On 07.10.2010 11:41, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> On 06/10/2010 15:25, Stephan Soller wrote:
>> On 06.10.2010 02:08, Arlo White wrote:
>>> That's because HTML/CSS is a pretty terrible language for anything
>>> beyond simple layouts. It shares more with Word/PDF/PostScript in terms
>>> of its purpose and history than it does with real gui layout engines
>>> (GTK, QT, etc).
>>>
>>
>> HTML/CSS is primary made for documents not applications. If you want you
>> can simply make every element a block level element and use JavaScript
>> for layout. I don't know GTK and QT in depth but then you should have
>> about the same level of possibilities as with these layout engines. It
>> wouldn't surprise me if GUI frameworks like jQuery UI actually do this.
>>
>
> The issue is not with level of possibilites. HTML/CSS has as much
> possibilities as many GUI toolkits, if not more. (there is really a lot
> of stuff you can do you HTML/CSS if you figure out how to). The issue is
> that it's incredibly hard to do that, HTML/CSS is so convoluted. (and
> I'm talking about proper flowing designs, now pixel-based, fixed-width
> ones. Those are fairly easy in both HTML and GUI toolkits).
>

It does not feel convoluted to me but I have learned HTML/CSS gradually as they evolved. Therefore I might not be able to properly see how it looks from the distance if someone doesn't know the details. To me it looks well structured (block vs. inline elements, different distinct layout models, typography, etc.). There sure a some parts that deserve a little cleanup and simplification but I can't think of any right now.

I'm just curious about your point of view. What parts of CSS look convoluted to you?

> And what do you mean "use JavaScript for layout"? You can't use
> JavaScript for layout. You can use JavaScript to programmatically
> manipulate the CSS properties of HTML elements, but you are still using
> the same HTML rules for layout, so the difficulty is unchanged.
>

You're right. At the end HTML/CSS simply is the interface to tell the browser about the structure and appearance of your document. However you can make every element a block level element ("display: block;") and use absolute positioning. Then each element basically behaves like a window of an window manager and you can use your own algorithms to do the layout by calculating the position and dimensions (top, left, height, width). At that stage you don't have to think about any of the layout models of CSS and you're totally independent of them.

Happy programming
Stephan

"Stephan Soller" <stephan.soller@helionweb.de> wrote in message news:i8sh5u$2ijp$1@digitalmars.com...
> On 07.10.2010 23:59, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller@helionweb.de>  wrote in message news:i8kmuc$15t$1@digitalmars.com...
>>> On 07.10.2010 14:56, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller@helionweb.de>   wrote in message news:i8k8k9$230n$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>>>
>>>>> [1]: http://arkanis.de/
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Not to complain, just FYI, this is what that page looks like for me:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis1.png http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis2.png http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis3.png
>>>>
>>>> Interestingly, if I turn JS on, than it'll look a lot better *until* it
>>>> finishes loading, at which point it goes back to looking just like
>>>> those
>>>> screenshots.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks for the screenshots. May I ask which version of Firefox (if I see that correctly) your're using
>>
>> v2.0.0.20
>>
>> Which actually kinda surprises me because I could have sworn I was on a
>> much
>> later version of the 2.x line. I *know* there was a period where it kept
>> updating itself seemingly all the time (which got quite irritating when I
>> just wanted to go to a particular URL). But I guess that must have been
>> the
>> only 2.x version I was able to find after giving up on FF3. And IIRC, the
>> built-in update won't let me update to anything less than FF3.
>>
>> And yea, I know FF2 is really old, but I tried 3.0 and 3.5 and the JS was
>> only marginally faster, it doesn't seem to fix any of the rendering bugs
>> I've come across in FF2 (I have 3.5 on my Linux box, just for site
>> testing),
>> and every other change they made I hated and downloaded extentions to
>> undo...until I realized there was no extention to un-unify the unified
>> forward/back buttons (which I had thought was a good idea when IE7 came
>> out -- until I actually used IE7), and realized the only winestripe-like
>> things for FF3 weren't nearly as good as the real winestripe. So I
>> figured
>> "Why bog it down with even *more* addons just to turn it into a
>> half-baked
>> FF2, when I can just use the real FF2?" YouTube bitches to me about it,
>> but
>> well, fuck YouTube; never liked having over-compressed videos
>> pre-embedded
>> into a web-based player anyway.
>>
>
> Maybe you should consider looking into some other browsers? Opera, Chrome and other Gecko based browsers might give you a better experience that the newer Firefox versions. This is the reason why there are different browsers after all.
>

