Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

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Drumbrake
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Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by Drumbrake »

I see that Australis discussion has been kinda passionate lately,however I've been trying the latest Linux builds and-unless they're more buggy/unfinished than the windows counterparts-I'm really baffled by what I'm seeing:I have no issues whatsoever with curved tabs,show the tab bar or similar matters,but the lack of customization is startling,the addon bar is actually fake in that no elements can be placed in it,toolbar icons can only go in the righmost part of the navigation toolbar and furthermore cannot be placed in the tabstrip as before...

...adding to all of the above that Panorama doesn't work either,and full themes (as discussed already) aren't usable anymore,I can only hope that Australis gets improved drastically before the final release and we get back the level of customization we've all grown familiar with.

I know they're trying to compete with other big players on platforms other than the traditional desktop,and they may see things we don't consider over here,but do they also look at the general feedback ?

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lithopsian
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by lithopsian »

Only on Linux, or Windows too?
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ferongr
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by ferongr »

This graph proves nothing. The source is inherently biased. Content users rarely use support links/feedback mechanisms.
What Falken giveth, the tōge taketh away.
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faulty_fox
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by faulty_fox »

It's the same on windows, linux and mac. UX doesn't have a big userbase so i hope to see a bigger reaction to these changes when it hits nightly.
I understand that they want to simplify it a bit, but they are removing most of the options and killing all the themes in the process.
They are even removing small icons mode.
TheVisitor
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by TheVisitor »

Someone should force the UX team to merge into m-c to really get a feel for the flood of bugs, and distaste for the changes before they waste anymore time/effort and declare to themselves and Mozilla that this is a non-starter and WONTFIX the entire mess.
LynCardinelli
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by LynCardinelli »

That graph is somewhat misleading. It would never occur to me to give feedback when something is working how I want it to. On the other hand, if something is broken or working in a way that I dont like...
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dkgo
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by dkgo »

A lean compromise is better than a fat lawsuit.
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Frank Lion
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by Frank Lion »

Drumbrake wrote:I'm really baffled by what I'm seeing:I have no issues whatsoever with curved tabs,show the tab bar or similar matters,but the lack of customization is startling,the addon bar is actually fake in that no elements can be placed in it,toolbar icons can only go in the righmost part of the navigation toolbar and furthermore cannot be placed in the tabstrip as before...

...adding to all of the above that Panorama doesn't work either,and full themes (as discussed already) aren't usable anymore,

This is a reasonable summary of the problem, as I see it. Apart from the very last part, which I'll expand on in a while.

No one is going to throw their toys out of the pram over the curved tabs, etc. that's just a matter of preference and you either use them or don't use them by changing them.

No, the real problem here is the lack of customisation proposed by locking down an awful lot of the UI. Make no mistake, if this change ever hits release, it will affect almost every single user of Firefox, not just geeks, theme and extension users. Even Grannie, whose sole venture into 'customising' in over 8 years is to use the default theme with the searchbar over to the left...is going to be moaning about this.

It will be your family and friends who will be affected and when they ask you what you did to stop this change before release, you had better have a better answer ready than 'Hey, I did my part, I posted a clapping smilie in the Builds forum.'

As to what you do about it, no idea, state your views here, I suppose. We've all seen and read Bugzilla and the 'Google Group discussions'. I've read users using a confrontational approach, a reasonable and argued approach and a toothless tiger greasing and crawling so far up the dev's backsides that you wonder if he will ever see daylight again and the sum total is, err, not much. At least here, you can say what you feel about things, however much some clown tries to divert things and throw red herrings around.

Why this UI lockdown? I confess I have no idea, usually I can see and understand all points of view on anything (even if I pretend not to ;)) but this one really does make no sense.

Why take one of the very few advantages you have over other browsers, especially Chrome, and deliberately throw it away and go backwards? Truly default users would be unaffected either way and you are really going to piss off everyone else who uses Firefox. As I said, it makes zero sense.

I've heard various conspiracy theories as to why, but by definition that is clandestine type stuff and impossible to prove either way. I reckon, put those out of your head and just deal with what's in front of you.

Anyway, onto the subject of themes -

and full themes (as discussed already) aren't usable anymore


...which I tried to explain here - viewtopic.php?p=12762695#p12762695 but there still seems to be some confusion on this, so I'll put it another way.

Take a theme, let's say Silvermel. Now, say I was to bring out an identical theme (SilvermelUX?) but I had already chosen where the main toolbar buttons would be, where the searchbar was, where you could place other buttons and on which toolbars or not at all and then I locked the entire thing down so it had to stay like that. Questions - How many of you would install SilvermelUX in preference to Silvermel and why would you? What added 'user experience' would you gain from from using SilvermelUX?

Does that make it clearer? Themes would still exist if this proposed UI lockdown ever hit release, but not in the way you know them. Does that make them unusable, I know most theme writers would think so, but maybe some of you have different ideas.

As for update news on all this, relating to themes - #1. The Customise button can easily be coded by users to be there, but not show (i.e. will not then break entire UI.) #2. The Stop and Reload buttons can be coded to show outside of the urlbar (but are atm locked to the right hand side of it) #3. Retro-fitting the lockdown can be done, not easily, and would need an extension (unless someone like PD came up with the most amazing .xml binding ever done within a theme)
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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lithopsian
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by lithopsian »

Why is simple. Read the blogs and you will see that (the UX team at least) is deliberately aiming for "the 98%" as they see it, and sod the rest. If that just meant taking features used by 2% of people off the options dialog, maybe even off the main context menus, but leaving them in about:config then I would be perfectly happy. Just stripping every customisable feature out completely leaves very little reason not to switch to Chrome, however much I mistrust Google.
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JayhawksRock
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by JayhawksRock »

lithopsian wrote:Just stripping every customisable feature out completely leaves very little reason not to switch to Chrome, however much I mistrust Google.

And of course Chrome is completely customizable... :shock:
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mayankleoboy1
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by mayankleoboy1 »

They are removing the "small icons" mode ?
I always use the small icons, to save vertical space on a 16:9 notebook.
Srap
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by Srap »

One would expect to see a post from a participating UX developer to confirm or deny the theories flying in this shaftstorm. I do not know why it isn't happening.
Sorry for my bad English. Even if there wasn't a mistake.
TheVisitor
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by TheVisitor »

Srap wrote:One would expect to see a post from a participating UX developer to confirm or deny the theories flying in this shaftstorm. I do not know why it isn't happening.


Well sadly, over the years many of the dev's have developed a disdain for us Nightly testers and generally consider us a bunch of whiners and cry-babies. Some will peek into the forums from time-to-time and some even participate, but generally they shy away from here.
SaphirJD
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by SaphirJD »

Sell, since there is a kind of "We know it best anyway, no reason to worry" attitude going on for the Firefox Devs Section, perhaps they just see no reason for explaining things because.. "They know best anyway" - Would not make me wonder the tiniest bit!
speciesx
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Re: Australis customization (or lack of thereof)

Post by speciesx »

mayankleoboy1 wrote:They are removing the "small icons" mode ?
I always use the small icons, to save vertical space on a 16:9 notebook.

yeap https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=736179
sry for my bad english.

My real user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv: current nightly) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/current nightly
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