Oh hey! I kept a promise!
I will talk about Firefox some.
So yesterday I promised I would write some about Firefox. I'll still do that, to an extent, but this is mostly a blog post about web design in general.
The web is hard to design for, because it was designed to be display-agnostic. My webpage, even in its current form, is mostly display-agnostic. Here it is in Lynx, for instance:
It does not completely degrade gracefully. It does not display well in Internet Explorer before 6 or so, though to be honest if you are running Internet Explorer before 6 or so you probably can't see anything through a haze of malware as I imagine the browser to be quite vulnerable these days.
Anyway, in typesetting--in my job I've put together booklets and presentations and stuff--you want/need to have complete control over the display. This is where PDF and similar formats come from. In theory, on the web this is less important--again, you want anyone to be able to view your page. The current theme, for instance, has a certain limited width--the text display area is only 850-odd pixels wide, but the margins don't scale it down well and on browsers with less space available the display may go off the screen. This is because it is impossible, or functionally impossible, to get the whole webpage to scale in the way I want it to.
I'm trying to develop a position statement on that. I don't like my old themes, because they look very, very dated. I am not exactly a graphic designer, but I do want my webpage to reflect both a limited competency in that and a competency in web design itself. At the same time, of course, I also believe that the page should be accessible (hence the additional styles) and simple (which it remains). This is why I have not redone it in Flash.
I think I'm likely to develop another theme--the nice thing about the modularity of the webpage's code is that it's fairly easy to just shove stuff around in CSS. Thus far I'm also avoiding the temptation to use scripting. I don't really know the next way I want to put this all together. I like this current style a great deal, it just suffers from some accessibility issues. Alas.
Also this gets us to Firefox: fuck Firefox. If I were to switch to hyperbolic mode... here, hold on, putting on hyperbole hat... there we go. Now that I have switched, I would say Firefox has no reason to exist at all. It's not fast like Chrome, it doesn't have the installed userbase advantage like Internet Explorer, and it's not standards-compliant like Opera. If this were a racing game, it would be the browser that is perfectly average in all categories but a stand-out in none.
I think I know why people use Firefox, though. It's a decent enough alternative browser, it's easy to find, and it has a metric fuck-ton of extensions. That is certainly useful. I just don't like having to essentially write my webpage twice over--once for Firefox and once for everyone else. But it's popular enough that I have to deal with it.
Such is life!
/a
The web is hard to design for, because it was designed to be display-agnostic. My webpage, even in its current form, is mostly display-agnostic. Here it is in Lynx, for instance:
Lynx, like the cat. OR THE INTERWEB.
It does not completely degrade gracefully. It does not display well in Internet Explorer before 6 or so, though to be honest if you are running Internet Explorer before 6 or so you probably can't see anything through a haze of malware as I imagine the browser to be quite vulnerable these days.
Anyway, in typesetting--in my job I've put together booklets and presentations and stuff--you want/need to have complete control over the display. This is where PDF and similar formats come from. In theory, on the web this is less important--again, you want anyone to be able to view your page. The current theme, for instance, has a certain limited width--the text display area is only 850-odd pixels wide, but the margins don't scale it down well and on browsers with less space available the display may go off the screen. This is because it is impossible, or functionally impossible, to get the whole webpage to scale in the way I want it to.
I'm trying to develop a position statement on that. I don't like my old themes, because they look very, very dated. I am not exactly a graphic designer, but I do want my webpage to reflect both a limited competency in that and a competency in web design itself. At the same time, of course, I also believe that the page should be accessible (hence the additional styles) and simple (which it remains). This is why I have not redone it in Flash.
I think I'm likely to develop another theme--the nice thing about the modularity of the webpage's code is that it's fairly easy to just shove stuff around in CSS. Thus far I'm also avoiding the temptation to use scripting. I don't really know the next way I want to put this all together. I like this current style a great deal, it just suffers from some accessibility issues. Alas.
Also this gets us to Firefox: fuck Firefox. If I were to switch to hyperbolic mode... here, hold on, putting on hyperbole hat... there we go. Now that I have switched, I would say Firefox has no reason to exist at all. It's not fast like Chrome, it doesn't have the installed userbase advantage like Internet Explorer, and it's not standards-compliant like Opera. If this were a racing game, it would be the browser that is perfectly average in all categories but a stand-out in none.
