Firefox crippling

[Enrico Scholz]

perbj at stanford.edu (Per Bjornsson) writes:

>> 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.

Abusing users as beta testers is known from other companies also...


> Nowadays it's right there in Edit->Preferences.

But it still does not respect current settings (was Gnome2.4 running
previously, then use normal window mode. Else, use the default spatial
mode), right?


>> 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.

That's why I said, that Gnome2 developers think that they are gods
because only they know what is right and what is not. But in most
cases, the right thing is to make it configurable; you will find a
common base only very seldom.


> 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.)

Yes, this paper is one of the root of the Gnome2 evil. Gnome2 developers
read it and think that they should program after it. E.g. because Gnome2
developers always think, they are right (see above), they assume that
everybody wants Emacs in the colors of the default theme. So they do not
care about existing ~/.Xresources entries and there is not way (not even
in the registry) to turn off this behavior. Ditto for ~/.Xmodmap. Or as
this thread shows, Gnome2 developers assume that everybody wants theme
icons in firefox and do not allow to configure it in another way.



Enrico
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