http://www.mozillazine.org/chromezone/

Though nothing there now will work with the beta. Hopefully that will change soon.

I agree, the UI is a critical element to the success of the program. If it doesn't look cool or pretty on first impression then people won't give a flip about how standards-compliant the browser is.

I'm actually kind of worried about how Moz looks now. It's got this down and depressing color tone to it. I know there are different chromes for it, but the media isn't going to take the time to look at the other chromes if the default package sucks.

http://www.corp.aol.com/

http://www.corp.aol.com/

Just in case you didn't know, Netscpape Online has been running in the UK as a "real ISP" for quite a while now (since August 1999) at http://www.netscapeonline.co.uk/

I picked up one of their CD-ROMs from a UK Woolworth store and was shocked to actually see an ISP CD with Netscape bundled with it :-)

More info at: http://news.cnet.com/news/search/results/1,10199,0-1002,00.html

n/t

Sure, you may understand that as a developer or as a power user or whatever you are. But you've obviously got a lot more knowledge than the basic user.

Do you really expect the basic user to understand when you tell them that you can't make Mozilla do something because of a technical specification's limitations? No! They could care less. The average Joe who uses windows is going to expect thousands of colors, if not millions.

I'm not saying that the whole thing has to be recoded. I'm just saying don't be surprised if UI critiques bite Netscape 6 is the rear end.

Yes, but there is absolutly no reason they couldn't package several different skins with the install, maby even make windows automatically use the non-standard skin, but leave all skins as an option, its just a skin after all, no reason skins have to be completly cross platform.

The main part of the UI that I think is very tacky (at least from what I saw of "unofficial" beta screenshots) was that no one has yet fixed the back/forward/reload buttons sitting past the dark blue region onto the lower grey region (just the bottom of the buttons hangs over the edge). I can't see how this is intentional, and if it is, well, at least IMO it's very very ugly. The ironic part is that this obvious quirk has been part of the UI/skin for some time now, and like I said appears to remain in the at least "unofficial" beta. Please, please, someone fix that.

Ben wrote:

"A few points to note about the current skin: - it is XP."

Who cares? The average user certainly doesn't, because the average user will only use Mozilla on one platform.

"Some people want to use system colours, but system colours only work properly on windows (look at the CSS2 spec, and you'll see why)."

Well, you'd better start implementing moz-css hacks for the things (such as scrollbar thumb color) which are missing for Mac -- otherwise no ordinary Mac user is going to take Mozilla seriously.

"Some people want a nicer looking 'conservative' look, or a nicer looking 'cool' look, regardless of colour choice: note that the colours required to do this would probably be outside the web safe colour palette."

Given that you'd be using CSS system colors, the CSS system colors would be extracted from the OS setttings, and the OS settings are already be being used by every other app on the system ... why would it be at all relevant that those colors weren't in the Web-safe color palette?

-- mpt

Hang on. There are two important things to consider here. #1 is that just because they are deciding to make the UI colors web-safe, does not mean that it has to be butt-ugly. You say that either a good "cool" or "conservative" look are not possible with the websafe palette- I beg to differ.. I mean, granted, the 216 colors can be a bit limiting but there is still plenty there to work with. I mean, people are coding some really nice websites with these colors, are they not?

The second point is, why even make it a priority to have a generic XP skin? This is something that programmers tend to think is a great thing but really isn't. Saying, "and the Mac, Unix, and Windows versions all look and feel exactly the same!" will not score big points with the general public. Can't Netscape hire a graphic designer to spend a couple of weeks creating custom skins for Mac, Linux, Be, PC, etc. ? Heck, they could probably find an intern to do it for free.

And finally the Windows UI grey corresponds exactly with websafe color #CCCCCC. I think Apple Platinum may also use this grey, not sure.

A few points about the current Mozilla and Navigator 4.7 interfaces:

1. Edit boxes: Edit boxes are not edit boxes until they are activated. This drives me nuts! Especially on the Location Bar. It can make the UI seem really unresponsive at times.

2. One Click pop-up menus: I really like how in 4.x, pop-up menus activate on the mouse-down event, rather that the mouse-up event(ms-windows standard). It makes for some really quick mouse work. This is currently missing in Mozilla. The Menu appears on the mouse-down event, but it does not respond to the mouse until the button is raised. (It always takes two clicks to do anything with a pop-up menu)

3. Keyboard shortcuts / Tab selection: (The only thing that MS has contributed to the GUI world). Keyboard short cuts and tab selection *must* be fully functional or people will never stop bitching, especially WRT standard dialogs and wizards.

3.5 Using the keyboard to select and 'click' a button on a web page should provide some indication that the button was actually clicked. (The button should look like it was clicked)

4. One of the main reasons why I use Navigator is for the excellent feedback that is returned when it's in the middle of doing something: - Busy cursor in the gfx window. Standard cursor on the UI. - Status bar always displays meaningful information.

IE4 did not come close to accomplishing this, and IE5 still doesn't have it right.

I think that Mozilla must do this better than Nav4.x, considering the apparent sluggishness of the UI (Especially on X)

All to often you are sitting and waiting for Mozilla, but you're not quite sure what it's doing. In other words, sometimes you aren't sure that anything happed as a result of clicking that button, or hitting that 'enter' key; and after a while you begin to lose faith in it.

It is still way to easy to get into a situation where throbber is throbbing, status bar is spinning, yet the status bar text reads "Done" ( Specifically when using the back/fwd buttons, and also when mousing over a link during page load)

UI lag is also present on operations that create new windows. (The UI appears dead for the time it takes to construct a new window, which is a long time) Extensive use of the busy cursor is required.

4.1 Window destruction takes an incredibly long time, preventing the browser window underneath from repainting itself. This isn't a UI design issue, but it is very ackward none-the-less, especially when you like to browse with multiple windows.

