I have to agree with you Tomas. Function over form. The benefits that the Firefox extensions give you far outweigh the “nice to have” native windows buttons. And they are easily customizable like Tomas points out.
The cool news is that Adium, based on libGaim is actually pretty beautiful.
I’m a Mac user and I’ve used Firefox over Safari for a long time, even when Firefox on OS X was pretty bad. The only downside to Firefox has been the typography, but even that’s mostly sorted now.
I don’t get why people want native OS X widgets on Web pages. The Web is not OS X. Buttons on the Web are meant to be gray and blocky, that’s what Web pages are meant to look like. And, well, that’s why I like Firefox… at least it doesn’t make my pages look like OS X applications.
And UI consistency is overrated anyway. Look at iTunes compared to Mail, compared to Photoshop, etc… they all have different interfaces. Brushed metal, plastic, small buttons, big buttons… unless your apps are all Cocoa apps, you’re not getting consistency anyway. I’d say the average suite of Mac applications is grossly less consistent than a group of Windows apps. But consistency is not important. Distinctive apps stand out from each other and provide unique interfaces, much like objects in real life.
All Cocoa apps can share these features automatically: spell checking, auto completion, some emacs style movement and kill-yank key bindings. Safari and OmniWeb’s text fields all pick up these features.
This is exactly what I’m talking about: leveraging the power of the native UI.
The plugins available for Firefox make my browsing at least twice as productive as my IE browsing - it’s like the switch from dialup to cable.
I know for a fact that you, Jon Galloway, don’t use AdBlock Plus. Which is far and away the #1 productivity booster for Firefox web browsing. So your opinion is this topic is highly suspect.
Picking an app because you like the buttons or its color is ridiculous. What about functionality and useability?
That’s just it: I find the new IE7 layout far superior to old style menus and toolbar. The favorites button is the thing I use the most, and on Firefox it’s behind a Bookmarks menu about 300 pixels to the right. Plus, IE7’s favorites isn’t a menu, so it doesn’t suffer from the same problems as a fidgety, full-screen drop-down favorites menu with (n) cascading levels. And the favorites drop-down also has a handy tab that lets me dynamically switch to my history so I can see where I’ve been, to follow a trail of click-crumbs back to their source.
Firefox uses the old traditional menu paradigm. I feel we’ve moved beyond this already with Office 2007 and IE7. More generally, main menus and toolbars are obsolete: they don’t scale worth a damn. It’s the same problem with the old Windows XP style cascading start menu.
That’s why I use the osx optimized BonEcho - much faster, and has osx buttons:
I’ve been using Vista for two months now and use Firefox for 99% of my browsing. I have absolutely no problems with it. I only use IE7 for Microsoft sites. Why? Ignoring the ugly, non-changeable toolbar and lack of Adblock Plus, IE7 causes all kinds of problems for me in my browsing. This isn’t an IE7 complaint forum, so I’ll just gloss over those problems. But, IE7 under Vista just won’t work for me on some of my most important sites (i.e., financial). Surprisingly, I’ve even had trouble with it on Microsoft’s TechNet site (I have to download using Firefox since IE7 won’t start up their download program).
There are always people that like uniforms and want everyone to wear it. Even then, some people like gray uniforms, some like green and some like blue ones…
The only thing I like about IE7 versus Firefox is the new tab sticking out from the current tab. I know, I know, Ctrl+T. The placement of the common functions as icons is horrible. Very counterintuitive.
I prefer Firefox over IE and Safari for five reasons: Web Developer, Live HTTP Headers, JSView, GreaseMonkey, and Firebug. When it comes to pen-testing webapps, these extensions are requirements. Sure, Safari looks best on OS X and IE7 looks best on Vista, but Firefox is theme-able to an extent and has the extensions that make the browser a really handy tool.
Jeff,
The truth is, only developers care about these issues !
Look at MS Office, Ad-Aware, Winamp, Windows Media Player, your own beloved MediaMonkey, Picasa, all the web sites with image buttons, etc… All of these use a different look and feel from what could be called “standard windows” and yet they are very succesful. Why? Because most people don’t care ! My dad doesn’t care whether a button is squared or round, as long as it is recognized as a button and behaves as expected, he’s happy. As so should you… Usability over “Pixel Perfect Copy” I say. Just like JGoodies java apps can be perfectly usable, if it weren’t for Java’s installations issues.
Cheers,
Axel
I totally agree. I use Konqueror on KDE. It just fits in.
However, in this case, there’s a lot more to it like being able to use kio-slaves and such but it boils down to the same thing: Use native libraries!
regards,
felix
Mike said:
That is why Ruby and Python btw suck majorly too. They don’t come up with any GUI library in the standard libraries.
Last time I checked Python came with TK bundled in (at least the Windows and OSX binaries sure do, since that’s the toolkit used by IDLE), and Ruby uses FOX as its standard UI toolkit.
All they offer commonly is TK.
