My only misgiving about this is the so-called "Awesome Bar" in Firefox 3, which introduces a lot of visual clutter for only marginal benefits. Fine. Maybe you do know best. But I'd like to be able to switch it off (because I just don't like it) without resorting to installing an extension. Focussing on usability really should mean you let people decide for themselves what's "awesome" and what's just clutter.
I love the awesomebar. For instance, I can just type in the bug number of the bugzilla issue I'm working with currently (15592 for example.) And then hit tab-enter and I'm at the right page. The learning algorithm took about a day to stabilize but it works perfectly for me now.
If I'm trying to remember a page I browsed recently I type in a few keywords and the bar will pop up a list of related pages. Usually the page I want to review is the first in the list.
Give the bar a chance. I was leery at first but now I love it.
"Give the bar a chance. I was leery at first but now I love it."
I thought (after I posted) that it might turn out to be like tabbed browsing, which I first thought would be OK-ish but (like everyone else) I can't live without it now. I just wish the awesome bar took up less real estate. The visual clutter is appalling.
indeed. if they could get both url + title in a line (like gmail) that would fix it's horrible visual looks. there's also the fact that sometimes my computer is a bit too slow to lookup favicons for the links in the awesome bar causing things to look even more horrible.
I like that :) I was trying to work out how to switch off the warning I get when I log in to Gnome: "You're logging in as a privileged user. That's bad!" To which I always mutter, "yes, I've been doing it for 15 years and nobody died yet." But there's no way to switch it off. So another window manager might be the best way to go...
The point here is not whether "you" know better than the desktop software does whether or not what you are doing is "safe". The point is that no one does: 2-300 people, or more, were involved in writing the software you're about to run as root. It's a huge amount of code, and no one can even pretend to have audited all of it for security issues. And, in point of fact, vulnerabilities are discovered in this stuff all the time.
Running that stuff as root is just dumb. If linux attracted even a tenth as much attention from black hats as does windows, and you did anything non-trivial (e.g. surfing) with that box, you would be more or less guaranteed to see it rooted at some point. So the desktop developers, being responsible about this stuff, are trying to warn you. You are just choosing not to listen.
Mostly I'm running terminal - X just lets me get more characters on the screen than using a plain old tty. In truth, I don't use it for much other than that, and it's a pain having to type in "sudo" and my password all the time.
On a broader point, Linux was never about hectoring users about how to run their computers. That, I thought, was the entire point of a free/libre OS: the freedom to shoot myself in the foot if I choose. (Oh, and do lots of other interesting things too, but foot-shooting is my priority here.)
I switched to xfce. Much faster, less clutter, no lecture when I log in as root.
This is a three-year-old blog post. I'm not sure how much still applies to current Firefox, especially the comparisons to other contemporary browsers.
That said, I often find Safari frustrating (cycle tabs with Cmd-Opt-arrows, for example, does not always work), but I have to resign myself to its foibles. To me, hitting the wall of the browser's functionality is what pulls me out of the dream. At least Firefox is getting ongoing extensions and patches.
I wholly agree with the principle here, but I often find myself running up against firefox. For instance, there's this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341067 . You'd think if that many people find a behavior unintuitive or undesirable, the developers might want to consider that there could be something to it. Of course, mom won't ever run into this because she'd have to change a preference to encounter it. It is possible to be too focused on casual users.
I have both opera and firefox open with default tool bars and opera is the clear winner it wastes less space. You have to turn off FF's book mark tool bar and then its a pixel for pixel tie pretty neat.
One of the tricks I've learned with Firefox is that under View > Toolbars > Customize... you can move the location of your "Bookmarks Toolbar Items" to the right of the menu bar. Then hide your "Bookmarks Bar" and the customized location remains. That way it doesn't take up an extra row of chrome.
I just turned it off all browsers have such great address completion I dont have a need for quick access to bookmarks. I use all the browsers for diferent things opera for general browsing, Firefox for js heavy sites, and Safari when I am showing off my websites to clients because it looks the prettiest.
Yeah. And Safari beats both of them for pure economy. Seriously, that line made me pause. Firefox has so much clutter in its design, it makes me wonder how many designers it actually has looking at things like that.
You would need to back up that claim, especially since middle-clicking DOES open a new tab in both Windows and Mac. What other shortcuts? And how is it klunky?
