+1 my thoughts exactly. It would be so nice if Firefox allowed tridactyl full keyboard control. With qutebrowser, having a proper control mode and an insert mode that work everywhere makes it so much easier to navigate.
Mozilla said they were happy to do that five years ago if we wrote the API. We started work on it here [1] but lost interest because there have always been more urgent things to do (and for me, the ctrl+comma escape hatch that gets you back to Tridactyl from anywhere in the browser is good enough).
I think honestly most of the work in getting such an API merged would be political since most of the people who approved it are no longer at Mozilla.
If anyone wants to pick it up I would be delighted to help.
I use Firefox every day as a backup, but my primary browser is qutebrowser. I would fully switch in a heartbeat if Firefox allowed full keyboard shortcut configuration. Tridactyl gets pretty close, but the fact that keyboard shortcuts stop working in certain scenarios is a nonstarter for me.
I used to use Firefox on Android but had to stop because of this issue. Too many times filling out a form, grabbing a password from a password manager, and returning to find the form blanked. When it's resolved I'll go back and try again.
There is a "read mode" on Firefox for desktop and Android that does this? You can set the font face and size and then every time you open an article, just click the "read mode" button and it will display the article all nice and clean. Safari does this too on desktop and iPhone.
Thank You, I've been looking for a barebones reading mode app for years, but they all want you to sign up for an account and add it to your reading list and yadda yadda. This is just what I needed.
FFS, I have 2.5k pixels of horizontal space, and they're saving up space this way? This isn't even a good idea on mobile where there is no such concept as hover.
It's probably more a matter of simplifying the look, having portraits first.
If we're trying to one-up Google at design, here's my probably-lame attempt, using the bevel to have the cake and eat it too, hopefully.
http://i.imgur.com/X4LQD03.png
(I changed the names)
I don't dislike the idea but it'd need more work graphically. Like this it's barely visible. Making it obvious to the user that this part of the screen is there for your to click on should be priority #1 when you design a nonstandard checkbox.
Edit: And remember, something doesn't necessarily have to be a checkbox for you to select it, it can just be a bevel of some kind. You don't even have to require clicking as an action: You can square-select items (like you would in a file manager), you can long-press (like you would on mobile) etc.
Well, yeah, but that's like saying bugs happen because of programmers; you can't juxtapose those things like that. I'm sure it wasn't an accident, I'm saying it's a terrible design decision.
Here's a more detailed rationale as to why:
1. The Checkbox-Avatar (checkvatar!) form creates two completely different functions ("identify" and "select") and puts them on the same button, in the exact same space. This sort of decision needs to be strongly justified when it happens; for example, when you have limited space on a device and can't have more than 3 buttons but require more functionality than that.
In this case, I have a very high amount of space on my screen; the designer knows that because he's giving me the non-mobile UI.
2. The checkbox itself doesn't graphically afford being checked. It's a simple flat, black square that replaces a more complex image. When I first saw it, I thought it was a glitch. Clicking close or next to it doesn't check the box but instead opens the contact details. Bad feedback to the user.
3. Elaborating on 2.: The avatar is critical to identifying a contact. When you hover the contact and the avatar goes away, part of that identity has been lost. It's confusing and can cause the user to have to double check they are even hovering/selecting the correct contact in the first place.
To put it in simpler terms: Go in your contact list, look for someone using their avatars (without looking at their name) and attempt to select that person. Your hand/eye coordination is thrown off-balance.
4. Hovering is not possible on all devices. Even if I'm not on mobile, this doesn't work on touch screens. This is design 101.
And all that aside I also see that shift-clicking to select multiple contacts doesn't work. Recreating functionality they/we got right a long time ago is hard...
I deployed a small node app with BlueMix. I did not use many of its advanced features, and it was relatively painless to get things running. I would consider using it for a bigger project in the future.
That is correct. justread will save you data compared to loading the original page. No javascript, ads, extra images unrelated to the article etc. It does, however, keep the images, since often they are an interesting part of an article.
I didn't know they had an API. Would it be easy to create a bookmarklet that used it? I don't like their extension, it feels too heavy. I want something that doesn't run until I invoke it.
