Firefox UX

[Moonchild]

I saw a beautiful mock up of the New Firefox theme coming later this year I'm really holding out for it.

"Firefox UX" is something Pale Moon will never go for. I'd rather call it quits before I go for that look. We already have a Chrome browser - why would Firefox need to mimic it? Use Chrome if you like it so much

[Moonchild]

Making a new topic about this here to keep stuff a little organized.

Firefox UX, the mockup as pointed to, commented:

[Night Wing]

I don't care for the new Firefox UX look which Mozilla will probably implement. Wasted space near the top, no status bar, Options look like they are way over on the far right side of the page and looks and probably feels like Chrome. They are other things too, but I won't mention them.

Some people might be waiting for this new UX for Firefox, but since I'm a non technical person, I won't be one of those people waiting for it.

If Firefox goes to this new UX look, if there are no options to go back to the Firefox UX which I like now, then I will stick to the last UX version of Firefox which doesn't implement this new Chrome copy and then rely on my antivirus and firewall settings for security.

[Ryrynz]

Mostly I just like the tabs, yes UX needs tweaking.. My current theme addresses the issues you've pointed out, something similar could be done with UX.

My current theme.

[megaman]

That was planned for Fx9, shows how much Firefox's team keeps holding back. Either way, since I use "Tabs Always In Titlebar," the tabs being slightly below will not be a problem.

Looking different should not matter much, it is the performance that users keep aiming for.
No difference if Pale Moon stays with the same UI as long as it keeps its speed.

[Rohugh]

My current theme.

Which theme is that?

[dark_moon]

I hate the space to top too.
So i made some css customizations. This is my pale moon:

The arrow in top left is my menu button. No need for a label. Just need a button.
Dark color for inactive tabs. But the color goes back, if i mouse hover.
So the background is transparent (i have a dark windows 7 transparent setting)

[Moonchild]

I personally don't use the "Appmenu"/Pale Moon button on my desktop - I use the "classic" menu bar; one of the main reasons for that is that I prefer to actually use the titlebar for what it's there for: to show the window/page title (and it's just wasted space otherwise because it's left blank unless you have tabs on top and are using maximized/full screen), another being that I prefer to have all my application options at equal "distance" from my work environment, meaning click-nav-click, regardless of what I need. Call me a sucker for consistency

On my netbook it's a different story. There, I use tabs on top + appmenu, with the bookmarks menu off, because of very limited screen resolution where the browser is always maximized (and the tabs are flush against the top of the screen in that case for Fitts' Law principles). The 20 px taken up by the status bar really isn't a problem even on a total screen height of 600, so I'm happy to have that enabled at all times, regardless of which of the two ends of the spectrum I'm using Pale Moon at.

I guess my point being that the UX layout makes no sense in either scenario for me... and i can't really think of a scenario where it actually would be advantageous to have that layout.

[megaman]

I guess my point being that the UX layout makes no sense in either scenario for me... and i can't really think of a scenario where it actually would be advantageous to have that layout.

Once again, it is the inside that counts. How fast it reacts and pages it loads, that should keep us as happy campers.
If we were so deemed to keep new layouts, there is always themes/skins from the Add-on page.

[Night Wing]

Looking at (dark_moon & rohugh)s themes, why is the Options wheel on the far right side of the page right under the Min/Max button?

Since I'm a non technical person, I like.....ALL....of my important buttons on one side "only" and my preference is the left side. The position where the Options wheel is in these two themes reminds me of the ridiculous Home button position in IE 9 which can't be moved to any other place and this was a deal breaker for me. This is why IE 9 isn't on either of my Windows 7 computers. Ditto for Chrome, Iron, Cool Novo (formerly ChromePlus) and Dragon.

If the Options wheel can be moved over to the left side, I could probably live with that. But; if it can't, then speaking strictly for myself, forget about it.

Us non technical people (like me) used IE 5 for a long time. Ditto for IE 5.5 and IE 6. Then came the massive change with IE 7 and I didn't like IE 7. I stayed with and used IE 6 until Microsoft sent me one of those "security updates" one day and after those security updates were installed, one of those security updates corrupted my IE 6 which FORCED me to go to IE 7. In other words, MS intentionally sent IE 6 a "mickey" which I didn't appreciate one bit. That's when I went to Firefox 2.0 and some time far later down the road, was delighted to find Pale Moon (4.0). BTW, I now look at and decide which MS updates I put on my computer.

