Firefox crippling

[Kjartan Maraas]

ons, 08,.06.2005 kl. 23.28 +0200, skrev 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...
> 
Can we stop with the shit slinging and throwing around hints that GNOME
== Windows please?

> 
> > 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?
> 
The decision was made to use spatial as default, can you seriously still
be offended by having to flick a switch two years later? You sure know
how to hold a grudge :-)

> 
> >> 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.
> 
And some people are more interested in tweaking settings that actually
doing work. Seriously, the argument is that every preference comes with
a cost. That cost is on the maintainer since the maintainer has to deal
with bugs in the code, porting to new interfaces, documenting things
etc. This is one of the main arguments against preferences. Not that the
user interface should be dumbed down so that "newbies" don't get scared
off or that one should mimick other OSes just for the fun of it.

The GNOME project definitely is influenced by design choices of other
desktops and OSes, but it's not like we blindly follow either one of
them and have no opinion of our own.

> 
> > 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.
> 
AFAIK there is code in gnome-settings-daemon to merge stuff from both
Xmodmap and Xresources, maybe the daemon just has bugs that were never
filed because someone decided to flame and rant about the issue because
they thought it was a conscious decision to fuck users over?

You know where bugzilla is if that's the case.

Cheers
Kjartan