know) our ability to carry a consistent and unified visual style to this part of the UI, since size, scale and proportion are part of that visual style. Not great. I'm not sure how else the animation could be done. Maybe by setting the size of some interior element in a stack, that's only there so its size can be animated.

That was a couple months back ... is that still how it looks?

Fortunately for themes where Panorama doesn't quite match the rest of the UI, this isn't primary UI, and I think users will spend a lot more time looking at toolbars (and - I keep forgetting about this - actual web content) than they will at TabCandy/Panorama. I really like Panorama as a tool, and it's been great the few times I've needed it, but I only really need it once every week or two. Like when WikiLeaks was front and center in the news and it was hard to get the full story, my browser kept getting clotted up with dozens of tabs about all that, along with all the other stuff that's part of my normal browsing, and it was great to have Panorama to sort all those out.

[patrickjdempsey]

That's what I don't get about Tab Groups... it seems like everything should be pretty straight forward but the style sheet is a maze. It just feels like between this and the addons manager the developers have completely abandoned the whole concept behind XUL and stylesheets, of being able to use one set of rules throughout the UI. And that's frustrating for me as a developer and a user because I abhor things that are *uselessly* complex.

[Philip Chee]

That's what I don't get about Tab Groups... it seems like everything should be pretty straight forward but the style sheet is a maze. It just feels like between this and the addons manager the developers have completely abandoned the whole concept behind XUL and stylesheets, of being able to use one set of rules throughout the UI. And that's frustrating for me as a developer and a user because I abhor things that are *uselessly* complex.

Aside from Aza "can't code his way out of a paperbag" Raskin I don't recognize most of the names on the Tab Candy team. I think most of them are short term contractors who weren't too familiar with the XUL/Stylesheet paradigm. Extension authors looking into overlaying the Tab Group UI appear to be equally frustrated at the gonzo coding.

Phil

[mcdavis]

I'd much rather see declarative XUL than a bunch of semi-object-oriented JS generating XUL. There's a lot to be said for simple and obvious.

[Philip Chee]

I'd much rather see declarative XUL than a bunch of semi-object-oriented JS generating XUL. There's a lot to be said for simple and obvious.

Unfortunately, to this current generation of script kiddies, bling-bling is irresistible.

Phil

[mcdavis]

Yeah, I think you're right. There is that risk. There's competitive pressure from Chrome, and between one developer and another. Once one person starts going hey look at the cool thing I can do -- especially if it's a clever mechanism with lots of moving parts that is actually doing something cool -- then other people want to start doing it too. I'm assuming (hoping) the reviewers will keep it appropriate.

[mcdavis]

Is it possible to write a media query that targets only Vista basic -- not classic, not glass?

Something like: @media all and not (-moz-windows-classic) and not (-moz-windows-compositor) { ... your rules here ... }

MDC says this is allowed but actually it fails when I try it: @media all and (not color) { }

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/CSS/Me ... _operators

[Philip Chee]

I wonder what -moz-windows-generic selects for.

Phil

[mcdavis]

Yeah I wonder. I'm assuming it corresponds to "other", i.e. on XP but not one of the standard named XP themes, from the comment in nsILookAndFeel.h: "unrecognized theme"

[ShareBird]

Is it possible to write a media query that targets only Vista basic -- not classic, not glass?

Something like: @media all and not (-moz-windows-classic) and not (-moz-windows-compositor) { ... your rules here ... }

MDC says this is allowed but actually it fails when I try it: @media all and (not color) { }

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/CSS/Me ... _operators

I don't think this is possible... I was trying in this week something similar without success.
Firstly, I guess the syntax MDC is using is wrong. It should be: @media not all and (color) instead.
This makes the use of "not" very restricted because the not inverts what the query returns, so something like @media not all and (-moz-windows-classic) and (-moz-windows-compositor) will always return true and the rules inside {} will always apply...

You could use instead the -moz-windows-theme feature instead, using something like @media all and (-moz-windows-theme: zune), for example. Available values for it are: aero, luna-blue, luna-olive, luna-silver, royale, generic and zune...