A call for open source programmers
Posted by Peng on 22 June 2008
Now that Firefox 3 is out and so many of us dislike some of the new default behaviors I thought of a way that a number of us could be made very happy, but it requires the services of programmers within the open source community.
With Firefox being an open source project I’m thinking that someone much smarter than me could take the code for Firefox 3 and the code for Firefox 2 and combine them in a way that could give us the speed of Firefox 3 but the look, feel and UI behaviors of Firefox 2. It should also accept either Firefox 2 or Firefox 3 extensions and themes, although I’m not sure which. Mainly I’m thinking about losing most of the Smart Location Bar and reverting it to a Firefox 2 address bar and ditching the new zoom system in favor of Firefox 2’s text zooming. If someone wants full page zoom with it they should be able to easily add the existing extension that does the job.
I’ll admit I have no idea how doable this is, although I know that Shawn Wilsher on Planet Mozilla said giving us both the old and new UIs is simply impossible. Perhaps what I’m hoping for is similarly impossible, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about coding to have a clue about how hard what I’m asking for would be, other than what Shawn is telling us.
I don’t have a clue what this browser would be called, although it certainly wouldn’t be called Firefox since Mozilla isn’t making it. One thing I do know is that if someone could do it, even just for Linux, it would make a lot of people very happy. (Sorry, but if it’s a Windows or an OSX app it would be completely useless for me.) So what do you open source programmers think? Would you be willing to take on this project, or at least look at it to see if it may even be possible?
Shawn Wilsher said
I didn’t say it was impossible, and I’m sorry if my post came across that way. My point was that there’s a high cost to providing two UI’s, and more often than not, the cost isn’t worth the benefit to most of our users.
Regarding your zoom complaint, you can easily restore the old behavior by going to View -> Zoom -> and toggle Zoom Text Only.
Stefano said
There should be an old-style location bar extension somewhere. It restores the old appearance but keeps the smarter text-matching routines.
Try to be less eversive, in the future
beerfan said
You have no clue.
Don’t like the theme? Install a different one. Don’t like behaviors? Create or find an extension that changes them.
You want to bring back the memory leaking, slow Firefox 2 engine? You want to make Firefox 3 backwards compatible with all extensions? I wish I could say good luck with that, but I hope you’ll just rather see the idiocy of it.
Peng said
@Shawn:
I know abut that, but the closest thing I’ve seen to Firefox 2’s tab-centric zooming is Zoomer 0.9, which has been superseded by Zoomer 1.0 which hands off the actual work of zooming to Firefox, which I (am others) are dissatisfied with.
@Stefano:
I know about the oldbar extension. In fact I’ve linked to it a few times.
@Beerfan:
Wow, themes and extensions. I never would have thought of that.
If you had read all of what I wrote you’d have seen that I want the Firefox 3 engine but without the UI changes that have been shoved down our throats, if that’s even possible. And there are plenty of Remove-ons (as someone else called them), I just wish there were another way to do it than adding more code on top of Firefox 3 and taking up useless RAM and CPU cycles just to disable something that got changed rather than having people use already available extensions.
Stefano said
I feel it’s very unlikely that someone will be up for such a project, given the effort it would require and given that alternatives exists (and are probably not that heavy on CPU cycles and memory). And that would be a shame anyway, I really think that would just be wasted effort.
roflkartofl said
Reminds me of this.
Not. Good.
Azrael Nightwalker said
1) Enter about:config in the address bar
2) Type “rich” in the search filter and the only hit should be:
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
3) Set its value to 0
4) No more awesomebar.
Azrael Nightwalker said
And get a Winstripe Classic theme:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/6883
Roger said
I am sorry but I think this is a stupid idea…
Seiti said
Try Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany or any other browser. Much easier than reinventing the wheel (or asking people to reinvent).
Fork said
Peng, just switch back to Firefox 2.0.0.15 when it comes out so we don’t have to hear you whine about 3.0 anymore.
Forking just for the sake of forking=STUPID
Peng said
Thanks for all the advice, y’all. I had to ask.
@Fork:
If you don’t want to risk hearing my extreme disappointment in what became Firefox 3 please feel free to avail yourself of not reading my posts.
@Everyone else:
I’m calling a full lid on Firefox 3. I won’t be blogging about it for the foreseeable future, even to pass along news of Firefox 3.1. One of these days I hope to find a browser I can be happy with, and when I do I’ll let you know what I come up with.
I know several of you got tired of my rants, but consider me a representative of larger number of users who are unhappy with Firefox 3, even with all of the speed improvements. I simply happen to be someone who has a blog and didn’t mind using it to give voice to the many who don’t have a platform for expressing their disappointment.
Comments on this post, as well as all of my Firefox 3 posts, are now closed (or will be by the time I log off for the night). In the words of Josiah Bartlet, “What’s next?”