Firefox crippling

[Per Bjornsson]

On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 21:52 +0200, Enrico Scholz wrote:

> Do you remember the spartial window management in nautilus? It was a
> completely experimental feature, it was tried only by a very small
> userbase before, there were lot of critical voices against it -- and
> the Gnome2 developers actived it without providing a way to turn it
> off, and it was activated on every existing system.

It was always possible to turn it off, but in order to get _more_
testing it wasn't made obvious to begin with. Nowadays it's right there
in 
Edit->Preferences. You're getting awfully close to red herrings here!

> Ditto for epiphany -- its experimental bookmark management was never proved
> to be useful but everybody was forced to use it.

Epiphany was never meant to be all things to all people, if you don't
like it then use another web browser. Its purpose is to be an easy-to-
use non-intimidating browser. By the way, basically what you are asking
here is that the authors write a _different_ bookmark system from what
they want, in addition to the one they want.

> Or metacity... there are
> lot of wishes which are all rejected because configurability is assumed as
> evil by Gnome2 developers.

To some extent, configurability _is_ evil, especially when it's done
instead of just doing things right. More generally, options have a cost,
both to the developer and the user. Have you even cared to read Havoc's
(now somewhat old, but still generally relevant) article on this?
http://www.ometer.com/free-software-ui.html
(especially the section on options a bit down.)

> Altogether, Gnome2 is a very unergonomic piece of software. Userfriendly
> software should adapt to the user, but with Gnome2 the user has to adapt
> to the software. This is caused by the refusal of Gnome2 developers to
> allow configuration of their software and the frequent changes of the
> user interface.

I'm a Gnome user and have been for a long time and the only really major
shift that I noticed and cared about was when Nautilus went spatial.

In principle I think the debate here might be between trying to keep
compatibility with old cruft (with rather few users) or to try to build
the best system for the future (i.e. something that will attract users
who have Windows and Mac experience and couldn't care less about hacking
config files in order to get some sanity to a desktop.)

/Per