
Firefox 4.0: Early Screenshots Released - foppr
http://mashable.com/2009/07/27/firefox-40/
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wyday
This is about the thousandth time I've seen this idiotic proclamation. There's
a difference between screenshots and mockups. Screenshots are shots of what is
actually on the screen (a.k.a. the program running). Mockups are created in
Photoshop from a number of elements.

These are mockups, not screenshots.

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taitems
And thank god they actually used something plain (like the google results)
instead of the visually detracting CNN screenshots they used last time.

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ulf
Is there any kind of application, for which screenshots are less important
than a browser?! Look, it displays google results just as every other browser
AND it has tabs!

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timmaah
_Tabs on bottom is the current norm in Firefox_

Am I the only one who likes my tabs on the bottom, meaning under the content,
above the status bar?

Much less mouse travel when switching apps and then switching tabs.. (I'm
trying to use the mouse less and rely just on the keyboard, but its tough)

~~~
Xichekolas
Personally I like them down the right side. Makes better use of a widescreen
monitor, since most pages are still vertical in nature. Also can see way more
tabs at once. If you want to see what I mean:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8045>

~~~
tome
There's so much wasted space on the side of a widescreen. I've never
understood why people want them for their computers, as opposed to tall
screens. After all, we read across a short way, and downwards a long way.

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Xichekolas
Because our eyes are side-by-side. Have you ever rotated a pair of 24"
widescreens vertically? They are taller than your vertical field of view.

Widescreens make sense for all sorts of things, especially video. Just because
they don't make sense for reading lots of text doesn't mean the space is
wasted. With a tiling window manager (<http://awesome.naquadah.org>), you just
put two windows side-by-side anyway.

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dryicerx
_Cough-Chrome_

But what matters is functionality and performance, hope they deliver. Looking
forward.

~~~
pavs
looks more like a chrome + opera mashup.

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travisjeffery
A higher percentage of screen (whether on laptops or separate monitors) are
wide-screen so I think putting the tabs on top to increase the amount of space
to view the page is the way to go.

Chrome and Safari work great with it.

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nopassrecover
The "on-top" looks much better and includes a home button. But yeah does look
a bit like Chrome. Having said that, Chrome was designed by people from
Firefox right? So there would be similar influences.

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gojomo
I would miss the page 'title' -- my tabs are always too small to see more than
the first letter or two. An optional title band _under_ the URL bar, adjacent
to the page content itself, would more than make up for the loss.

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tdoggette
Something the pro/con list misses (and it's kind of a big point) is that
distance to a UI element isn't the only thing that affects how easy it is to
get to.

<http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html#fittsLaw>

Putting the tabs at the very top means that they're on the edge of the screen,
which means that in one direction, they're (effectively) huge. Choosing a
tabs-on-top design makes the tabs easier to get to, not harder.

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metra
Give the option for both. If that confuses or scares users too much, have one
as the default and the other as an add-on that users who really want it will
have to download.

As of right now, ff users have to settle for the tabs-on-bottom style unless
they want to settle for a combination of 5 add-ons, which - i'll assume -
significantly increases memory usage.

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lunchbox
What's up with the style of the Google search button in the second mockup?

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ubernostrum
That whole mockup is badly done; the page shown in the browser there was
almost certainly copied from a screengrab of a Mac browser without any thought
for the fact that it was supposed to be a mockup of _Windows_.

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noamsml
Aurgh. Mockups!

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TweedHeads
Combo stop/refresh/go???

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

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blasdel
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!

The Stop Button, Reload Button, and Indeterminate Progress Spinner all
represent exactly the same thing -- whether the page is loading shit. You only
need one, with a lag between stop and reload to avoid accidental fail.

They also finally put the progress bar in the address bar, another Safari
innovation.

I've used TinyMenu + StopReload + Fission, along with shoving the few UI
elements I want into the "File" toolbar to get this UI in FF for years.

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alexvasi
"Accidental fail" is the thing that would happen often. Two opposite actions,
stop and reload, placed on one button. I'd rather give user two
straightforward buttons, than one complex and _modal_.

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tome
Agreed. Merging stop and the spinner makes sense, but merging with reload none
at all.

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oomkiller
To me the first screen shot looks a whole lot like IE7/IE8, which I don't
really like.

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danbmil99
They're probably ultra-cool, but unfortunately Firefox 3 cannot render that
webpage on my dual-core machine running Ubuntu.

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zimbabwe
Oh man. That actually looks pretty neat. I've got some anal dislikes, but
they've removed almost all of the things that were red flags for me.

I'm just hoping they nativized the Mac version; I'd love to have a fourth
major browser for tinkering with stuff.