- Safari is ruled out because it's a blurry mess (all for the sake of making it look more like the printed version? WTF?) and forces useless background processes, has zero respect for my system's look-and-feel, and has no "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or "BetterPrivacy" (Three FF add-ons that provide functionality that, for me, are absolutely 100% essential).

- IE7+ is out because it has no "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or "BetterPrivacy", and I don't like the unified forward/back buttons.

- Iron is out because I *hate* absolutely everything about it's UI, and it doesn't have "NoScript" (I've heard it has "AdBlock Plus", but I didn't see it when I first looked so I don't know). Also, configurability seems to be practically non-existent compared to FF.

- Chrome is out because of all the reasons for which Iron was created in the first place. I won't even allow Chrome (or Safari) on my computer at all.

- Opera is ruled out because it costs money and every time I tried the demos it seemed to combine the worst aspects of all the other browsers, plus had by far the most rendering problems.

- And everything else like IE6-, Netscape, WebTV, Lynx, etc are all ruled out for obvious reasons.

Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> "Stephan Soller" <stephan.soller@helionweb.de> wrote in message news:i8sh5u$2ijp$1@digitalmars.com...
>> On 07.10.2010 23:59, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller@helionweb.de>  wrote in message news:i8kmuc$15t$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>> On 07.10.2010 14:56, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller@helionweb.de>   wrote in message news:i8k8k9$230n$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>>>>
>>>>>> [1]: http://arkanis.de/
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Not to complain, just FYI, this is what that page looks like for me:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis1.png http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis2.png http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis3.png
>>>>>
>>>>> Interestingly, if I turn JS on, than it'll look a lot better *until* it
>>>>> finishes loading, at which point it goes back to looking just like
>>>>> those
>>>>> screenshots.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the screenshots. May I ask which version of Firefox (if I see that correctly) your're using
>>>
>>> v2.0.0.20
>>>
>>> Which actually kinda surprises me because I could have sworn I was on a
>>> much
>>> later version of the 2.x line. I *know* there was a period where it kept
>>> updating itself seemingly all the time (which got quite irritating when I
>>> just wanted to go to a particular URL). But I guess that must have been
>>> the
>>> only 2.x version I was able to find after giving up on FF3. And IIRC, the
>>> built-in update won't let me update to anything less than FF3.
>>>
>>> And yea, I know FF2 is really old, but I tried 3.0 and 3.5 and the JS was
>>> only marginally faster, it doesn't seem to fix any of the rendering bugs
>>> I've come across in FF2 (I have 3.5 on my Linux box, just for site
>>> testing),
>>> and every other change they made I hated and downloaded extentions to
>>> undo...until I realized there was no extention to un-unify the unified
>>> forward/back buttons (which I had thought was a good idea when IE7 came
>>> out -- until I actually used IE7), and realized the only winestripe-like
>>> things for FF3 weren't nearly as good as the real winestripe. So I
>>> figured
>>> "Why bog it down with even *more* addons just to turn it into a
>>> half-baked
>>> FF2, when I can just use the real FF2?" YouTube bitches to me about it,
>>> but
>>> well, fuck YouTube; never liked having over-compressed videos
>>> pre-embedded
>>> into a web-based player anyway.
>>>
>>
>> Maybe you should consider looking into some other browsers? Opera, Chrome and other Gecko based browsers might give you a better experience that the newer Firefox versions. This is the reason why there are different browsers after all.
>>
> 
> - Safari is ruled out because it's a blurry mess (all for the sake of making it look more like the printed version? WTF?) and forces useless background processes, has zero respect for my system's look-and-feel, and has no "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or "BetterPrivacy" (Three FF add-ons that provide functionality that, for me, are absolutely 100% essential).
> 
> - IE7+ is out because it has no "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or "BetterPrivacy", and I don't like the unified forward/back buttons.
> 
> - Iron is out because I *hate* absolutely everything about it's UI, and it doesn't have "NoScript" (I've heard it has "AdBlock Plus", but I didn't see it when I first looked so I don't know). Also, configurability seems to be practically non-existent compared to FF.
> 
> - Chrome is out because of all the reasons for which Iron was created in the first place. I won't even allow Chrome (or Safari) on my computer at all.
> 
> - Opera is ruled out because it costs money and every time I tried the demos it seemed to combine the worst aspects of all the other browsers, plus had by far the most rendering problems.
> 
> - And everything else like IE6-, Netscape, WebTV, Lynx, etc are all ruled out for obvious reasons.

