4 ms·

Glad you like it! On the issues - what you listed is the eternal dilemma of cross-platform software. Balancing cross-platform behavior vs. platform-compliance.

Glad you like it! On the issues - what you listed is the eternal dilemma of cross-platform software. Balancing cross-platform behavior vs. platform-compliance. There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each. Those choices are hard to make perfect. I've been recently fixing the drop-down menu lists styling [0] to allow websites to style some of it, while keeping it looking native when they don't. It's pretty tricky to get it right :) [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386015 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386015

jorvi 9y ago
Oh, I fully understand there are some trade-offs, its just something that always makes it like something feels 'off' when I use cross platform apps. There's small touches that help a lot though.. a big one is UI elements transparency, like the Chrome window bar. Firefox actually had this until it was inexplicably ripped out in 43 (even more inexplicable when Firefox _does_ adapt to GTK styling on Linux). Let me be clear that these are minor annoyances and I respect the effort you guys do and am pretty amazed that you can make ground on a browser backed by a behemoth like Google. I'm also pretty stoked for when you guys will have fully Servo'd Firefox, or have released Servo as a standalone product. When I tried Servo it was already oh-so-smooth :)
megous 9y ago
> There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each. Also if you're a user who don't care about any particular platform and want just to use your trusty Firefox browser, it's annoying to learn different shortucts for the same thing in the browser on windows, linux, and macos.
JohnBooty 9y ago
I always favor native over non-native, but the FF's non-native bits are tasteful enough for me not to care. Do I wish FF used native tabs on macOS? Sure, but FF's tabs are functional enough and visually innocuous enough for me to simply not really care. And, wow does FF57 "feel" fast. Not sure if it's because I have Stylo enabled, or what, but the UI feels faster now. I'm not sure if I've felt that way about any other FF release. And I have used them all.
DonHopkins 9y ago
As long as you're implementing your own platform independent menus, then why don't you implement pie menus, like I implemented for the HyperTIES hypermedia browser at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab in the 1980's? (For another more recent example, see the pie menus in The Sims from 2000.) Demo of The Sims Pie Menus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, A.V. Williams Bldg., University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742, U.S.A. http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102 http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102 http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/362/CS-TR-2433.pdf?sequence=2 http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/362/CS-TR-2433... Pie menus to permit low cognitive load actions: To avoid distraction of common operations such as page turning or window selection, pie menus were used to provide gestural input. This rapid technique avoids the annoyance of moving the mouse or the cursor to stationary menu items at the top or bottom of the screen. 3. PIE MENUS TO PERMIT LOW COGNITIVE LOAD ACTION The Hyperties browser uses pie menus as accelerators, to make commonly used commands quickly and easily available. A pie menu is a type of pop up menu whose selections are laid out in a circle around the menu center (18). The menu pops up centered on the cursor, so that each selection is adjacent to the cursor but in a different direction (Figure 1 and 6). A selection is made by moving the cursor in the direction of the desired selection, and clicking. Experienced pie menu users can make selections from familiar menus quickly and reliably without even having to look at the menu, because the menu selection depends on the direction between the two mouse clicks that invoke and select from the menu. The distance of cursor motion does not effect the selection, but the further away from the center the cursor is, the more precise the control of the selection is. The browser has a control panel at the bottom of the screen, with buttons showing the names of available commands, to turn the page, return to the previous article, show the index, etc. When users are browsing a document by pointing and clicking on highlighted text links in the main contents window, they move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to press buttons in the control panel, and back up to continue browsing. The permanent display of those controls is important for the novice and occasional users. On the other hand, pop up menus reduce the distraction of moving the cursor by making these commands available wherever the cursor currently is. This reduces perceptual and motor load. Pie menus are arranged with their items in easy to remember directions. For example the BACK page turning commands are to the left (and the NEXT page is to the right) (Figure 6). This arrangement facilitates gestural input and encourages development of muscle memory. Experienced users can make gestural selections from these menus so comfortably and rapidly that it is often unnecessary to display the menu. This is called "mouse ahead display suppression", and its point is to reduce the perceptual distraction.

jorvi 9y ago

Oh, I fully understand there are some trade-offs, its just something that always makes it like something feels 'off' when I use cross platform apps. There's small touches that help a lot though.. a big one is UI elements transparency, like the Chrome window bar. Firefox actually had this until it was inexplicably ripped out in 43 (even more inexplicable when Firefox _does_ adapt to GTK styling on Linux). Let me be clear that these are minor annoyances and I respect the effort you guys do and am pretty amazed that you can make ground on a browser backed by a behemoth like Google. I'm also pretty stoked for when you guys will have fully Servo'd Firefox, or have released Servo as a standalone product. When I tried Servo it was already oh-so-smooth :)

megous 9y ago

> There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each. Also if you're a user who don't care about any particular platform and want just to use your trusty Firefox browser, it's annoying to learn different shortucts for the same thing in the browser on windows, linux, and macos.

JohnBooty 9y ago

I always favor native over non-native, but the FF's non-native bits are tasteful enough for me not to care. Do I wish FF used native tabs on macOS? Sure, but FF's tabs are functional enough and visually innocuous enough for me to simply not really care. And, wow does FF57 "feel" fast. Not sure if it's because I have Stylo enabled, or what, but the UI feels faster now. I'm not sure if I've felt that way about any other FF release. And I have used them all.

DonHopkins 9y ago

As long as you're implementing your own platform independent menus, then why don't you implement pie menus, like I implemented for the HyperTIES hypermedia browser at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab in the 1980's? (For another more recent example, see the pie menus in The Sims from 2000.) Demo of The Sims Pie Menus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, A.V. Williams Bldg., University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742, U.S.A. http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102 http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102 http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/362/CS-TR-2433.pdf?sequence=2 http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/362/CS-TR-2433... Pie menus to permit low cognitive load actions: To avoid distraction of common operations such as page turning or window selection, pie menus were used to provide gestural input. This rapid technique avoids the annoyance of moving the mouse or the cursor to stationary menu items at the top or bottom of the screen. 3. PIE MENUS TO PERMIT LOW COGNITIVE LOAD ACTION The Hyperties browser uses pie menus as accelerators, to make commonly used commands quickly and easily available. A pie menu is a type of pop up menu whose selections are laid out in a circle around the menu center (18). The menu pops up centered on the cursor, so that each selection is adjacent to the cursor but in a different direction (Figure 1 and 6). A selection is made by moving the cursor in the direction of the desired selection, and clicking. Experienced pie menu users can make selections from familiar menus quickly and reliably without even having to look at the menu, because the menu selection depends on the direction between the two mouse clicks that invoke and select from the menu. The distance of cursor motion does not effect the selection, but the further away from the center the cursor is, the more precise the control of the selection is. The browser has a control panel at the bottom of the screen, with buttons showing the names of available commands, to turn the page, return to the previous article, show the index, etc. When users are browsing a document by pointing and clicking on highlighted text links in the main contents window, they move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to press buttons in the control panel, and back up to continue browsing. The permanent display of those controls is important for the novice and occasional users. On the other hand, pop up menus reduce the distraction of moving the cursor by making these commands available wherever the cursor currently is. This reduces perceptual and motor load. Pie menus are arranged with their items in easy to remember directions. For example the BACK page turning commands are to the left (and the NEXT page is to the right) (Figure 6). This arrangement facilitates gestural input and encourages development of muscle memory. Experienced users can make gestural selections from these menus so comfortably and rapidly that it is often unnecessary to display the menu. This is called "mouse ahead display suppression", and its point is to reduce the perceptual distraction.