Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

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The default has to fit these requirements:

- The OS/desktop manager-specific stuff needs to be there, or else you fragment the overall UX for the computer.

- The browser needs to give immediate access to the actions that a typical user will use all the time.

- Tab mode has won out over separate windows, so you need a visual indicator of what tabs are open and which one is active.

- And the contents of the web page are the contents that you care about right now, or else you're looking for a way to navigate away.

Modern browsers do a pretty good job with all of those requirements. I'm surprised that Bray is even interested in a notional "home" page, since everyone I know, technical or not, either wants their session restored from last time (on startup) or a very fast search page to come up when they tap for a new tab. People don't reset tabs -- they close them or go somewhere in specific.

Best of all, this behavior is all customizable by normal people who never have to type about:config.

No, it doesn't have to be that way, and on mobile devices it often isn't. In a mobile browser a lot of this layering is invisible or only available when called upon by the user. And consider also whether this excessive contextualisation might have something to do with the success of the 'app' model for accessing services, where the device focuses solely on the task at hand and all that framing goes away completely.

Mobile devices have their own UX expectations, and a browser has to fit into that model. You don't get a titlebar plus minimize/maximize/kill buttons because that's not the metaphor that the device uses. If everything on your desktop has a titlebar + buttons, your browser had better have those as well, or else it's a distraction.

Don't break the metaphor. Use local system libraries. Don't make maximizing the window a surprise.

If you want a nonframed experience on a desktop, it can't be the default. You can make it as easy to access as one keyclick to enter kiosk mode. Better provide a clean way of exiting, though, and best is to tell the user how to exit when they enter. (Take a YouTube video fullscreen, FF reminds you to 'Press ESC to exit'.)

I'm not sure we really need all those bars. I mean I use this http://i.imgur.com/0U1yW.png everyday and it's perfectly fine/usable (ok we may need to add an url/toolbar for most people, but at least it merge the tab bar and the title bar).

Edit: It also merges the file/tools/help bar in the left button.

How do you get the Firefox icon instead of the word "Firefox" in the orange drop-down button?

There are probably several addons and themes to that end, here's one that seems reasonably popular:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/movable-firef...

It looks like it's Pentadactyl (an addon to use Fx with Vim-like key bindings) which provides this behaviour.

Firefox on Windows tends to be more space-efficient than Firefox on Linux or OSX. I don't know why Firefox doesn't draw tabs in the title bar area in Linux (Chrome does), but I heard that it might have to do with some opendesktop standards.

If you want any chance of a Linux app looking at all "native" to the user's currently selected theme, your best bet is to let the window manager draw the window frame, which includes the title bar and minimize/close buttons. Chrome specifically doesn't try to look native in its default state, but also gives the user the option to let the window manager draw the window frame, to fit in at the expense of using more space overall. This is a side effect of X11 and window manager APIs, as well as the proliferation of competing window managers and widget toolkits like Qt, Gtk, etc.

I have Firefox and Chrome on Fedora/KDE, and they actually take up exactly (well, within 5 pixels or so) the same amount of space on top.

Screenshot: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tikhon/browsers.png

Interesting. But Firefox still looks more cluttered.

I think the only reason it looks more cluttered is the google search bar, which I never use anyhow. If I get rid of it (I should have done that earlier) and move the buttons around, they start looking really similar[1]. (I also got rid of the home and bookmark buttons which I don't use either.)

[1]: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tikhon/browsers1.png

On the other hand, Firefox looks more native--for example, it has the same reload button (but not the forward/backwards buttons, for some reason) as KDE programs.

Also, unlike Chrome, it is pretty trivial to turn off the url bar, saving even more space.

However, my real point is that getting a fairly minimal firefox/chrome (although not as minimal as the example alexis-d gives) on Linux is easy and can, in fact, be done even without any extensions. You could even use KDE's tabbed windows and eschew Firefox-specific tabs entirely, but turning the tabs off in Firefox may require an extension.

Of course, a meta-point is that tinkering around with my window manager is fun :)

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