No more right click terminal

[Per Bjornsson]

On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 12:17 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> It's interesting to read people claim there is absolutely no problem, user
> experience will be enhanced by a simpler desktop, when (for example) at
> the same time Gnome browsers sink into obscurity and are replaced by
> Firefox.
> 
> Seems actual "basic" users would rather cope with the warts of a
> non-native app than experience the full Gnome simplicity.

I think that this is about the worst example you could possibly have
chosen to go with. Firefox was explicitly designed with goals very much
in line with the Gnome desktop: Creating a browser with a simple
interface for regular users. In the Mozilla community, well not so much
in the core developer community as far as I can tell but in the
hangaround crowd, moving from the monolithic Mozilla Suite to the
individual apps with their simplified interfaces has also caused a lot
of uproar. Yet I'd say that Firefox qualifies as a much greater success
than the Moz Suite ever was, finding both fame and huge amounts of
users.

Epiphany was always rather obscure (at least in terms of user base), and
with Firefox crowding the market for a simple-UI browser with way
superior marketing, Epiphany is really in a tight spot. That really says
nothing about Gnome as a whole.

Now, the Firefox comparison is interesting in one way though: Firefox
draws people with some development skills somewhat into the community by
means of the extension mechanism: you can code up cool add-ons easily.
In some sense, the removal of the "Open terminal..." feature, replaced
by the nautilus-open-terminal Nautilus extension, actually maps
perfectly onto the Firefox idea of a simple core which "power users" can
extend with some extension mechanism.

Perhaps the trick for Gnome is to market the various extension
possibilities more. Clearly fun stuff is possible (Nautilus extensions,
look at Brightside and Devilspie for WM crack...) In fact I think that
this to a great extent is actually a marketing problem rather than a
technical problem. But marketing is serious stuff, so a marketing
problem is certainly a real problem, not something to handwave away...

/Per

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University