Perhaps try firefox 4 (beta)? It is much faster, probably on par with chrome now, and it looks a bit cleaner designed.

You can download Opera for free btw.

"Lutger" <lutger.blijdestijn@gmail.com> wrote in message news:i8ta2d$1lnd$1@digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
>> "Stephan Soller" <stephan.soller@helionweb.de> wrote in message
>>>
>>> Maybe you should consider looking into some other browsers? Opera,
>>> Chrome
>>> and other Gecko based browsers might give you a better experience that
>>> the
>>> newer Firefox versions. This is the reason why there are different
>>> browsers after all.
>>>
>>
>> - Safari is ruled out because it's a blurry mess (all for the sake of
>> making
>> it look more like the printed version? WTF?) and forces useless
>> background
>> processes, has zero respect for my system's look-and-feel, and has no
>> "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or "BetterPrivacy" (Three FF add-ons that
>> provide functionality that, for me, are absolutely 100% essential).
>>
>> - IE7+ is out because it has no "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or "BetterPrivacy", and I don't like the unified forward/back buttons.
>>
>> - Iron is out because I *hate* absolutely everything about it's UI, and
>> it
>> doesn't have "NoScript" (I've heard it has "AdBlock Plus", but I didn't
>> see
>> it when I first looked so I don't know). Also, configurability seems to
>> be
>> practically non-existent compared to FF.
>>
>> - Chrome is out because of all the reasons for which Iron was created in
>> the
>> first place. I won't even allow Chrome (or Safari) on my computer at all.
>>
>> - Opera is ruled out because it costs money and every time I tried the
>> demos
>> it seemed to combine the worst aspects of all the other browsers, plus
>> had
>> by far the most rendering problems.
>>
>> - And everything else like IE6-, Netscape, WebTV, Lynx, etc are all ruled out for obvious reasons.
>
> Perhaps try firefox 4 (beta)? It is much faster, probably on par with
> chrome
> now, and it looks a bit cleaner designed.
>

I'll probably try it at some point, but I seriously doubt it won't be the same story as FF3. It's Mozilla's basic nature to refuse to allow users to disable any of Mozilla's beloved *cough* "improvements", and to merely scoff whenever people don't like it. They're never shown any interest in making anything about the AwfulBar optional. Same with the unified forward/back buttons, or every ugly-ass theme FF has insisted on using starting with FF2 (That's why I use Winestripe.) And like most developers, they've never shown any respect for people with light-on-dark schemes. Etc, etc, etc, And they're a bunch or arrogant douchebags to boot.  Mozilla just has their heads ten miles up their asses and that's all there is to it, and I don't believe for a second anything's ever going to change that.

Like I said, I'll probably try it at some point, but I *very* much doubt it won't be the same story as FF3. And from the screenshots, it looks like it'll end up absolutely horrid-looking on the Win Classic theme, just like FF2 and FF3 and just like every Windows program these days that's designed to assume the user is running that god-awful Aero theme (I think the only reason people think Aero looks good is because it's not as bad as Luna, and most people were too stupid to realize XP's Luna was optional.) Plus, it looks like they're trying to ape IE7/8 and Chrome, and I think those are some of the most butt-ugly and shitty-UI browsers ever made (*especially* Chrome).

