mattatobin wrote:When did the general audience of end users dictate what we as power users need or want?
I have a dream. Once people are off on their smart phones and consumer devices and no longer have proper PCs in their house. The market for PCs will be a niche market voiced by us. Let them have their toys. There will always be a need for advanced and complex systems with adaptability for everyone and the traditional computing scheme will reach a balance where true evolution will take hold again. It won't be Mozilla or Microsoft leading these. It will be us.
If you have a tablet or ipad as a replacement for your desktop or laptop. You never really needed a desktop or laptop. We do and as the consumerist masses are not on the PC space anymore we can get back to our business as we used to before the computer revolution with a desktop in every house hold. It is possible that the specialists will have a place again that they deserve. Most of the support calls will go to customer support of the device, not us.
I like this guy. I like him very much. Please crown him king and give him authority, we might get a change for the better at last.
I too am getting pretty annoyed with how powerusers nowadays are being told to shut up and suffer as the market adapts to the dumb needs of the techtards who don't know the slightest thing about any of the stuff they use.
I still can't fathom some of the decisions Mozilla has been making, like removing the add-on bar and just telling people to cram it all into the nav bar. My own layout right now is this:
(window reduced in size so the screenshot fits, normally 1920x1080)
Page-related items above the page, tabs just above that to act as the containers, global stuff higher up again. Add-on stuff to the right, vanilla interface to the left. Status things like loading progress, network status, IP address and download progress in the good old status bar. An efficient, organized UI that wastes little space.
It comes across as arrogant to me that Mozilla wants to push their own UI, regardless of standards and user wishes. There are design standards that exist for a reason and provide us with comfort by giving us consistency. In all my programs, I know exactly where to find every option and button: in the appropriate section of the menu bar at the top left. My programs mostly use the native UI elements and window frames (oooooh, how I hate custom window decoration...), so buttons and everything else always look familiar and behave well with modifications.
The only real motivation behind Australis seems to be to please the masses of morons who only care for how good it looks (which is also a pretty debatable thing), as it goes with just about anything nowadays. Good developers who stick to the real purpose are getting rare nowadays and it's only getting worse: for example, I learned today that Steam - an already awful program - will be getting a music manager :facepalm: "Because it's too difficult for our users to play music while gaming". Nonsense! Get a REAL player like Foobar and set up some good hotkeys or an auto-playlist that's generated from a query on tags, you fools. Of course, I forgot, people can't even use music tags properly so they can't let their player do anything for them. I've seen
some weird stuff already.
"We're removing the status bar and making things less customizable because users were breaking their UI beyond usage". Maybe you should consider removing those users instead of removing the fine features that they can't seem to understand with their low IQ. "It's now easier to see which tab is active". As if it wasn't already? And in the latest mockup, where everything is glass, it's actually pretty darn hard to see which tab it is. "We're removing things like network status because not enough people use it". So just ignore the minority that knows better? Maybe we should start organizing Poweruser Pride Parades to reclaim our rights as users.
I like my menu bars because they're neatly organized and standardized. I like my status bars because I like to know what the F my programs are doing (you wouldn't believe how many undesirable domains I've been able to find and block by just looking at the network status in Firefox). I like my native UI instead of some fancy, "unique and identity-providing" custom abomination because it's the fastest and most convenient to use.
Moonchild (and developers of all my other favorite, GOOD software like Foobar, QuiteRSS, Trillian, Everything, Find&Run Robot, Kalender, etc) PLEASE keep defying these idiots! Your efforts are much appreciated by your audience of educated users! You guys are the last bastion of the resistance!
In reply to someone else's post: maybe there should be a website for add-on developers like me who despise Australis to upload their Palemoon-only add-ons to?
I'm iffy about squeezing the most out of all code I write and keeping it up to date, but becoming a slave to Australis and everything else Mozilla does goes against my principles. I'm a little worried that Palemoon will indeed get in trouble once Australis hits since most add-ons will stop working in the old interface...
At least packaging a modified SDK would solve the problem for SDK add-ons, but the ones that (foolishly?) use hardcoded stuff will also have to hardcode their compatibility.
Thank you. 
I figured Pale Moon was eventually going to suffer severe collateral damage due to all the unnecessary and unwanted changes brought on by the Firefox developers and also by the Australis UI in their quest to chromatize Firefox. 
