ramblings of a hikikomori - Rails, Firefox, Anime, Mac
No alternate stylesheet switcher in Firefox 1.0August 25, 2004
Bug 253722: remove alternate stylesheet UI
Daniel Glazman couldn’t believe it and suggests that such incomplete features be enabled/disabled via a user option. Yes, please.
Useless option for the average user AFAIK. Could be very usefull for some people, but that function deserves to be in an extension.
I, for one, will feel happy when that useless lightning icon in the statusbar is removed.
Different subject: why is the Firefox statusbar is getting fuller and fuller after every extension?
FireFox 1.0 Woes
Just catching up on the news about features being removed from FireFox 1.0. I think this really stinks, it’s dumping on all your loyal FireFox and Open Standards supporters. We all know that joe user isn’t going to install an extension to do this, ju…
Repeat after me:
“View Source is not going away. The JavaScript Console is not going away. View Source is not going away. The JavaScript Console is not going away.”
They changed their minds. The two features still staying.
Why is it that several days after the initial change of heart, people are still saying it’s the other way around? I wonder how much more flak Asa’s gotten because people don’t stay well-informed.
As for the stylesheet switcher, so what? The code needed for an extension to do the same is minimal, and it wasn’t really a feature that a new user would expect to see (and thus be disappointed by its absence), unlike Work Offline (which was also removed but once again only by the easiest method to reimplement).
I care more about Work Offline than View Source or alternate stylesheets. The average user has never touched either of the latter features, but the former feature might be commonly used among newbies. (I wouldn’t really know, as I’ve had access to an always-on cable modem since first using Firefox.)
View source and the Javascript Conole are staying for now. The impression one recieves is that the powers that be would still like to see them removed at some point, maybe for 1.5.
The big deal over stylesheet switching, as has been pointed out elsewhere, is that a CSS 2 compliant browser must offer a way to switch between alternate stylesheets when such are available. There seem to be two arguments for it’s removal. a) It’s broken. Well, er, fix it. Since features were supposedly frozen for the 1.0 release livemarks (or whatever they’re called not) and the new TAYF bar have been introduced, but we can’t fix a feature already there? b) Sites with alternate stylesheets usually give a user some way of switching. This is a crazy argument from a useability and accesibility point of view (what if I’ve turned Javascript off? Which of the buttons on this particular web page does what I want?)
The removal of work offline is also more than a little silly. At this rate we’ll hear arguments that the address bar isn’t needed. We could supply a few useful bookmarks such as Google and leave the user to get everywhere by clicking links.
They want to remove View Source (no or in future, doesn’t matter)? Why? Can anyone point me a good discussion about this? I want to hear some good reasons!
“Lets remove New tab”
“Why?”
“It only makes mess in file menu. BTW: Its 5 min. job to make an extension…”
“OK, lets remove it”
“No, wait. Lets remove whole MENU!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah!!! Remove, remove, remove!!!”
I use View Source (Ctrl+U) all the time and if someone removes it without a good reason I’ll cut his fingers off :) Small joke, but I really want to know WHY?
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=745112#745112
I posted my 2 cents there. Especially interesting is point 2c, which I happened across while researching this issue.
-bryan-
Hyatt’s idea in bug 178161 of having these features as a removable ‘advanced’ extension is probably the best compromise - but the development schudule (what with perfecting such extras as livemarks - something that would be an ideal candidate to be shifted to extension) means the necessary work cannot be done.
The web is not a broadcast medium. The web is a communication medium - millions of people produce web pages. Most learn by looking at what has gone before. Removing view source would have deprived them of seeing how markup is deployed. Removing style sheet switcher leaves a vacuum for those woishing to further their understanding of how style and content can be separated.
I have read /be’s post (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/006284.html) on this subject and dhho remain calm but still feel a bit unsettled.
It would appear to me that the place has gone extension crazy. This is a bad thing as the more extensions loaded the slower (I find) Fire Fox starts. It already takes longer than IE and Mozilla on my system, and no I’m not using a Pentium 133MHz with 32Mb of ram.
With 16 extensions installed, I would hate to have to install more to have basic things like RSS bookmarks and style sheet switching.
It doesn’t matter that right now 99% of people wouldn’t use these features. Why? Well, just because they don’t use them and have never seen them before doesn’t mean they wont use them and find them useful.
It seems to me that a stylesheet switcher is a much bigger priority than RSS (livemarks) support. I would rather use an extension for RSS and have stylesheets built in.
To me the RSS/Atom support and the StyleSheet switcher are important.
Anyone else use Sage (a firefox extension!) for RSS? Is sage gonna be built-in or are they gonna start from scratch…
CSS switchins is most important to me, as a budding web designer.
I’ve been using firefox for quite a while and I have NEVER used the stylesheet switcher. In fact, I couldn’t even find a reference to it in firefox help (0.93). If it weren’t for a post in this thread I wouldn’t have known how to find the switcher (the goofy yellow icon in the left most part of the status bar).
I’m all for keeping the feature - but they really should document it - in the browser somewhere - so that you know its there and how to use it.
Firefox 0.10 Bothers Me
So, I upgraded to Firefox 0.10 (1.0 Preview Release for those of you silly enough to believe such things). So being insane, I tried out the new Live Bookmarks feature, it worked fine with my Atom Feed and seemed to…
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Crazy. They seem to want to remove everything. View Source is apparently going from 1.0 too. Even though it’s nice to be able to extend Firefox with extensions, it’s not nice for an end user to have to download a browser and then download another 20 extensions from the painful to use Mozilla Update just to be able to use it.
When I downloaded Firebird 0.7 for the first time, it was a case of having to download extensions for even simple things such as Copy Image to Clipboard which I shouldn’t need to.
Posted by: Cow on August 25, 2004 8pm