Firefox and Thunderbird UI

24 August, 2006

There’s an excellent article by rakaz on the new themes in Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0. I agree with the whole thing, in particular the strange and increasing amount of seemingly Mac-influenced design decisions for a world which is primarily Windows XP based.

To me, such decisions seem like short-sighted mistakes. I still, for example, can’t get my head around what kind of decision-making process went into creating the new navigation in the Firefox 1.5 options pane. Forcing them to adopt entirely new (and application-unique) UI metaphors is not a way to embrace people migrating from any other browser.

Anyway, there are screenshots and comparisons of the UI changes in the article, so go and read it!

See other posts tagged with general and all posts made in August 2006.

Comments

Anonymous

24 August, 2006 at 13:26

Hello Phil,

perhaps you remember me. a fairly long time ago i wrote a php script that converts the xml generated by your script to a clear listing.

Are there some news about your history export script? I read that it doesn’t work with the new Firefox versions … did you enhance it already?

ps: i took the liberty of adding your excellent blog to my blogrole on http://www.kortas.net (only in german … sorry for that)

greetings from germany

michael

Pip

24 August, 2006 at 14:11

‘tag Michael, and yes I do remember you 🙂

I haven’t updated the script because Firefox 2.0 uses SQLite instead of an RDF backend, so it needs to be totally rewritten.

I will look at rewriting it when the stable version of Firefox 2.0 is released.

greetings from England 🙂

Anonymous

24 August, 2006 at 14:32

Hi Phil,

i heard some rumours of placing the history-data in a new way instead of that freaky fileformat but i dont know that this will happen in firefox 2.0.

well, i am looking forward to your new and updated script. if the data your script returns is an xml-file again i will write a script too 😀