David Tenser wrote: > One thing that I've always thought of as a very simple, yet very useful > feature that Mozilla lacks: The ability to add/remove buttons to the > toolbar(s) and to drag/move toolbars, address fields, menus, etc. >
Oh my God, I never noticed that Mozilla didn't even have dockable/moveable toolbars! Holy Christ. > Even simple crappy Wordpad has this functionality (at least moving > toolbars), Simple, crappy Wordpad is also able to edit plain text relatively easily, unlike Mozilla's "composer". Do you know that until about a month ago, Mozilla's email/news editor didn't even have a *context menu*?! I shittest thou not. > and freebie Outlook Express can do anything with the toolbar, > but Mozilla simply can't. You can add/remove some standard buttons like > Search, but you can't even turn of captions on buttons, like you could > in ancient Netscape 4.x > David, we're just never going to see this in Mozilla. And actually I'm not sure we should want to; hell, AOL can't even get the *simple* and *critical* stuff to work! I'd rather they waste time getting those wrong than waste time getting the "nice-to-have"s wrong! > With an open source project involving hundreds of developers over a > several-year time span, you would expect a very customizable program > with lots of design/appearance preferences, but Mozilla is in fact very > hard to customize... Ok, you can change skin, but that's about it. > Expect this reply to that from the AOL staff and the Mozillapologists: "Oh no, Mozilla is extremely customizable, and it's easy! Just write a few hundred lines of Javascript...." I'm not sure how the rest of it goes, since my eyes glaze over at that point and I go use something else that has a checkbox to do the exact same thing ten times better. > I admit that it's not the most important feature in a program, but the > truth is that none of my friends usually stick with the default > appearance of any program. Personally, I always remove the captions on > toolbar buttons, I use smaller buttons, etc. In Mozilla, you can either > display the toolbar, or not. > Any color as long as it's black. BUT YOU CAN USE ALL KINDS OF DIFFERENT SKINS! Oh, well, not really, something like a grand total of SIX at last count, if you search really hard and don't mind a lot of stuff not working. But that XUL was sure worth it! Pfhht. > Actually, the more I (try to) use Mozilla as my everyday browser and > mail client, the more I'm starting to realize that Mozilla isn't as > carefully planned as I thought it would be. Mozilla wasn't planned *at all*. Hell, they started out by trying to update 4.7x, and then after a year/year-and-a-half scrapped all that work and started over! > By just reading the fact > that there are _many_ developers involved in a project that has been > going on for several years, you simply assume that this program is very > outlined and is aiming to be the best alternative out there. At least I > did. But appearantly I seem to be wrong, You could not be *more* wrong in fact. I was in the *exact* same spot as you are a few years back, when I started to look seriously at Mozilla. There is *no* outline. No direction. No intention for Mozilla to be the best at anything. In fact, the only things that can be said about Mozilla's goals are this: 1. "Cross-platform", which translates into "If we need to make it ten times worse on Windows (99%+ of the target users) so that it will run on some oddball OS that nobody ever heard of (BeOS, 0.0000001% of target users), we'll do it". 2. "Standards-compliant", which translates, "Standards-compliant web browser, when it's convenient for AOL". > because the only thing they > seem to be doing is ignoring suggestions like this one, and fixing > trillions of bugs. > Well, and adding more bugs, according to the stratospheric bug count numbers in bugzilla. > Is it someone in this newsgroup that agrees with me, or am I just being > very negative at the moment? > You are 100% dead-on brother. > I'm going to be positive too: Mozilla _is_ very standards compliant. When it wants to be. Look back a few weeks into the discussions about "favicon". > I > was editing my homepage the other day and I followed the book in CSS > formatting, and it actually worked without a problem in Mozilla, but IE6 > couldn't display it properly! :) On that point, Mozilla is superior, and > something tells me that this (Gecko) is their main focus. Not the UI. > I think you're missing a key piece of the puzzle in your understanding of the Tacoma Narrows Browser Project here: The UI is written in something called "XUL". Basically Mozilla's UI is a glorified webpage *itself*, and is rendered by that same engine. Slowly. Poorly. Resulting in the vast majority of the problems people have with Mozilla. > I can just imagine the Gecko engine inside a Microsoft designed UI. > You don't have to imagine, it's called "K-Meleon". It proves that Mozilla's "XUL" notion is completely out-of-whack. > / David >
