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Topic: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies (Read 10796 times)

Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/11/australis-ui-lands-in-firefox-nightly.html
Quote
The first thing you'll notice when using Australis is its curved tabs and the clear distinction between foreground and background tabs.

I don't like curved tabs.
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However, since it landed in the latest Firefox Nightly, it will most probably be available with Firefox 28 which will launch March 4, 2014.

March 2014 sure is a depressing month in browserland. :P

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #1
Are you testing those Australis nightlies yourself? I made FF my system default at 0.7, but since version 1 I only installed finals. What are your impressions? Do you have links to sane in-depth critical analyses? Am I asking too many questions at once?

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #2
I haven't yet tested Australis, but I can tell you in advance that I like applications that abide by the way I tell them to look, and I don't like applications that think they should go against my preferences.[1] So if I have a theme with rounded tabs, sure, have rounded tabs, but otherwise, abide by my native GTK/Windows/whatever theme!

I do use Thunderbird, which already has rounded tabs. They're better than in Chromium because while they look rounded, on hovering they act like square tabs so you don't have those annoying areas where they don't work.

How much there is to like or dislike other than looks remains to be seen. But having to download an extension just to get a native GTK theme doesn't bode well. On the other hand, on Chromium/Chropera you wish you could download an extension…

[1] I make a slight exception of sorts for Qt4 vs. GTK type issues, but even so I've semi-separately set them up to look the same.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #3

I don't like curved tabs.

Can't say I'm to keen on them myself either, too chrome-like.
But I do like the way the active tab looks in those example screens, maybe it's the black background that adds to the effect.
The start and end to every story is the same. But what comes in between you have yourself to blame.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #4
So in all this Australis hype they forgot the principle of conforming to desktop look and feel with GUI? Or at least trying/pretending to? Sad story that Chrome started.

To me it makes quite a difference what GUI looks like. With this forced stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb trend it looks like I have to migrate entirely to shell and never return.

BTW, can the mods see the user-agent strings here? Of course they can, silly question. Will you put up some stats in a while too?

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #5
Opera has never been super-native either, but somehow it has always been within my comfort range. Chromium feels like a stranger on any platform, possibly including Android.

As for stats… Awstats complains that it's not enabled, and says that enabling it will reset some passwords. Sounds scary. O_o The forum itself logs the IP address, but I don't obviously notice it logging the user agent. I find that somewhat odd.

Edit: typo.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #6
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Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #7
I know, right. People keep saying Chrome is faster or even the fastest, yet Firefox seems to lock the GUI less than Chrome and Opera tended to prevent locking the GUI at all. I'll gladly waste a few ms in total page rendering time, let alone a few µs, if it means a more responsive, i.e. faster GUI. I find it incomprehensible that people generally prefer what I call Chrome-fast.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #8
I find it mind-boogling that people call Firefox bloated. Under similar conditions, Chrome uses a lot more ram than Fx.  The more tabs you have open, the worse it gets. Now it does seem to be true Chrome releases the ram more easily when you close a tab.

Or maybe I'm confused and Fx being "bloated" is symptom of the Options = Bloat Disease.


Firefox seems to lock the GUI less than Chrome and Opera tended to prevent locking the GUI at all.
On Windows, Chrome would lock up the whole machine from time to time. I used to laugh that people said multiple processes keep one tab from locking up the whole browser when the whole machine would freeze. This is far from a high end machine (Athlon X2, 3 GB ram) but its enough so I should be able to easily run a web browser with as many tabs as I need. From what I've read, a higher end machine might not really help because the more ram you have, the more it likes to use.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #9

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/11/australis-ui-lands-in-firefox-nightly.html
Quote
The first thing you'll notice when using Australis is its curved tabs and the clear distinction between foreground and background tabs.

I don't like curved tabs.

And that's the big innovation this time around? Now where have I seen that years ago...  ::)


Quote
However, since it landed in the latest Firefox Nightly, it will most probably be available with Firefox 28 which will launch March 4, 2014.

March 2014 sure is a depressing month in browserland. :P

Holy version number inflation, Batman!
Guess it will take a while until that one hits pkgsrc - what I got from there a week or so ago is ESR 25. Serious case of mine's bigger than yours. Given the actual changes ( other than bugfixes and various fuckups like buggering up non-x86 and non-ARM support for years ) between the releases we might just insert a dot in the middle.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #10

I haven't yet tested Australis, but I can tell you in advance that I like applications that abide by the way I tell them to look, and I don't like applications that think they should go against my preferences.[1] So if I have a theme with rounded tabs, sure, have rounded tabs, but otherwise, abide by my native GTK/Windows/whatever theme!

The default theme in ESR 25 is still reasonably close to gtk2's default theme. What annoys me with FF is that parts of the UI will follow the gtk2 theme and some won't.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #11

Opera has never been super-native either, but somehow it has always been within my comfort range.

Depends, the early windows versions and all BeOS and MacOS 9 ones all used their native GUI toolkits and therefore didn't look very much alike at all. The UI customization stuff ( and with that uniform look across platforms ) didn't really start until 5.x or 6.x IIRC, and on MacOS only at 7, when they switched to native OSX.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #12

I find it mind-boogling that people call Firefox bloated. Under similar conditions, Chrome uses a lot more ram than Fx.