Right now, I like the small split which is developing between Firefox and Pale Moon.

[Rohugh]

Looking at (dark_moon & rohugh)s themes, why is the Options wheel on the far right side of the page right under the Min/Max button?

The "star"? That is the only icon I have on the right and that is the Last Pass icon, I believe (without searching) that dark_moon has the same thing there as well.

[Night Wing]

Yes, the "Star". I didn't realize the star symbol was for Last Pass. I thought it was for Options. My mistake. My apologies to both.

[Ryrynz]

The arrow in top left is my menu button. No need for a label. Just need a button.
Dark color for inactive tabs. But the color goes back, if i mouse hover.
So the background is transparent (i have a dark windows 7 transparent setting)

That Firefox icon I have beside my URL bar is my menu button also, I removed most of the unneeded stuff with the Addon Personal Menu.
My tabs also go darker when the tab is highlighted and the menu button gets a nice glow around it when it's highlighted also.

My current theme.
Which theme is that?

Shine Bright Aero Skin theme with the addons GlassMyFox, Moveable Firefox Button and Tab Utilities.

I guess my point being that the UX layout makes no sense in either scenario for me... and i can't really think of a scenario where it actually would be advantageous to have that layout.

Once again, it is the inside that counts. How fast it reacts and pages it loads, that should keep us as happy campers.
If we were so deemed to keep new layouts, there is always themes/skins from the Add-on page.

Some people may prefer it anyway, no doubt the topic will come back up when it's released. Perhaps a UX branch of PM is possible or maybe it could be themed/hacked in for those that might prefer it. -shrug-
Maybe there will be something to like once it's been tinkered with, anyway what's the chances that UX performance will be better than the current UI? I've downloaded the latest UX but the theme in the screenshot isn't active and looks the same as regular FF.

[megaman]

Some people may prefer it anyway, no doubt the topic will come back up when it's released. Perhaps a UX branch of PM is possible or maybe it could be themed/hacked in for those that might prefer it. -shrug-
Maybe there will be something to like once it's been tinkered with, anyway what's the chances that UX performance will be better than the current UI? I've downloaded the latest UX but the theme in the screenshot isn't active and looks the same as regular FF.

That layout has been around, it is called Australis, check it in the theme section of the Firefox Add-ons.

[Ryrynz]

Cheers, you wouldn't know how to kill the media control skinning would you? The default theme is on the left, Australis on the right. My current theme does this also.
I killed the media directory but that didn't fix it completely, obviously some CSS to edit somewhere..

[Ryrynz]

For those looking to do this, it's as simple as substituting the files inside the media folder of the theme with the media files from the default theme of Firefox. You can get the files by extracting them from the file omni.ja which is located in the Firefox program files directory.

[ulmuchiha]

Although, as you can make it look like whatever you want and change whatever you want so the default look doesn't really matter, I'll put in my 2 cents. The download button that appears when you need it and disappears afterwords, I like that as the downloads window just annoys me. I think that down arrow next to it is the drop down for your bookmarks. The appmenu must stay. Or a button that we can fill with whatever we want. It doesn't really matter. I use an addon to make the menu just Options, About Pale Moon, and then my bookmarks. Less wasted space is always good, but again, we can just fix it. I only have 2 addons that put something in the status bar, one of which I never have to mess with and the other you can open with F1. I like how the background tabs blend in. It looks good. The rounded tabs look kind of stupid. If you are wondering what my Pale Moon looks like, here you go:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BzLDA5 ... GVRcGhyV1k

[Ryrynz]

For those interested:

Quoted from msujaws @ http://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/06/18 ... dows-only/

"Wanna play with a sneak peek of the new Australis tabs for Firefox? I’ve put together a build of it that you can download and run with."

Installer (16 mb)

http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/austra ... taller.exe

Zip archive (21 mb)

http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/austra ... .win32.zip

"This isn’t checked in yet, but it should be coming along soon. I only implemented it for Windows, so my apologies go out to those on OS X or Linux"

[stravinsky]

installed this. Looks OK. not really different, except that the text in the tabs is almost illegible. so to identify a tab, you have to basically identify the icon.

[Moonchild]

It only works if you use glass on a dark background. if you have alight bg or persona installed it becomes an issue. the whole UI looks too flat and borderless to me. confusing terms again, the UX team is good at that. First they confuse minimalism with cleanliness, now they confuse flatness with streamlined.