I think I know why people use Firefox, though. It's a decent enough alternative browser, it's easy to find, and it has a metric fuck-ton of extensions. That is certainly useful. I just don't like having to essentially write my webpage twice over--once for Firefox and once for everyone else. But it's popular enough that I have to deal with it.
Such is life!
/a
| Galluskek 14.09.2009 - 6h31 |
Nice theme, it really brings out the... colorful language, but you really ought to put the old one as the second option for those of us who feel that the TLD .su is meant for mockery of the now defunct CCCP. (Did the cost of writing the name of their republic wear them down when compared to more economically named nations?!) A suggestion: I have a wide monitor against my will, and having to move my eyes a lot makes them very displeased. if you could constrain the width of your text somehow to a reasonable stripe, I would appreciate it. Whenever I design a page I float everything on a fixed width island (more of an isthmus really...) in the middle of the screen. It makes my visual cortex less unhappy with me and has gained popularity in recent years pretty much becoming a standard thing as far as inter-web sites go. Also, the appeal of Firefox is that it is distinctly nice. It plays nicely with most machines, extensible to infinity and back since humans built it instead of the soulless automatons that work for any corporation. It has the potential to be very nice looking with the user contributed skins, and it makes people feel like technophiles just because they choose to eschew the traditional web browser without having to figure out what sort of Opera they need to attend. Plus, the logo is a fox, how can a giant evil 'e', or Sauron's eye, or an inanimate compass, or whatever the heck represents Google's new ad-server possibly compete with that? |
| Comrade Alex 14.09.2009 - 9h00 |
If you mean setting a max-width on the other themes, then yes, I can do that. If you mean setting it on the current default, then the content viewport should already be constrained to something like 850 pixels. I'll set a max width on the other ones, too. At some point (actually, I can pinpoint when--2004) I realised that CSS let you dispense with margins and so I haven't really built webpages with margins since. The new theme displays on my laptop, which as I didn't have Internet until yesterday at my new apartment was also my dev computer :D I think you're right, and I meant to bring that out. Firefox's strength is in its extensions. I don't use them, for the most part--Opera is my default browser; I use Firefox for work. I am still not entirely sure about it, and it does still irk me to have to write code specifically for it. But then, I feel the same way about Internet Explorer. +ca |
| Galluskek 15.09.2009 - 4h54 |
Oh, pardon my lack of specificity, I did mean apply the width constrain to the other themes. I'd use the new one, but it feels generic, somehow like every single powerpoint background I've seen in the last decade. On the other hand, I've noticed people who use powerpoint get paid ridiculously huge sums, while people who use Access and Excel don't. So, go as far as you can with the new design, it may be the secret to unbounded internet popularity. On Firefox, I'm really just a pawn in the browser wars. I use browsers to get the internet served to me in a nice, reasonably easy manner. Some people carry things too far, demanding that everyone switch to their mode of thinking (Apple people, firefoxes, those people who used Archos products before there was an iPod). I am not a fanatical devotee to my current selection, which is bound to change eventually. So, while I won't change my browser, I also will not pester anyone about their choices on the matter. But I will devote paragraphs to my neutrality in the hopes that someone will mail me a card that acknowledges it someday. I just realized that there is an entirely separate article on the changes in which this discussion would fit nicely. Somehow I missed it entirely. Whoops. |
| Comrade Alex 15.09.2009 - 7h12 |
I should note that I do not have a problem with Firefox in the way that, for instance, Martin Luther had a problem with Catholics. It is a perfectly serviceable browser, and I do maintain it for testing porpoises. If I were to recommend a browser, I would recommend Opera for geeks and Chrome for everyone else, though people being what they are I imagine there are some who are hesitant to submit to the Google Machine. This being said, I'm not sure how Chrome does it but it is disturbingly fast. Also, I've locked all text in the content field to 800px wide. +ca |
| Galluskek 15.09.2009 - 1h56 |
I like it better now, thanks! It seems like every part of Chrome is shiny and new (naturally, so they might dispense with some of the old speed limitations through far more modern implementation of the standards. The one in most other browsers maintains looks like it maintains the particular 'heritage' of the code. Plus they have that new Java junk which will definitely speed up a lot of pages with scripts inside. Of course this is just rampant speculation, since I have yet to look at the internals of Chrome, let alone run it on a computer that I own. But from the "feel" of it, I think its nice. I just do not like combining too many of my functions into one corporation. I already use their mail service, why should I tie all my internet operations to them? |