Re: why are there no themes for galeon? and is galeon 1.3 cooler than 1.2, let's vote

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005, Adam Hooper murmured woefully:
> On Fri, 2005-18-03 at 15:27 +0000, Nix wrote:
>> On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, Adam Hooper wrote:
>> I have real difficulty believing that there are *no* GNOME users of
>> Galeon who ever want to close their web browser.
> 
> Okay, I didn't pick the best example, but I'll refute your argument in a
> half-assed way to try and defend the *principle* of my statement that
> "Quit" is a workaround for other problems.
> 
> Disclaimer: I am NOT arguing that Galeon should not have a "Quit"
> action. I'm explaining what I mean when I say that not all feature
> requests should be granted.

Oh. I totally misunderstood you, then, and attacked an argument you
weren't making. (I shouldn't read mailing lists after 80 hours of
continuous wakefulness...)

> So, my argument: "close all web browser windows now" action doesn't
> really make sense from a normal-user perspective.

But `I don't want to use my web browser anymore, begone' *does*.

>> How can you possibly tell that users would never want to close Galeon?
>> Perhaps --- off the top of my head --- they're trying to
>> 
>> - free up memory for another job (Galeon is not small)
> 
> The problem here is that Galeon is not small.

Yes, but unless it has a size of zero that problem won't go away, and
making Mozilla smaller will only reduce the pressure (and not even that,
on multi-user systems).

>> - cleanly disconnect all clients on a remote machine which is about
>>   to go down and on which Galeon is running
> 
> In an ideal world, wouldn't they automatically get cleanly disconnected?
> Every application should automatically do so.

Ideally, yes, but in my experience this is something that's rarely
tested and doesn't work.

>> - vape a Galeon whose rendering thread has gone into an infinite loop
>>   (there are still sites around that do this, alas, although I don't
>>   run across them often anymore)
> 
> Then Mozilla should be fixed!

In an ideal world, all programs would be bug-free, but planning user
interfaces on the assumption that this is already the case is silly.

>> - free up virtual desktops
> 
> Wouldn't a "close all windows on this virtual desktop" action in the
> window manager make more sense?

How does this differ from `close galeon' except to waste more memory
keeping a web browser around that can't interact with the user in any
way?

> What I'm saying is that the Quit action is a workaround for other
> problems, and so when a user says "I want a Quit button" a developer
> should ask himself, "why?"

Because users sometimes want to stop working with particular programs?
The reasons I provided could apply to *any* program. Hell, they even
apply to init(8), hence the existence of `inittab u'.

>> This whole argument feels to me like a justification for ignoring any
>> and all requests which you don't like the sound of, without needing to
>> find an actual problem with the request; just say `you don't really want
>> to do that' and ignore it. While you of course have the prerogative to
>> do that, as do we all, some of us are actually fond of *listening* to
>> users unless we have a good reason for saying `no'. We find it tends not
>> to lose us users if we don't patronise the living daylights out of them.
> 
> Keep in mind I'm not a Galeon developer :). But when I listen on this
> mailing list, I see several feature requests which either:
> 
> (a) have not been thought out.
> (b) are already reported on Bugzilla.
> (c) are in the mailing list archives already.

This is always true, and zapping the silly ones is obviously a good
idea.  I'm not saying all ideas from users are sacrosanct and must be
implemented; just that some may be a good idea, and that slapping users
down for making suggestions is a bad idea.

> Of course, these don't mean 100% of the time that the mailing list
> should not be used. But in many cases it's annoying to have to listen to
> the same conversations again and again, with no new ideas being
> introduced.

Hasn't the net *always* been like this? This is what a FAQ is for. :)

>> > - Say "no" when he doesn't want to do something.
>> 
>> I wish I had your powers of telepathy. I'd have expected the user to
>> know his own wants better than anyone else does.
> 
> I should have been more clear: I meant the developer needs to know how
> to say "no" when the *developer* doesn't want to do something!

It hasn't been my impression that Galeon's developers are shrinking
violets :)

> I imagine you took this list item as particularly arrogant of me and
> indicative of my disrespect for users. It was nothing of the sort.

Good! If the `he' is the *developer*, then by all means, there's nothing
forcing a developer to implement *anything*. They could even implement a
new Galeon that did nothing but display a picture of a sailing ship: I
just don't imagine that very many people would use it...

> Nah, this is just miscommunication on my part. Let me explain by
> example. I developed an ad-blocking extension for Epiphany. In the
> course of developing it, I used *myself* as a user. The back-end was
> straightforward enough to write, but when it comes to a user interface,
> I simply have no clue what to do.

(Snap. But that doesn't mean that user cluelessness extends to *all*
domains..)

>> > These tasks are incredibly difficult. Add to this the complication that
>> > a massive proportion of the user-base doesn't even know how to give
>> > feedback or make feature requests. In such a situation, it's impossible
>> > for developers to know the best way to do things.
>> 
>> Agreed :( but that makes it all the more important that if a user *does*
>> find some way to talk to us, that we don't blow him off with comments
>> about we know what he wants to do better than he does, which *sound*
>> fantastically arrogant whether or not they have a basis in fact.
> 
> Yeah, I'm like that. I apologize.

Well, I dunno; I misread what you posted and posted borderline flamebait
in respose and you came back with a pleasant response like this. I don't
think that's doing too badly. :)

-- 
> ...Hires Root Beer...
What we need these days is a stable, fast, anti-aliased root beer
with dynamic shading. Not that you can let just anybody have root.
 --- John M. Ford


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