"Nick Sabalausky" <a@a.a> wrote in message news:i8u779$d4a$1@digitalmars.com...
> "Lutger" <lutger.blijdestijn@gmail.com> wrote in message news:i8ta2d$1lnd$1@digitalmars.com...
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>
>>> "Stephan Soller" <stephan.soller@helionweb.de> wrote in message
>>>>
>>>> Maybe you should consider looking into some other browsers? Opera,
>>>> Chrome
>>>> and other Gecko based browsers might give you a better experience that
>>>> the
>>>> newer Firefox versions. This is the reason why there are different
>>>> browsers after all.
>>>>
>>>
>>> - Safari is ruled out because it's a blurry mess (all for the sake of
>>> making
>>> it look more like the printed version? WTF?) and forces useless
>>> background
>>> processes, has zero respect for my system's look-and-feel, and has no
>>> "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or "BetterPrivacy" (Three FF add-ons that
>>> provide functionality that, for me, are absolutely 100% essential).
>>>
>>> - IE7+ is out because it has no "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or "BetterPrivacy", and I don't like the unified forward/back buttons.
>>>
>>> - Iron is out because I *hate* absolutely everything about it's UI, and
>>> it
>>> doesn't have "NoScript" (I've heard it has "AdBlock Plus", but I didn't
>>> see
>>> it when I first looked so I don't know). Also, configurability seems to
>>> be
>>> practically non-existent compared to FF.
>>>
>>> - Chrome is out because of all the reasons for which Iron was created in
>>> the
>>> first place. I won't even allow Chrome (or Safari) on my computer at
>>> all.
>>>
>>> - Opera is ruled out because it costs money and every time I tried the
>>> demos
>>> it seemed to combine the worst aspects of all the other browsers, plus
>>> had
>>> by far the most rendering problems.
>>>
>>> - And everything else like IE6-, Netscape, WebTV, Lynx, etc are all
>>> ruled
>>> out for obvious reasons.
>>
>> Perhaps try firefox 4 (beta)? It is much faster, probably on par with
>> chrome
>> now, and it looks a bit cleaner designed.
>>
>
> I'll probably try it at some point, but I seriously doubt it won't be the same story as FF3. It's Mozilla's basic nature to refuse to allow users to disable any of Mozilla's beloved *cough* "improvements", and to merely scoff whenever people don't like it. They're never shown any interest in making anything about the AwfulBar optional. Same with the unified forward/back buttons, or every ugly-ass theme FF has insisted on using starting with FF2 (That's why I use Winestripe.) And like most developers, they've never shown any respect for people with light-on-dark schemes. Etc, etc, etc, And they're a bunch or arrogant douchebags to boot. Mozilla just has their heads ten miles up their asses and that's all there is to it, and I don't believe for a second anything's ever going to change that.
>
> Like I said, I'll probably try it at some point, but I *very* much doubt it won't be the same story as FF3. And from the screenshots, it looks like it'll end up absolutely horrid-looking on the Win Classic theme, just like FF2 and FF3 and just like every Windows program these days that's designed to assume the user is running that god-awful Aero theme (I think the only reason people think Aero looks good is because it's not as bad as Luna, and most people were too stupid to realize XP's Luna was optional.) Plus, it looks like they're trying to ape IE7/8 and Chrome, and I think those are some of the most butt-ugly and shitty-UI browsers ever made (*especially* Chrome).
>

Just found a portable install of FF4 and tried it. And yea, pretty much like I expected. Just like all the other software being made these days, it refuses to use anything even resembling my native UI. Not to the horrid extent of Chrome/Iron, but still far worse then FF2+Winestripe. And, of course, there's no option to make it use native. There's no options to get rid of the AwfulBar, in whole or in part. There's no option to de-unify the unified forward/back buttons. And as far as finding add-ons to take care of that stuff, I'm not interested in loading my browser down with even *more* add-ons than I'm already using.

