[geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 14 Apr 2002, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> All GUIs come to be bloated with featuritis -- users demand it.  It

There has to be some way of making lusers happy without making "power
users" feel like they've bought a $3000 Unix box just to tie lead weights
around its ankles.

Instead of all the recent focus about "skinnable" UIs, why hasn't someone
played with a "pluggable"[1] UI?  That is, sort-of like Java, you only
have the components/features you want/need loaded.  So long as you cut it
up by features, rather than widgets, I think it would be possible to meet
in the middle somewhere.

Windows does this, to an extent, but a lot of component designers just
lump a bunch of components into a single library because the load time is
nontrivial--thus defeating the purpose of having the component be runtime
loadable.

> seems there are relatively few people who can actually use a minimal GUI
> environment without wanting more,

I don't know what to make of this, really.  Lots of people were perfectly
happy with Win3.1 or twm or System 7 a while back.  Many of those people
didn't -want- any more featuritis than they already had.  Now, people can
get too much of animated graphical crap all over the place, and animated
cartoon-dogs when they want to search for files.  What happened?

> and every time you think you've got a minimal GUI that you can use
> someone will come along and tell you how bloated and over-featured it
> is!  :-)

I've been one to argue that point.  I've got a perfectly usable VT420 that
I use when I get tired of all this X crap.

> No it doesn't.

Then multiply your savings estimates by N, then, since Konqueror does.
How's -that- for a design flaw?

> Unfortunately some of the UI features are not properly separated
> across windows (eg. the mangifier widget can affect other windows
> sometimes, probably because of some deeper problem within the Gecko
> part).

Windows/IE does this, too, and the cause is probably the same--that
property isn't per-window, it's per-instance.

> I would suspect that not so many people use separate windows though,
> with the excellent built-in handling of tabs for separate pages.

I might be able to get used to tabs, but I don't know.  If there were a
hotkey for switching tabs, I might actually like that better.

--Jonathan
[1] Or did NeWS do this?