5. Bookmarks: I love everything there is about Navigator 4.x bookmarks. I have my bookmark root set to the personal toolbar, with a number of sub-folders stemming off of the toolbar. This is incredibly handy for both getting, and setting the bookmarks.

When bookmarking a page, it's very easy to keep things organized by simply dragging the link onto the personal toolbar, and into the appropriate sub-folder.

As well, I usually keep the bookmark manager stuck to the left hand side of my screen (ala sidebar) behind everything, so that complete bookmark management is always very easy and convenient to get to.

The current UI bookmark implementation fails on two accounts: - You can not drag items on to the personal toolbar. It worked on earlier builds (~M7 ?) but it has since been removed. (Is this simply a skin issue, or is there more behind it?) - The bookmark sidebar is non-functional when compared to the bookmark manager. These two should be functionality identical (give or take a couple of columns), otherwise, what's the point.

(I may sound bitter about these things, only because I think I read in the UI newsgroups earlier that the current implementations of the personal toolbar and bookmark side bar were essentially finished, and are not going to change. That would suck.)

5.1 It would be really rad if the sidebar could be dragged out of the browser window, and into it's own window. (Bonus points for allowing it "dock" to a side of the screen) I never browse at full screen, and I always have a number of browser windows open, so it seems silly to have 2 or 3 visible sidebars and menus on my desktop.

5.2 The personal toolbar is way to small. It looks way cooler when it's small, but it's also far less functional.

6.0 Skin Specific Issues: The skin isn't 3D, which is a refreshing change, however, when most controls are clicked or selected, the only visual 'clicking' indication they give is to move down and to the right by a pixel. Considering that this is a non-standard UI, and that most novice users won't know which controls can and cannot be clicked, it should be made painfully obvious that: a) the control can be clicked (perhaps pop up on hover, maybe just change color); b) The control is being clicked (inverse the control color during the click)

This may seem like a small point, but it's the little things that count, especially when a user is forced to use and learn a completely new and unique UI.

6.1 It would also be nice if the menu items blinked to indicate that they have been selected, again, because of UI sluggishness.

7. Some minor points:

Scrolling: Another thing I like about Navigator 4.x (win32) is the window scrolling when dragging/selecting past the browser window boundary. It's very smooth and very easy to control. Mozilla does this (or did this) to a certain extent, however, it seems that this has always been treated as somewhat of a side-effect (current builds do not scroll at all) It would be really nice if there was a small button (perhaps on each scroll bar) that, when dragged, would scroll the window in a similar way that 4.x currently does, without selecting any text.

Selection: Text selection inverts the text, yet it also inverts the background. The 4.x implementation is better, as it can aid in reading poorly designed web sites when the background color/texture clashes with the text. (This seems to have been fixed in later builds)

Status Bar: Status bar should display button and menu help text (and bookmark urls) on mouse hover like in 4.x

Final Note: I think a lot of people really liked the first Mozilla skin. It would be crazy to not bundle both of these skins (or more) with Netscape 6.0, so that users can at least choose to use either a more traditional interface, or the radically new interface.

Whoa! That ended up being way longer than I had intended. If you got this far, thanks for reading!

-- Darren

I know that a month ago it was stalled out because Be was getting ready to release 5.0. I bet they get the code base up to date too.

I doubt there will be a Netscape version, just a Mozilla version, which is fine by me.

Have a look at bug 7954 ("outstanding HTML 4.0 compliance issues")

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7954

Why does everyone hate the default skin so very much? It's sleek, simple, and easy to use. The purpose of each of the buttons is obvious and there are not so many as to become confusing. The whole thing is nicely non-cluttered. And the throbber simply looks good. Even the sidebar is useful, though it's continual misbehaviour is a pain. Contrast this to IE where all of the buttons fade to grey and thus become less than easy to distinguish between, while lending the whole thing a rather bland look. It is annoyingly cluttered, with several rather useless buttons adding to the confusion.

The only complaints I can bring to bear on the current skin is the lack of a nice big bookmarks button next to the navigation controls, and the kind of tacked-on look of the Windows bar and menus at the top.

Will somebody please explain to me WHY they believe that "the Mozilla UI sux!"

At present none of the alternative chrome thingies are any use (one of them looks nice, but it isn't finished and most features do not work).

But, they will be. So at that point you can switch.

Personally, I like the Mozilla UI, although the colour-clash with the throbber is really, really annoying - but this will change for the Netscape-branded beta, thankfully :)

--sam

also, is this going to be the same build that was *leaked* about a week ago, or an updated version?

It's available since 1947 at f-t-p://f-t-p.elvis.gov/lives/at/mars/said/mulder.tar.gz

Remember Mozilla is still under heavey development, things can shift up and down constantly (including performance). I don't know what's been the specific issue(s) but I won't be surprised if "Preview Release 1" isn't as fast as M14, as long as the general trend in future release is towards improvement.

<:3)~~

Mozilla binaries are compiled everyday (these are called the "nightlies", think of them as "daily snapshot"), and some are better than others. Sometimes, they can become unstable or slow for a few days along and then it improves as bugs are corrected or new features are optimised. I've not grabbed this "leaked version" but from what i've read it was not a good snapshot and nightlies like the 2000-03-28's one are much better.

it is ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/netscape6/english

(I forgot the 'pub')

What did you expect? I mean, there is only so much extra Netscape can add to an already solid product. Lets see... it's got the security stuff compiled in... it's clearly faster than any nightly I've ever used (and I've used them daily for nearly 5 months)... and, oh yeah, let's not forget that dailies have been nearly unusable for 5 or 6 days now, and this is not (I missed my right clicks.) If this is what the future of browsing is (particularly in terms of speed!) I'm very excited.