I'd rather do without all the pointless animations, but, again, they don't seem to allow that. And there's still a bunch of irritating tooltips, although FF2 has them too (But you'd think that *by now* they'd have had a chance to put in an option to disable them.)

It is faster, but that's not enough to make up for a shit UI.

On 10.10.2010 22:42, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller@helionweb.de>  wrote in message
> news:i8sh5u$2ijp$1@digitalmars.com...
>> On 07.10.2010 23:59, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller@helionweb.de>   wrote in message
>>> news:i8kmuc$15t$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>> On 07.10.2010 14:56, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller@helionweb.de>    wrote in message
>>>>> news:i8k8k9$230n$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>>>>
>>>>>> [1]: http://arkanis.de/
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Not to complain, just FYI, this is what that page looks like for me:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis1.png
>>>>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis2.png
>>>>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis3.png
>>>>>
>>>>> Interestingly, if I turn JS on, than it'll look a lot better *until* it
>>>>> finishes loading, at which point it goes back to looking just like
>>>>> those
>>>>> screenshots.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the screenshots. May I ask which version of Firefox (if I see
>>>> that correctly) your're using
>>>
>>> v2.0.0.20
>>>
>>> Which actually kinda surprises me because I could have sworn I was on a
>>> much
>>> later version of the 2.x line. I *know* there was a period where it kept
>>> updating itself seemingly all the time (which got quite irritating when I
>>> just wanted to go to a particular URL). But I guess that must have been
>>> the
>>> only 2.x version I was able to find after giving up on FF3. And IIRC, the
>>> built-in update won't let me update to anything less than FF3.
>>>
>>> And yea, I know FF2 is really old, but I tried 3.0 and 3.5 and the JS was
>>> only marginally faster, it doesn't seem to fix any of the rendering bugs
>>> I've come across in FF2 (I have 3.5 on my Linux box, just for site
>>> testing),
>>> and every other change they made I hated and downloaded extentions to
>>> undo...until I realized there was no extention to un-unify the unified
>>> forward/back buttons (which I had thought was a good idea when IE7 came
>>> out -- until I actually used IE7), and realized the only winestripe-like
>>> things for FF3 weren't nearly as good as the real winestripe. So I
>>> figured
>>> "Why bog it down with even *more* addons just to turn it into a
>>> half-baked
>>> FF2, when I can just use the real FF2?" YouTube bitches to me about it,
>>> but
>>> well, fuck YouTube; never liked having over-compressed videos
>>> pre-embedded
>>> into a web-based player anyway.
>>>
>>
>> Maybe you should consider looking into some other browsers? Opera, Chrome
>> and other Gecko based browsers might give you a better experience that the
>> newer Firefox versions. This is the reason why there are different
>> browsers after all.
>>
>
> - Safari is ruled out because it's a blurry mess (all for the sake of making
> it look more like the printed version? WTF?) and forces useless background
> processes, has zero respect for my system's look-and-feel, and has no
> "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or "BetterPrivacy" (Three FF add-ons that
> provide functionality that, for me, are absolutely 100% essential).
>
> - IE7+ is out because it has no "Adblock Plus", "NoScript", or
> "BetterPrivacy", and I don't like the unified forward/back buttons.
>
> - Iron is out because I *hate* absolutely everything about it's UI, and it
> doesn't have "NoScript" (I've heard it has "AdBlock Plus", but I didn't see
> it when I first looked so I don't know). Also, configurability seems to be
> practically non-existent compared to FF.
>
> - Chrome is out because of all the reasons for which Iron was created in the
> first place. I won't even allow Chrome (or Safari) on my computer at all.
>
> - Opera is ruled out because it costs money and every time I tried the demos
> it seemed to combine the worst aspects of all the other browsers, plus had
> by far the most rendering problems.
>
> - And everything else like IE6-, Netscape, WebTV, Lynx, etc are all ruled
> out for obvious reasons.
>

Adblock Plus, NoScript and BetterPrivacy are a combination that's hard to find in other browsers. I suppose you have to do some manual configuration to get that done.

