Weird. I have a slight bias to the keyboard - so I think I tried right clicking, and didn't find the option. Anyway - it seems that you can drag and drop on to the dock.
57 karma · joined May 25, 2010
Anyway - each to their own. It looked okay to me, apart from some tiny script in places. (Safari, OSX 10.4, 1280x854)
I think having lots of tabs open isn't good for focus, but that's another topic.
What I was getting at, is that I believe we use tabs as bookmark replacements. Which is stupid because bookmarks are cheap. This shows a flaw in the browser.
To me it's the browser UI that let's you down. If bookmark management were better, you might not use the tabs.
Back to the spatial memory, I have a better grasp of tabs when they bunch - ala Opera and Chrome than when they scroll. I get lost in Firefox pretty quickly, the newer tab management features just don't work for me.
I don't see why you can't have a mix of live tabs, and frozen tabs.
After using Gmail for years - I'm going back to a desktop client rather reluctantly, just because it doesn't use much in the way of system resources while idling.
I was a fan of tabs initially, but in some ways I've gone off them. I'd like the window manager to look after multiple windows better, rather than use tabs.
I'd love to see some radical development in the browser UI.
I gave Ocelot a whirl this eve, and it's much better than my experience with the 10.04 netbook edition. The window management is more consistent. It feels more cohesive.
Anyway after some initial excitement, I broke it without much effort.
I'd pretty much written off Ubuntu, but think the next LTS could be pretty good - if they iron out all the bugs, and listen to the community.
I've never evangalised so hard about a piece of software, and every Linux and Apple user owe it a debt of gratitude, in as much that it was a good cross platform browser.
Performance wise, some upgrades have been for the better some for the worst. But don't get too sentimental about past incarnations. I remember there being memory issues in the 2.x line. I saw the browser eating over a half gig of ram once - and I nearly fell off my chair.
Those that have dozens of tabs open - I do think you need to ask yourself why? It just slows your computer down. I think we use them as replacement for bookmarks, which says something about the browser UI.
I've only recently left 3.6 to try out TenFourFox on my power pc - which at first felt a million times better, but after my initial excitement, I noticed it's a bit of a cpu hog. Idling with Gmail open, it seems to be quite greedy. Which suggests to me that there is an inherent problem with the browser - imagine if I had a handful of web apps open.
To say Firefox is broken is a bit strong. It would be better to say it has it's faults and could be faster. If it's DB is a bottleneck - could it be swapped for something else?
I do however think the browser UI is in serious need of some love, and could do with some innovation. It's barely changed. For example tab management is dire.
I don't like backspace as back, but it shines like the spacebar in being a big key that does not require a simultaneous key press.
When we used to use 640x480 and 800x600 monitors, the browser defaults - for something like a h1 took up most of the screen. That's half the reason designers (before the advent of CSS) didn't use semantic markup. They'd just use bold to mark up a heading at the body text size. We had pixel images used for text in navigation at 10px. With something like 12px for body text (and tables for layouts.)
There were also radical inconsistencies between the browsers, with their text size rendering defaults.
I'm also pretty sure that the 16px default font size was a late edition. Either way a bit of history would help the article.
Plus, as many have pointed out, the fact that 16px appears differently depending on screen resolution, distance from the display is an important point that should have been stated.
The article may have been better arguing that making a website more readable is better for users and sustained readership.
Also on slower hardware - zooming is a drag, and it can be slow.
The browsers do allow for customisaton, and I think this is probably the easiest thing for an end user. I use a minimal font size of 16px, and that works for me. But it does break some sites - Facebook's layout has been broken over the last month like this for example. Which is fine if you kind of understand the reason for it, but could confuse other users. Just as some navigation breaks, think of horizontal nav, that falls onto another line when the text size increases - I'm thinking hover states, and drop down menus.
I use my own style sheet with opera, and customise firefox flipping between the two, and occasionally breaking out into chrome.
I also find the terminal more readable than the browser, so have made my browser look like the terminal - I even use a monospaced font. Because that is what I'm comfortable with.
W3m and Elinks are actually really nice to use, readability wise.
Funny to read your highlight method, I use that when away from my computer.
You can always cut and paste instead.
I've been zooming since Netscape.
No privacy in the office for me sadly.
HN is unreadable for me without a little fine tuning.
I also use my own style sheet, with my own choice of font. I use a slightly modified version of one of the w3c core styles.
In Firefox, I just set a my own font, a minimal font size of 16px, and my own link, background and foreground colours.
The web to me is just plain ugly outside my browsers.
I run hot showers occasionally too. Though I never have any compulsion to leave the shower, I just want to stand there. The other thing is it never feels hot enough!
Try it, just start with cold. You might even like it.
That said - I do agree with you that a lot of these people are neurotic. Not all work is equal - some of it in my opinion is a waste of time - and it just keeps people off the streets.