From: Earle Martin Date: 16:10 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours After reading people talking about colors they were comfortable reading on their screen on London.pm today[0], I decided I wanted the default background color of web pages in my browser to be some very light shade of grey (like #f3f3f3 or some such), that's almost white but not quite, just to take the edge off a little bit. So I took at look at Mozilla Firebird's "Fonts and Colors" preferences dialog, and what do I get to choose from? A seven-by-ten grid of inoffensive colors, none of which is a light enough shade of grey. No color picker of any fucking kind at all, because I guess they didn't think that maybe their USERS might like to PICK THEIR OWN COLORS. Gah. (1 minute later) OK, I was motivated enough this time to get a Bugzilla account. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242840 [0] thread starting at http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20040510/026196.html
From: Earle Martin Date: 16:14 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Re: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 04:10:22PM +0100, Earle Martin wrote: > No color picker of any fucking kind at all, That should have been written as "They could have included the standard fucking type of color picker that everyone expects, but they didn't," - now that I think about it.
From: Phil!Gregory Date: 17:07 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Re: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours * Earle Martin <hates-software@xxxxxxxx.xxx> [2004-05-11 16:14 +0100]: > They could have included the standard fucking type of color picker > that everyone expects, but they didn't Standard widgets? From Mozilla? ::has a right good laugh:: No, it's easier for them, apparently, to write everything themselves, rather than deal with calling native widgets on various platforms. Ease of implementation over ease of use. It's the Unix Wayâ„¢.
From: Darrell Fuhriman Date: 17:14 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Re: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours > easier for them, apparently, to write everything themselves, rather than > deal with calling native widgets on various platforms. Ease of > implementation over ease of use. It's the Unix Way???. X? Native Widgets? *splorf* I guess you could write it in Athena, which is as close as X gets to native widgets. Anything else, and you're into "the nice thing about standards..." territory. X is the single worst thing to happen to the Unix Desktop since, well... ever. Darrell
From: Foofy Date: 17:27 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Re: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours On Tue, 11 May 2004 12:07:16 -0400, Phil!Gregory <phil_g@xxxxx.xxx> wrote: > Standard widgets? From Mozilla? ::has a right good laugh:: No, it's > easier for them, apparently, to write everything themselves, rather than > deal with calling native widgets on various platforms. Ease of > implementation over ease of use. It's the Unix Wayâ„¢. It amazes me people always feel the urge to reinvent the UI. I just feel it would be easier to write a layer to map abstract (very common) UI elements to the native OS elements. But no, developers want to forget the years and years of work and bug fixes in OS UI element libraries to go at it on their own! Jeeze, even the Microsoft Office team feels the urge to rewrite stuff every couple of years... ALSO HATING people (that means me) who are too stupid to use the Reply-To-All button. Sorry Phil. :(
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 17:53 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Re: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours > Ease of implementation over ease of use. It's the Unix Wayâ„¢. Despite the claims in the "Worse is Better" paper, it ain't so. If the Mozilla people were interested in ease of implementation, they would be using thin wrappers around standard components so they didn't have to duplicate the components. If they were doing things the UNIX way, the different pieces of Mozilla would be separate programs. If they were doing things the UNIX way, it wouldn't be a mass of twisty classes that end up using WINS to resolve the proxy if it's not fully qualified EVEN ON UNIX. No, Mozilla is clearly an attempt to produce a "the right thing" system. The primary goal is completeness, followed by consistency and correctness. Simplicity never even shows up. The problem is the Common Lisp "big complex system scenario" (AKA "the great incomprehensible pile") is the end point of all "the right thing" systems that stay on the "the right thing" path. That's where Mozilla lives. As an aside... There's this myth embedded in the "worse is better" paper that there is an alternative to "the great incomprehensible pile". It's called "the diamond-like jewel scenario". I would argue that "the diamond-like jewel scenario" is always one of three things: 1. A trivial system that doesn't do much. Either a simple problem or a toy ystem. useful for education, but small enough that *any* approach would work. 2. A prototype for a "big complex system scenario" that hasn't grown up yet. 2. A west-coast system that hasn't gotten someone from MIT pissed off at it yet. Pretty much any system that someone from the east coast has called "worse is better" falls into this category, *including* UNIX. Mozilla's design goal was to look *precisely* the same on any platform. I think that's a lousy design goal, and you presumably agree, but it's what they wanted, and it's what they got. They did a pretty good job of it, really, and it's a pity that they did the wrong thing the right way.
From: Tom Insam Date: 18:01 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Re: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours On May 11, 2004, at 16:10, Earle Martin wrote: > After reading people talking about colors they were comfortable > reading on > their screen on London.pm today[0], I decided I wanted the default > background color of web pages in my browser to be some very light > shade of > grey (like #f3f3f3 or some such), that's almost white but not quite, > just to > take the edge off a little bit. oooh, danger. You'll soon experience another sort of hate, the hate for people who assume that all browsers have white backgrounds, and therefore don't put it into the stylesheet explicitly. Prepare for lots of images with white backgrounds on a grey browser window. tom
From: Earle Martin Date: 18:39 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Re: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 06:01:30PM +0100, Tom Insam wrote: > oooh, danger. You'll soon experience another sort of hate, the hate for > people who assume that all browsers have white backgrounds, and > therefore don't put it into the stylesheet explicitly. Prepare for lots > of images with white backgrounds on a grey browser window. Like, erm, http://www.yahoo.com/ ! The first of many, I'm sure.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 11:31 on 12 May 2004 Subject: Re: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 06:39:21PM +0100, Earle Martin said: > Like, erm, http://www.yahoo.com/ ! The first of many, I'm sure. Actually, it used to be a warning from the w3c validator to set the background colour - I'm not sure if it is nowadays. Something to do with people with visual impairments being able to change it or something. Please to not be getting me started on the quality of Yahoo's html though - you've never had to hack on it. Urrrrgh.
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