Re: Firefox 4 dumbing down?

David McRitchie wrote:
> 
> "Peter Boulding" wrote
>> As a new user of Firefox, who is fast coming to appreciate it--now 
>> that I've
>> found the add-ons that give me back Opera's must-have features--I 
>> couldn't
>> agree more. It appears that no sooner have I decided to make it my 
>> default
>> browser, Firefox--and for no obvious reason--is planning to jump the 
>> shark
>> and I sure as Hell won't be bothering to up/downgrade.
>> <goes to Tools > Options > Advanced and switches off auto-updating>
>> Your comments re Excel 2007 are spot on. (BTW, I take it you are *that*
>> David McRitchie?)
> 
> Thanks,  and  yes, I am.
> 
> With Firefox things probably won't get so out-of-hand, because there are
> a lot of  people watching the development process.   Nevertheless, we do
> have a horrible waste of space in the default toolbars, specifically empty
> space above/below navigation bar and a huge back/forward button which
> can be fixed with the "Stylish" extension and use of small style code 
> changes.
> There are lots of extensions and styles that will hide toolbars until 
> you move
> cursor past were they would be, so from looking at pictures it is hard 
> to tell
> what is actually planned.   In general,   I don't like things that jump 
> around,
> but will sometimes switch to disappearing  toolbars as opposed to full
> screen view. 
> Sometimes something better comes out of bad development before it actually
> gets implemented.   This one appears to be obviously targeted to the few
> people who appear to be using Firefox without any extensions (and possibly
> those who turn off tracking mechanisms).
> 
> The "Stylish" extension itself though has "jumped the shark"  which is 
> quite
> unusual when the developer of a single developer application does that 
> to his own application. 

As far as the big toolbar buttons go, if you do not like the big ones, 
you can use little ones.  I don't see any problem there.  I have not 
seen much wasted space above or below the toolbar in most themes.  There 
is usually a small border there, but that is no big deal.  My pet peeve 
with some themes is that the authors put too much padding to right and 
left of the button icon to make the button too wide, but I can fix that 
by removing the excess padding.