And so does Opera 12, sadly. It keeps gobbling up RAM, has to quit when the machine starts to swap ( usually when the opera process hits about 2.5GB ), and when restarted with all the same pages open it will be well below 1GB. FF doesn't seem to have this problem, or at least not nearly as bad.

The weird thing about that is how builds of FF from the same source behave on different hardware. On my amd64 laptop ( 4GB RAM, NetBSD -current, so binaries are LP64 by default ) FF is a memory pig, hits 1GB of address space use with just a few pages open. On my Blade 2500 ( UltraSPARC-IIIi CPUs, 4GB RAM, NetBSD -current, also 64bit binaries by default ) it uses a lot less RAM ( data should be the same, code should be more compact on amd64, so wtf?! ), with more pages open. It remains relatively responsive even with a bunch of compilers running in the background. Even the OS is built from the same source on both.
Might have something to do with the javascript engines - kinda-sorta compiler on amd64, plain old interpreter on SPARC. On the other hand, both have noscript installed and I won't enable javascript for anything unless absolutely necessary.


The more tabs you have open, the worse it gets. Now it does seem to be true Chrome releases the ram more easily when you close a tab.

Opera doesn't seem to do that at all these days.


Or maybe I'm confused and Fx being "bloated" is symptom of the Options = Bloat Disease.

Bloat seems to be synonymous with giving the user some degree of control these days.
This less-is-better thing reminds me of something - maybe mozilla should call the 'new' UI newclick.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #13
For me on Ubuntu 13.10, it usually takes 500-600 Mb with seven or eight tabs open. To be honest, I'm not really sure how Opera holds up. I didn't bother installing it until last night.   :-X

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #14
My Opera 12.16 is using about 1GB with… I guess about 40 pages open?

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #15

My Opera 12.16 is using about 1GB with… I guess about 40 pages open?


My FireFox Portable v17.0.11 ESR with 46 random pages open, while also running 50+ extensions/addons at the same time,  was running between 940mb - 1137mb (consistently closer to the top end).

With only this thread & my Speed Dial open (700+ speed dials) it consistently runs below 750mb

Just a simple lil question, why would anyone need 40+ pages open at the same time???

Solely to stress the browser, or for other legitimate every day reasons???


Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #16
Right now I have a bunch of IMDB pages, a bit of Wikipedia, some potential online shopping investigation, a whole heap of things related to the latest CyanogenMod I just installed on my phone, a bunch of forum threads and blog posts to check out… just some free-time browsing. Such a session is an ongoing thing. I may not get to some of them for days or weeks.  I don't want to be distracted by such trivial matters as closing pages, or have to spend time managing them some way or other (like Stash).

Do I need that? Not necessarily for my spare time; but for researching stuff I'd say of course. If I'm working on some Python on one (virtual) desktop, some JS in another, writing a document or two in a third, and am editing a picture in a fourth, each desktop might have a window open with all kinds of supporting documentation. And I could leave all of that open when I do spare-time stuff.

Of course I don't work on all these things at the same time. I could close everything except what I'm working on, but then I'd have to spend time managing that, closing and reopening things, etc. Thanks to 6GB RAM* I usually don't have to think about such trivialities at all, so I can focus on what I'm doing.

* Not that much these days really, but usually sufficient for my needs.
Solely to stress the browser, or for other legitimate every day reasons???

To this I say, only a Chromium user would call some light browsing a stress test. :P

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #17
Quote from: An earlier post by Frenzie
To this I say, only a Chromium user would call some light browsing a stress test. :P


Yeah! .......

...........If you ever use FireFox, try this add-on ..... Session Manager


Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #18
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Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #19

My Opera 12.16 is using about 1GB with… I guess about 40 pages open?

That's what it starts out with, it just keeps growing. What I have open isn't even all that complex - a bunch of tvtropes, some news, docs etc., nothing script heavy or with lots of large images.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #20
Geez, if it was almost everybody else, I'd ask if a plug-in is acting up or something  :o I just opened Opera is news, Facebook, My Opera, and Cheezburger. The result is 391 megs of RAM used, which is sure to increase once I put through its paces.  Chromium actually doesn't start off bad on system resources, but likes to eat a gig of RAM within a couple hours of my normal use.

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #21
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Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #22

My Opera 12.16 is using about 1GB with… I guess about 40 pages open?


Did you ever try Opera v12.16 Portable?

With somewhere over 40 tabs open I only use about 620-680mb with the portable version (which is the only v12,0 I have on this machine).

Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #23
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Re: Australis moved on from Fx experimental GUI to regular nightlies

Reply #24

What's different about the "portable" version? Does it include Flash? (Regular Opera can also be installed with the profile in program directory.)


You're probably a better judge about that than I.

Give it a run for the money, & let us know.

Get it here........ Opera v12.16 Portable

~~ OR ~~

Direct Download

Run the installer & point it to any empty directory of your choice (or your USB Drive if you so wish).