Big Theme change again in Firefox 4?

[WildcatRay]

I suspect the desire to increase vertical screen real estate is being driven more by the proliferation of "net books" and other mobile devices w/ small screens than something Office 2007 has...but that's just my $0.02.

Ray

My point about Office 2007 was that they blew it.

Good. Micro$oft has never been a leader/trailblazer, have they?

[patrickjdempsey]

Good. Micro$oft has never been a leader/trailblazer, have they?

Hahaha, yeah Windows 7 is filled with exciting "new" features that have been available to either Mac or Linux users for years now. But the most "refreshing" idea they have? Letting feedback from users help determine the future feature set... that's a pretty Open Source attitude, even if the methodology wasn't community driven at least there is SOME attempt to build an operating system people will actually want to use.

[WattsvilleBlues]

How about trying to keep the thread on topic people?

[ehume]

Then I will reiterate my main point: we are faced with a Firefox chrome that will ruthlessly shrink the area it uses at the top of the browser. There are good reasons for this.

Firefox needs to accommodate toolbars on the right or left margin. Paint Shop Pro 7 has done this for years, and the PSP UI was quite effective. Inkscape uses a toolbar in the left margin.

Firefox can be adapted to vertical toolbars: the TotalToolbar extension adds the vertical capacity. I build support for vertical toolbars into all of my themes. Doable. No sweat. Should be done.

[Caleb531]

I think the tabs on top idea is a bad design for the end user. It may shrink toolbar size, but not much, since room is still needed for the window title bar. Tabs on top would make the tabs farther away from the user, and therefore will take longer to get to (unless you know the keyboard shortcuts, but not everyone does).

[WattsvilleBlues]

Does anyone have any idea when the new theme will land in the nightly builds?

[WildcatRay]

I would say not before Fx 3.6 is finally rolled out which is still a ways out.

[WildcatRay]

Just saw this blog on the potential theme changes: Windows Theme/UI Update

[patrickjdempsey]

Steven's site appears to be down today.

[WildcatRay]

Steven's site appears to be down today.

It was available earlier this morning. Maybe the crush overwhelmed it.

[shorlander]

Yeah, I am trying to bring it back up. I need to prepare better for load in the future I think.

[DonGato]

Stephen, I like the approaches and justifications from that page. It seems our bickering was useful after all.
If you would keep the title bar I would also keep the page name there, maybe centered. It's useful information.

[patrickjdempsey]

In general I think these new sketches look much better than the previous iteration. The new menu button is a positive change to me... the orange version attached to the top with the logo especially. I think it unifies well with the concept of the "Start" button, you could even take a page from Windows UI and make the logo a little larger than the button so it overlaps the edge a little. In the block of App button variations, the bottom left one really looks like a winner to me. The sunken urlbar is also a welcome revision, as are the shinier, less Chrome-like buttons. Loosing the confusingly named "Page" button I think is very good.

[WattsvilleBlues]

I take it this means there will be no theme update at all with 3.7?

[WildcatRay]

Opera 10.5 (theme) changes have been mentioned here.