Firefox 4.0: IE7 revisited?

I saw the Firefox 4.0 screenshot mockups today and I have to say, it reminds me of Internet Explorer 7 more than anything else. Check out this side-by-side:

Ugh. I really don’t get it. Do they really need to dumb down the Firefox interface even more than it already is? I seriously hope that the final release of it includes an option that lets one bring back some of the stuff they seem intent on removing (like menus for basic things… “file”, “edit”, “view”, et al?). I mean seriously… even IE7 lets one do that much…

I know it’s not open source, but I still prefer Opera as far as an interface goes. I can rearrange, add, remove, or tweak various elements of it to work exactly how I want, and it doesn’t fight me every step of the way. It already includes functionality for which (to make it equivalent) I have to install no fewer than 5 extensions to Firefox 3.5, and is a smaller download, uses far less memory, and is faster on top of everything else.

I wish Opera would GPL their browser… if they did, it’d be the perfect choice for me.

Or, alternatively I could make this request of the Firefox developers. Guys, if you MUST emulate someone else’s proprietary browser’s interface and functionality, might I suggest NOT emulating Microsoft’s back-assward response to your OWN efforts from 5 years ago? IE7 has always seemed to me like a really bad Firefox 1.0 Beta. WHY on earth would you want to emulate that?

I’m positively baffled here, guys. Seriously. I understand that you’re just brainstorming, but don’t even joke about this as a starting point.

And another thing. If you decide NOT to emulate IE7 (like in the first screenshot), PLEASE don’t emulate Google Chrome by making the tabs at the top (like in the second screenshot). That’s even worse, in my opinion.

Thank you.

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Fluxbox screenshot time

I posted a screenshot in my Fluxbox article a month ago, but Fluxbox is just so tweakable and so sharp looking I feel the need to post another screenshot just to illustrate that.

This is Fluxbox v1.0.0 with the “sid_fluxarnation” style, running on top of Slackware 12.1. I don’t recall where I got the sid_fluxarnation style, but you can easily find one like it, among about a billion others by going here or by following any of the other links in the “styles” section at the bottom of this page on the Fluxbox site.

Also in that screenshot, you can see I’m running GKrellM 2.3.1, using the K5-FVWM theme for it which I downloaded from Muhri.net.

As always, if anyone has questions regarding how to configure or tweak their Fluxbox setup, let me know. It’s easier than you might think! Cheers!

Will ARM processors be competitive?

I just ran across this blurb about an ARM-processor based netbook and it got me thinking.

I’ve been skeptical of ARM-based netbooks. While lauded for their low power consumption and versatility, because they’re mostly a PDA/cell phone/router type of CPU, I have trouble envisioning an ARM netbook as being very comparable in performance to one running, say, an Intel Atom.

My initial thoughts on Google Chrome OS

Last week, as a big surprise to some, but as a long-expected move to others Google announced that they would be releasing their own operating system.

There has been a lot of buzz in the past few days as a result, mostly about netbooks, about Microsoft, and (not surprisingly) about Linux.

It’s too early, I think, to be making a huge deal out of this. Let’s step back a bit and take a look at the situation.

Briefly: How to change from command line only at boot to a graphical login manager in Slackware

When I first started using Linux, I used Red Hat and Mandrake, both of which booted into a graphical environment by default.

One of the first things I noticed about Slackware when I first installed it was the fact that it booted into a command line only interface by default. From there, I had to log in, and if I wanted a GUI, I had to type “startx” and then it’d start X-windows and go into whatever my default window manager was.

I remember being a little confused about this at first; it wasn’t a problem, but I knew there had to be a way to change that. I figured I’d write up a brief few paragraphs on that subject, since I ended up having to dig around the web some at first to figure that out.