On 11.10.2010 13:01, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Stephan Soller"<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Adblock Plus, NoScript and BetterPrivacy are a combination that's hard to
find in other browsers.
Yup. And that's speaks very poorly for the overall state of web browsers.
It's amazing that with so many offerings there's none that are actually any
good.
Not only browsers but more general the understanding of privacy on the
Internet among its users.
Many browsers today "compress" the UI in order to free more horizontal
space for the websites. There is an ongoing development towards wider
displays that shrink in height
Which, of course, is an absolutely rediculous trend that's been created
almost entirely on faulty notions, but that's a whole other rant...
I absolutely agree on that.
and the new browser UIs are a logical counter development to that. In
Opera however it's just the default configuration and with a few clicks
you can bring every toolbar back (and add or remove buttons, etc.). Never
found a way to revert that in Firefox or Chrome but I haven't searched
every "about:config" option.
Yea, "about:config" is truly awful. I consider any setting that's only in
there to be non-existant (unless I just happend to come across someone
mentioning a specific one, as was the case with turning off animating images
and favicons (I turned off favicons only because FF's "no animate" setting
doesn't work for favicons)).
ps.: Opera is free since over 5 years, so you might want to take a look
since much has changed since then.
Just gave the latest version a try (turns out the last I tried was 9.x and
was about three years old, although I know that wasn't the first time I had
tried it). I haven't spent much time with it yet, but my initial
impressions:
When it first started, first thing I did was get rid of that awful "menu"
button. Then I balked at how incredibly ugly the real menu and tabs are. I
went to find a way to disable themes, but then discovered that it was
*already* on the supposed "Windows Native Skin", which is quite obviously
anything but. Looks exactly like GTK to me. There's the tell-tale GTK
"Rediculously Excessive Padding", and the almost-equally tell-tale
"Invisible text for light-on-dark users (black-on-black)". And then as if
that wasn't bad enough, there's this really amateur-ish hover/pressed
"highlight" on the top-level menu items, which 1. is obviously non-native
since native has no hover effect and *I* have my selection color set to
blue, but this uses white instead, and 2. results in even *more* invisi-text
(white-on-white).
The tabs don't even try to be tabs at all, just GTK buttons acting like
tabs. And the menus appear with a fade-in that's clearly *intended* to look
like the subtle fade-in native stuff uses, except unlike the native apps
they're jarringly...well, "choppy" is the only way I can think to describe
it. And there seems to be some weird drawing-conflict between them and the
"tabs" during that fade-in. It looks really really bad, and disabling
effects doesn't get rid of it.
The whole UI is just a complete amateur job (which is pretty much what I
remember from every other time I tried it, now that I think of it). Haven't
tried any actual pages or any sort of AdBlock/NoScript/BetterPrivacy sort of
functionality yet.
Ok, I'll stop recommending browsers then. Maybe you should just grab
WebKit or Gecko and build your own UI around it. This will also give you
(almost) all the privacy control you want. ;)
Just to give the Opera guys some credit: technically their UI is pretty
well done and fast (it's based on Qt and they skipped hardware
acceleration for this release because it wasn't the bottleneck). The
default design is a different story but I personally think they hit what
the masses currently would call a "nice design".
Happy programming
Stephan