Doesn’t prevent you from installing wxWidgets (trivial to install for Python, on pretty much any platform) or PyQt4 (using the GPL’d Qt4.2.2)
I don’t care about button style. I started using Safari only because I got sick of having to restart Firefox all the time. I know, I know, Firefox doesn’t have memory leaks. It just caches itself to death. What’s the difference?
On the other hand, Thunderbird is much more useable than OSX’s Mail.app.
i agree, but i don’t think that it means developers should only use native gui widgets. apple doesn’t. for example, front row, time machine, itunes, and pretty much all of their hit apps have some special interface feature. gui developers should be creative, but they should be sensive to the fact that users do get used to the “look and feel” of their operating system. if your interface is going to make them uncomfortable, figure out something else. a little bit of user testing will let you know.
Doesn’t prevent you from installing wxWidgets (trivial to install for Python, on pretty much any platform) or PyQt4 (using the GPL’d Qt4.2.2)
Indeed. That’s what I am doing. That’s what the Gimp/Gaim/Firefox retards should be doing as well.
Look at MS Office, Ad-Aware, Winamp, Windows Media Player, your own beloved MediaMonkey, Picasa, all the web sites with image buttons, etc… All of these use a different look and feel from what could be called “standard windows” and yet they are very succesful.
Yeah, they unlike silly engineers making software for engineers know how to make good pixel art. That’s the difference. It works on commercial stuff, not on open source. Open source geeks should stick to wxwindows as it falls back to gtk or windows native widgets better.
Are the Web 2 applications you use every day (like Google Docs Spreadsheets or some other AJAX app) supported in Safari - NO.
Is your on-line bank supporting Safari - NO.
Is Safari in your language - NO.
Mac is something like 10 years behind Microsoft, Java and open source project like Firefox.
Yes it is nice, all antics are nice.
I’m going to have to step out of the majority on this one.
On a given day, I use Linux and Windows at work, and come home to my Mac.
The biggest aggravation in my life is applications that try to be “native”. I don’t want a different set of key commands on each application, I don’t want different looks and feel. If I have to get work done, I want everything to look and behave as similar as possible across platforms. I don’t care if it’s bland or ugly (I’ve turned Vista back to the classic W2K theme anyway). I don’t care if they’re non standard. I don’t want to have to remember three sets of muscle memories for each given program.
Currently, I use:
- Firefox / Firebug for browsing and development
- Thunderbird / Lightning for mail and calendering (using a href="http://rscds.sourceforge.net/index.php"RSCDS/a and IMAP).
- Aptana for web development
- Emacs for Lisp and Perl development
- vi/vim over ssh for other kinds of in-place development
- Eclipse for Java development in cvs
All of these are cross platform between Windows, OSX and Linux. All of them are (largely) network independent.
And most importantly, they all look and feel the same regardless of the underlying OS. I don’t have to worry about my muscle memories thrashing every time I sit down at a different terminal.
It’s so much easier to get stuff done this way.
I really hate Safari’s rendering - even gmail isn’t fully functional - so I stick with Mozilla-based browsers only. I’ve always prefered Firefox to Safari for that reason. Recently I noticed Firefox has been using too much memory CPU time so I gave Camino another try and I’m now using it instead. I still miss a lot of firefox extensions, though.
Java GUI development has one word that can make a grown man cry: GridBagLayout.
Although IE7 is a far superior browser to IE6, I really dislike its interface (it’s even worse under XP than under Vista) and find Fx a lot more pleasant, even under Vista. Perhaps that’s because I don’t like the Vista interface period.
Where I really don’t like the non-native UI is in other stuff, especially media players and security software. Realplayer, iTunes and Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Norton AntiVirus, McAfee, ZoneAlarm. What’s with this horrible skinning? It always looks out of place compared to the rest of my properly behaved apps. Axel may not care, but I prefer native UI on apps.
I use firefox almost exclusively on my Mac. I use Firefox on windows, only using IETab when absolutely necessary. The user preference is for one or two apps that do their job exceptionally well. In most cases on a Mac, the tools that come with it are very good, but there are many open source apps that are available that improve on what OS X provides. I use an application called “UNO” that makes all the window decorations look the same. The UI gets to more than just the LOOK of apps on a Mac. The HIG actually calls for certain things to look and respond in certain ways… like COMMAND+, which almost always opens the Preferences for an application ( incidentally Firefox complies with most of these conventions as far as I have noticed). Some people want every window to look different, some people want them to look the same. I would say users care much more about the menu items being in the right place, than any preference for the “bundled” app vs. the 3rd party app.
Have you tried the new Adobe Reader 8.0? They have chosen to ruin the UI and put in some skinned crap menus which look horrible if you change Windows color scheme a bit to the wrong direction.
To say something for Java GUI applications. Think about Eclipse or Azureus - both have native UI widgets, because they use the Standard Widget Toolkit (http://www.eclipse.org/swt/). Sure they’re a bit on the heavy side but at least they look and feel right…