Re: About minimum platform requirements.

[Matthew Thomas]

Gervase Markham wrote:
> 
> > Designing a good UI is not trivial.
> 
> Indeed. Why should mozilla.org claim that it can do it better than
> anyone else? It doesn't - hence skins and chrome.

No, hence open source. The lack of skinability in any particular free
software project does not prevent people from improving its UI.

All skinability does is confuse and dilute the effort put in to
improving the user interface. For example, Mozilla currently ships with
two skins, one of which (Classic) is noticably unfinished.

> For example, Mr Jakob Nielsen could put his money where his mouth is
> and design, or get others to design, a new Mozilla skin/chrome which
> put into practice his principles of usability.
>...

Jakob's concerns are more with the navigational features a browser
provides (such as support for the LINK element, indication of link
attributes, etc) than they are with the cosmetics.

-- 
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla user interface QA