Re: getting more screen real estate I just switch to full screen mode when necessary. Chrome does have some nice touches but I see no reason to copy it wholesale.

Unless the developers find a way to keep the functionality (they do serve a purpose), I hope they are not removed. I believe Firefox 3.5.3 is the best it has ever been and they are on the right track.

Id rather see those building websites go back to school and re-learn how a browser was designed to work. If you resize a window, you dont lose part of what you are viewing. And thinking everyone will have a 16:9 screen when FF 3.7 is available is a joke.

If you dont think there is a desire for customization and extended functionality, why are there 10,000 addons for FF?

It seems we are heading to a browser in the form of a dialog box with a pinhole in the middle.

Likewise, please keep a standard menu bar. They are a standard GUI element in the vast majority of Windows applications and work in a consistent way, except when developers do weird things to skinned apps. Microsoft is the main one that’s been pushing for menu bar-less designs, and they can’t even settle on a consistent style: look at MS Office vs. Vista’s Explorer, for instance! Also, before they tried eliminating them completely they used to push for abbreviated menus in Office and the Start menu, and I have yet to meet anyone who actually liked them–actually, a lot of novice users seem to just get frustrated and confused because their regular menu commands were “gone”!

If you take the bookmarks bar as an example, here any kind of site, no matter how different, will be arranged in a consistent row if favicons and names you can easily change yourself. If developers had access to some kind of bar that had a simple rule set like this, that would help smooth things out when it came to expanding extensions beyond just a few. But again, that’s going to eat into browsing space and it can’t really be a default option, so were back to square one.

Menus used to be a consistent feature of every program, but that’s changing. The menu was always a cheap design trick to fit in extra functionality into the UI without actually doing any hard work. Office is a good example of a program that abused its menu, which has been addressed nicely in the form of the context sensitive ribbon bar which pulls out menu items and gives you graphical access to them.

Finally I’d say the few pixels gained by removing the menu bar was important. From a usability standpoint, the area which gets 99% of your attention are the sites the browser displays, anything that eats into that has to have a special reason to do so. This is acutely so on limited height resolution Netbooks and new screens coming out which are portable and so small be necessity.

I’d also say be careful with the shadows, they have a habit of seriously complicating layouts and the ones you have are also inconsistent in terms of the light source. It looks from the buttons that the light source is positioned above and slightly towards the top of the screen but if so the content area should not have a shadow on its top edge (that would imply the light is actually coming from below). You should really pay attention to the properties of the light source and document them so they can be reproduced accurately and consistently by 3rd-party developers.

Oh well. This is far from final, and even if it were, I’d get used to it as I have to all the other changes. I do like the extensive glass integration and the back-forward buttons.

One thing if you recognize it. We are statistically insignificant, but because these things happen, like saying that we are insignificant and therefore does not develop software for us.

If the developers work more on our platform, I am sure we would not be an issue as insignificant.

Open Source is a river that people come to drink from, not put water back into. Only hippies do that and they are also statistically negligible :) (read as a joke but with a lining of truth)

Not that I don’t have any love for the Linux. I do, really I do. It’s just easy to forget about it sometimes in all the hub and bub of an average windows powered computing day.

Feel free to throw cabbages at me or something.

Bookmarks bar should stay gone by default. Already there is too much space taken up by the tabs and buttons. Add to that the taskbar in Windows and the browsing height is rapidly decreasing.

I’ve tweaked my Firefox to use as little vertical space as possible and while it requires a change in how you use the browser, once you get into it, it’s so much better having more vertical space in the area where you’re really concentrating most of your attention, the actual websites.

The only criticism I have though is the removal of the menu bar. If it were to go like this, I’d like there to be some sort of option to bring it back. If I ever have to use IE, I cannot bear putting up with its system, either having to turn it on or keep pressing “Alt”. I’d also imagine that it would be hard to merge seven menus into two without such menus looking rather cluttered. Possibly there could be a “menus” button that causes them to slide in somewhere in the design (sort of non-transparent though, attached to the border like the tools menu is). If not, where the pages button is would be a good place to have a “Menu” button from which all the menus currently available as sub-menus emerge.

I’m also slightly concerned about the missing bookmarks bar. Maybe hidden by default, but certainly being an option – I don’t use the menu, just the bar (although I now do search bookmarks through the bar as opposed to using the menu).

Other than that though very stylish and modern looking.

One idea that just came to me was that the bookmarks button in the menu could sort of transform into a bookmarks only search box. A menu sort of comes down, a search box in it, below that space for the results and then below that the other bookmarking options/menus.