Remixing Mac
I think its fair to say that many people weren’t 100% happy with the visual refresh on Mac in Firefox 2. We haven’t forgotten about this, so I took 15 minutes and hacked a few pieces of things into a bit of a PoC. Results are below.
This is combining Uno (to achieve the unified look) and Kevin and Steven Horlander’s tabs from Pinstripe. There’s a lot of great work in Pinstripe (notably the tabs, sidebars and findbar) that we’d like to pull into Firefox 3, but I haven’t been able to get a hold of Kevin to find out if he’s cool with this, and what the licensing is like, since the jar lacks any licensing info.
As beltzner noted in last week’s meeting, we’re looking for themers to drive this work, please contact him with recommendations or details if you’re interested and available.
Please for the love of god just ask him if you can make pinstripe the default theme again. Whenever I see the current default reload button I feel a bit ill. Also the colors really should be, you know nice to look at.
The unified look is great, but if you don’t replace the buttons with something that remotely resembles mac-like, then it is useless.
I am pretty certain that Kevin released the modifications to Pinstripe “2″ under the tri-license as is the rest of the theme. We never discussed it specifically but my portion of the work at least was done under that assumption.
I also did quite a bit of work on theming the AddOns window to make it more “Mac-like” that never got released:
http://www.noved.org/~stephen/theme_screenshots/addons.png
http://www.noved.org/~stephen/theme_screenshots/addons_with_notification.png
Although this work, and the current Pinstripe, will be outdated with the release of Leopard.10.5 has a unified interface which, at the moment, resembles iTunes 7 with some adjustments. That change alone is going to warrant a reexamination of a lot of current interfaces. Specifically the iconography might be jarring on a darker background.
I don’t like the color of the doorknob on the Home icon. You suck!
That looks immensely better, in my opinion.
Did you have a look at Aronnax’s themes?
).
http://www.takebacktheweb.org/
Very popular (and they have the tab close button on the correct side
Great news.
How will that (i.e. the tabs) look without the Bookmarks Toolbar? Wouldn’t it be better to use the same color for all toolbars?
The mock looks fine aside from the bookmarks bar being the wrong color. It should use the same gradient/color that the toolbar does (and the tabs should as well but by that point I think it’s solid color).
The only other thing I’d recommend is to think about using a tab look more like what Safari uses. I know part of the push for having an inactive tab that looked like a tab was because that was thought to be easier for users to understand, and the blue glow is to help highlight which of those tabs is the active one, but on OS X there isn’t a traditional system tab widget anymore and what does exist isn’t usable for a browser and definitely doesn’t look like that. The closest you get to an official tab widget look then is what Apple is using for Safari (and Terminal in Leopard). You could also do like Camino which uses the same basic idea for active/inactive but with a more traditional tab layout, but I like how the window doesn’t seem to get split up into as many sections with the upside-down tab layout.
This looks promising, but please please please change the icons. The current icons are not mac-like AT ALL, and make me cringe when i open firefox.
I am SUPER glad that people are looking at theme issues again. And having Uno baked into the default theme would be fantastic.
I do hope you’ll be reconsidering the wrong-side tab-close buttons. Safari on Windows does this too, and it looks ridiculous in both cases.
(Other pet peeve — lighting up the toolbar buttons on hover.)
“with mac”… what about windows? I haven’t heard nothing but compaints.
Me like. My only issue is with the tab of the active windows, which should be easier to pick out visually.
Please let Kevin do the Firefox 3 theme. With him it will look better on the Mac than any built-in Mac theme that ship with FF 1.5 and 2.0.
Just take the close button in the tab bar, these close button should be on the left.
I’d love to have Kevin and Stephen involved again. From what I was told, they didn’t have cycles to help with Fx2, which is why we brought in outside help. I’m quite thrilled with their Tb2 work on Mac, which is the best Mac theme I’ve seen to date.
Tb2 with Uno
Firefox’s current look sucks balls. So yeah, please let Kevin do a Leopard optimized Pinstripe version of Firefox (the dark unified look will also look OK in Tiger, since iTunes/iPhoto/… have it).
Oh, BTW: Pinstripe has the close buttons on the left.
What’s with the upside-down tabs? It looks like the active tab “belongs to” (connected to) the Bookmarks Toolbar and not the displayed web page. :-\