Many browsers today "compress" the UI in order to free more horizontal space for the websites. There is an ongoing development towards wider displays that shrink in height and the new browser UIs are a logical counter development to that. In Opera however it's just the default configuration and with a few clicks you can bring every toolbar back (and add or remove buttons, etc.). Never found a way to revert that in Firefox or Chrome but I haven't searched every "about:config" option.

Regarding configuration Opera is on pair with Firefox if not even more flexible, therefore they don't have extensions.

Opera giving the most rendering bugs is actually a funny story. They had the most advanced "quirks mode" (IE 5 compatibility mode). It changed quite a bit in the rendering of websites and was very close to IE 5 (I really doubt they had fun programming this). However many developers didn't know how to trigger standard compliant mode back then (these strange DTDs...) and forced Opera (and IE 6 and Firefox) into quirks mode. But since Firefox looked more or less the same in quirks mode people of course regarded the Opera and IE rendering as bugs.

ps.: Opera is free since over 5 years, so you might want to take a look since much has changed since then.

Happy programming
Stephan

"Stephan Soller" <stephan.soller@helionweb.de> wrote in message news:i8ufto$17dk$1@digitalmars.com...
>
> Adblock Plus, NoScript and BetterPrivacy are a combination that's hard to find in other browsers.

Yup. And that's speaks very poorly for the overall state of web browsers. It's amazing that with so many offerings there's none that are actually any good.

> Many browsers today "compress" the UI in order to free more horizontal space for the websites. There is an ongoing development towards wider displays that shrink in height

Which, of course, is an absolutely rediculous trend that's been created almost entirely on faulty notions, but that's a whole other rant...

> and the new browser UIs are a logical counter development to that. In Opera however it's just the default configuration and with a few clicks you can bring every toolbar back (and add or remove buttons, etc.). Never found a way to revert that in Firefox or Chrome but I haven't searched every "about:config" option.

Yea, "about:config" is truly awful. I consider any setting that's only in there to be non-existant (unless I just happend to come across someone mentioning a specific one, as was the case with turning off animating images and favicons (I turned off favicons only because FF's "no animate" setting doesn't work for favicons)).

>
> ps.: Opera is free since over 5 years, so you might want to take a look since much has changed since then.
>

Just gave the latest version a try (turns out the last I tried was 9.x and was about three years old, although I know that wasn't the first time I had tried it). I haven't spent much time with it yet, but my initial impressions:

When it first started, first thing I did was get rid of that awful "menu" button. Then I balked at how incredibly ugly the real menu and tabs are. I went to find a way to disable themes, but then discovered that it was *already* on the supposed "Windows Native Skin", which is quite obviously anything but. Looks exactly like GTK to me. There's the tell-tale GTK "Rediculously Excessive Padding", and the almost-equally tell-tale "Invisible text for light-on-dark users (black-on-black)". And then as if that wasn't bad enough, there's this really amateur-ish hover/pressed "highlight" on the top-level menu items, which 1. is obviously non-native since native has no hover effect and *I* have my selection color set to blue, but this uses white instead, and 2. results in even *more* invisi-text (white-on-white).

The tabs don't even try to be tabs at all, just GTK buttons acting like tabs. And the menus appear with a fade-in that's clearly *intended* to look like the subtle fade-in native stuff uses, except unlike the native apps they're jarringly...well, "choppy" is the only way I can think to describe it. And there seems to be some weird drawing-conflict between them and the "tabs" during that fade-in. It looks really really bad, and disabling effects doesn't get rid of it.

The whole UI is just a complete amateur job (which is pretty much what I remember from every other time I tried it, now that I think of it). Haven't tried any actual pages or any sort of AdBlock/NoScript/BetterPrivacy sort of functionality yet.

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 07:01 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[ . . . ]
> Yup. And that's speaks very poorly for the overall state of web browsers. It's amazing that with so many offerings there's none that are actually any good.

