Ben Bucksch wrote:
>...
> Matthew Thomas wrote:
> >
> > This discussion was not about whether Navigator's UI should contain
> > a biff icon at all -- *it already does*.
>
> That doesn't mean taht it's good. I think, that choice has been made
> for technical reasons (XP), not UE. We have bugs for
> platform-integration of biffs (as already references), but they are,
> of course, more work (unless we can leverage existing third-party
> code).
>...
> But you are asking for the opposite. An taskbar-integrated biff, well
> integrates with the taskbar. A biff incorporated into Mozilla (or even
> only Navgiator) works there only.
Not true. Messenger, Composer, and Chatzilla all have toolbars.
> > > We are not here to heal the world. We provide internet software.
> > > We cannot fix shortcommings of the OS.
> >
> > If that was true, then we wouldn't be bothering to implement Mozilla
> > Navigator on Windows at all, since Windows comes with its own
> > integrated Web browser already.
>
> But it is not part of the OS, no matter what Microsoft wants to tell
> us.
By the same argument, the GNOME Panel or KDE taskbar aren't part of the
OS either, so we can't rely on them to provide biff indication (because
they might not be there), so we need an extra biff indicator anyway.
> > As a second example, take the existence of XP Toolkit.
>...
> > it does allow us to avoid the bugs and other shortcomings in
> > the native toolkits
>
> hah! lol. If I compare Win32 or GTK widgets with Mozilla's, it is very
> clear, which ones are more buggy. and I don't think, this will change
> in the near future, or maybe ever. Simply because it is more economic
> to have one widgetset for all apps.
Mozilla will forever be more buggy than Internet Explorer, because I
like cheese.
Whose `widgetset' are you referring to, and what does economy have to do
with the bugginess of XP Toolkit versus native toolkits?
> > If the mountain won't come to Mozilla, then
> > Mozilla must come to the mountain.
>
> You meant the other way around, I guess.
No, I didn't.
>...
> Why do you want to take "my" biff away, while I don't browse, then?
I don't.
> > > Do you want to have 2 biffs?
> >
> > On Windows and Mac OS, we already do.
>
> huh? how so?
4.x for Windows: one in the component bar, one in the system tray. 4.x
for Mac OS: one in the component bar, one in the menu bar.
> > Remember, this discussion is just
> > about where to put one of them.
>
> So, you want 2 biffs? How do you justify this from a UE standpoint?
Firstly, because either one of them might not be there at any given
time. The system tray on Windows is not visible if the taskbar is in
auto-hide mode. The menu bar on Mac OS might not be visible, depending
on how full-screen mode is implemented. The equivalent in GNOME or KDE
won't be present if you have neither GNOME nor KDE installed. And for
the indicator in Mozilla's chrome, you might have that particular bit of
chrome turned off at any given moment.
And secondly, because (as I said) on today's monitors the one provided
by the OS has to be too small to be useful in order to be small enough
to be out of the way. So on those occasions when we can provide more
detail (by having an additional indicator in the toolbar), we should.
Ben Bucksch wrote:
>...
> Matthew, I can understand that you like (from a UE perspective) MSN
> Explorer. It looks really good (didn't try it).
No, I don't like it. It tries to put all the user's activities in a
single window (which is symptomatic of the poor windowing provided by
GDI, or by any other current window manager for that matter).
> But making Navigator to some kind of MSN Explorer will scare existing
> customers away.
We already have a sidebar. I'd rather we didn't, but as long as we have
awkward window managers running on our operating systems, a sidebar is
the best approach to take. (So I suppose you're going to say we should
start developing an easy-to-use MPLed window manager for X, drop the
sidebar, and tell everyone to start using X with our window manager?)
> IMO, Microsoft made the right decision by building MSN
> Explorer on MSIE, but still keeping stock MSIE. That latter can be
> used by experienced users, the former by newbies.
Whatever. Internet Explorer 5.0 also has a Mail button in its toolbar by default.
> Creating an app like MSN Explorer based on Mozilla won't be hard, I
> guess, since we have XUL etc.. Actually, this is IMO such an obvious
> move that I think, it was Mozilla which gave MS the idea for MSN
> Explorer.
No, it was AOL which gave them that idea. And Internet Explorer 6 is
going to include quite a few of MSN Explorer's novice-user features.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla user interface QA
