30 April 2014

Firefox 29

firefox 29
Probably everybody already heard there is a new Firefox release and it changes many things and already has an opinion about it. Unfortunately I don't have the audience to gather a significant sample, but if anyone runs such a poll, I would be genuinely interested.

Which Firefox user interface do you prefer?
  1. Firefox 29 (the latest, just released)
  2. Firefox 4-28 (still on long term support)
  3. Firefox pre-4 (before the "keyhole")
  4. Seamonkey (the suite)
  5. I don't care (as long at it open web pages)
Of course i am coming here from an angle: I prefer the apps on my desktop to be consistent with each other, as layout, structure, widgets placement, shortcuts, behavior( I was happy the old Firefox never got the "keyhole" on Linux.) Still, not enough to move to something like Midori , where the look and feel is totally native but the set of features smaller.

6 comments:

  1. I'm a big fan of SeaMonkey but, answering in the spirit of the question, I'm an even bigger fan of consistency when it comes to GUIs.

    I know, this is 2014 and consistent is "boring", but that's me. I want my "File" menu to always be the first one on the left, always opened by ALT+F, to always have "Quit" as the last command and the accelerator for that to always be "q" -- and I could go on for hours. Why, I hear you asking? Well, imagine somebody would change CTRL+C/CTRL+V to something else in every application -- would you like it? Then you know how happy I am when things remain consistent ;-)

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  2. I use midori and chromium, so I'm not sure I can answer your question without maybes, but from I saw at the release video, the new interface's rather bad for my taste. I hate those menus with huge icons and I especially hate the symbolic icons that seem to be the fad everywhere. And yeah, consistency between apps is best.

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  3. Currently I'm using Chromium, but the upcoming Aura seems to be a mess on KDE so I'm seriously thinking to switch on Firefox very soon. IMHO the new Firefox's UI looks way better than I expected and with some patches from OpenSuSE I get a good integration with KDE (native file dialogs, for example). The only big issue is Flash: on Chromium I was using Google's Pepper Flash version, but on Firefox probably I'll have to get stick with the old 11.2 version.

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  4. (b) I think I can live with FF29, but one of my most important add-ons (Feed Sidebar) is now partially broken. Some of the basic functionality of FF (like the list of open tabs) seems to be missing.

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  5. (a) OK, I changed my mind. The list of open tabs is actually there and the Feed Sidebar works again.

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  6. I like some aspects of the new UI, but I really like tabs below the URL bar. I understand the conceptual cleanliness of the on-top approach, but I tend to have a lot open and flip between them with the mouse, and they're that much closer and also seem easier to hit.

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