I just stick with Epiphany on Ubuntu.  It has minimal decoration around the rendering area and it sticks with my Gnome theme.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@russel.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On 11.10.2010 13:01, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller@helionweb.de>  wrote in message
> news:i8ufto$17dk$1@digitalmars.com...
>>
>> Adblock Plus, NoScript and BetterPrivacy are a combination that's hard to
>> find in other browsers.
>
> Yup. And that's speaks very poorly for the overall state of web browsers.
> It's amazing that with so many offerings there's none that are actually any
> good.
>

Not only browsers but more general the understanding of privacy on the Internet among its users.

>> Many browsers today "compress" the UI in order to free more horizontal
>> space for the websites. There is an ongoing development towards wider
>> displays that shrink in height
>
> Which, of course, is an absolutely rediculous trend that's been created
> almost entirely on faulty notions, but that's a whole other rant...
>

I absolutely agree on that.

>> and the new browser UIs are a logical counter development to that. In
>> Opera however it's just the default configuration and with a few clicks
>> you can bring every toolbar back (and add or remove buttons, etc.). Never
>> found a way to revert that in Firefox or Chrome but I haven't searched
>> every "about:config" option.
>
> Yea, "about:config" is truly awful. I consider any setting that's only in
> there to be non-existant (unless I just happend to come across someone
> mentioning a specific one, as was the case with turning off animating images
> and favicons (I turned off favicons only because FF's "no animate" setting
> doesn't work for favicons)).
>
>>
>> ps.: Opera is free since over 5 years, so you might want to take a look
>> since much has changed since then.
>>
>
> Just gave the latest version a try (turns out the last I tried was 9.x and
> was about three years old, although I know that wasn't the first time I had
> tried it). I haven't spent much time with it yet, but my initial
> impressions:
>
> When it first started, first thing I did was get rid of that awful "menu"
> button. Then I balked at how incredibly ugly the real menu and tabs are. I
> went to find a way to disable themes, but then discovered that it was
> *already* on the supposed "Windows Native Skin", which is quite obviously
> anything but. Looks exactly like GTK to me. There's the tell-tale GTK
> "Rediculously Excessive Padding", and the almost-equally tell-tale
> "Invisible text for light-on-dark users (black-on-black)". And then as if
> that wasn't bad enough, there's this really amateur-ish hover/pressed
> "highlight" on the top-level menu items, which 1. is obviously non-native
> since native has no hover effect and *I* have my selection color set to
> blue, but this uses white instead, and 2. results in even *more* invisi-text
> (white-on-white).
>
> The tabs don't even try to be tabs at all, just GTK buttons acting like
> tabs. And the menus appear with a fade-in that's clearly *intended* to look
> like the subtle fade-in native stuff uses, except unlike the native apps
> they're jarringly...well, "choppy" is the only way I can think to describe
> it. And there seems to be some weird drawing-conflict between them and the
> "tabs" during that fade-in. It looks really really bad, and disabling
> effects doesn't get rid of it.
>
> The whole UI is just a complete amateur job (which is pretty much what I
> remember from every other time I tried it, now that I think of it). Haven't
> tried any actual pages or any sort of AdBlock/NoScript/BetterPrivacy sort of
> functionality yet.
>

Ok, I'll stop recommending browsers then. Maybe you should just grab WebKit or Gecko and build your own UI around it. This will also give you (almost) all the privacy control you want. ;)

Just to give the Opera guys some credit: technically their UI is pretty well done and fast (it's based on Qt and they skipped hardware acceleration for this release because it wasn't the bottleneck). The default design is a different story but I personally think they hit what the masses currently would call a "nice design".

Happy programming
Stephan

"Stephan Soller" <stephan.soller@helionweb.de> wrote in message news:i8v03a$293d$1@digitalmars.com...
>
> Maybe you should just grab WebKit or Gecko and build your own UI around it. This will also give you (almost) all the privacy control you want. ;)
>

Yea, that's been my intent, but who knows when I'll have a chance to get to it :/