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
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
) 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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