smsmith wrote:I brought it up because of your "is he building a theme or a browser?" type comment. It's one of the things that makes Pale Moon Pale Moon.
It's an interesting question.
I can see, and indeed would encourage, the need for faster, lighter 3rd party builds of Firefox and there is a lot of validity in doing so. In other words, those are very worthwhile projects.
What I have trouble with is the concept that some vast amount of work, to the point of a complete fork, needs to happen just to make Australis look and feel like, say, Firefox 24.
For example -
viewtopic.php?p=13492625#p13492625Do people realise that there is
nothing on that 'Locked' and 'Removed' list that cannot be reverted with
just one theme and one extension? Nothing on that 'Added' list that cannot be hidden by the same?
This is one of those chicken and the egg type things. People have assumed that because CTR is really complicated, that this whole stuff is really complicated, but CTR is only really complicated because it offers so many options to the user and by its general approach. That is not a criticism, but an objective viewpoint.
So, if the sole object was just to make Australis look and feel like FF24 how would it be done? Well, there are already themes that can do most of it (add addons bar, flex spaces, spaces, move urlbar around, change the entire look, etc) and people should know by my userChrome.css stuff how easy it is to re-introduce things like icons+text and text only. The thing that people fret about - the tabs, is just not a problem, those tabs can be moved anywhere and are easy to style to look like anything you want.
But what of easily moving Forward, Back, Stop and Reload around? Err, it was done ages back -
viewtopic.php?p=13545977#p13545977 and not just for default, but
any theme.
Look at the 2 pictures there - not only are Forward and Back flying all over the place, but have been separated again. No extension option stuff, just go into Customise and move them around, as of old. It just needed the concept of there being more than one way to do things to make that possible.
I suppose really what I'm saying about PM type stuff is this -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tolb5BM6HEgSo Frank, if you can make Australis look and feel exactly like Firefox 24 will you do so? - What? For the 'glory', the non-existent donations? Do I really look that daft? There's a lot of things I can do, that doesn't mean I have to do them. Plus, glance at my UA string sometime.
No, the point I'm making is this - take Australis or one of the genuinely faster, lighter 3rd Party Builds of it and add 1 theme and 1 extension to it and you can have what looks and feels like Firefox 24 again. No GUID change, XP back, no addons changes, etc.
To regular users this stuff looks, I realise, really, really complicated, but sometimes looks can be deceiving -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWyCCJ6B2WE
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
.