Quote spam.
I doubt this. I don't even remember what that icon looks like. Is it still used on Windows?
IE uses a red "X" on a page icon. Even if you can't tell that the octagon is a symbol for stop in the US, you should be able to figure out what a "X" on a red background represents.
The new skin needs to be aware that not everyone runs the default Windows themes.
It's hard to make a theme that looks good on every Windows theme. This theme will generally look good on anything close to Luna (light colors, medium contrast, etc).
One thing I could never figure out is why there isn't three icon sizes. A small size (like IE small), a medium size (perhaps what is presently the small size in Winstripe), and a large size (same as the present large).
Too much stress on theme authors?
Ditto to others, an "x in a red circle" looks too much like a certain fatal error icon in Windows, even though IE uses this metaphor.
Most users also never see a fatal error icon, especially with the advent of stable, reliable Windows OSes.
A big green triangle does not mean "movement" to me, it means "triangle". And yes, Qute is not immune either - I didn't like its back/forward buttons that much either, but I prefer them over triangles.
With that philosophy, Refresh is arrows chasing each other in a circle, the Stop icon is a "X" on an octagon, and a folder icon is two yellow abnormal polygons with one on top of another and slightly offset to the right.
However, the problem is that "blue" might mean "hate" in another country. (well, I dunno, just an example.)
Colors actually depend on humans' natural instincts. Blue is "soothing", whereas red means "danger". Culture rarely messes with colors, since it has its roots in nature.
I have a 1400x1050 over 15" screen, I can't even SEE the large icons! They should be 30 pixels tall, people.
You have an abnormal screen size. The icon sizes are targeted at 1024x768, 1152x864, and 800x600 users.
1. there seems to be too much padding around most of the nav buttons, large and small
Use the userChrome hack that was posted.
The urlbar's history, with the grey background looks bad, white would be much better. Also, the selected menu items text is the same color as the selection itself, so you can't read it, that looks pretty bad.
You're using a third-party theme. Since a theme can't take account for every possible visual style, some visual styles will look worse than others with Winstripe. Same thing occurred with Qute.
figured the authors would have a blog somewhere, but maybe not
Theme Author:
http://www.kmgerich.com/Ben Goodger:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/ |
http://bengoodger.com/If you're going for "cross-platform consistencey" the best idea would be to go for halfway between Mac's "monochrome minimalism" and XP's "pastel asthetic puffiness".. currently Winstripe is doing neither.
Going halfway is providing a halfway-sucky theme for all platforms. Firefox is going to provide seperate themes for Linux, Windows, and Mac. Winstripe currently does not look like Windows XP to some people because it is still in development (see Kevin's weblog).