Re: [Galeon-devel] Re: [Usability]Galeon feature implementation

[Eivind Tagseth <eivindt multinet no>]

* Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu> [021104 14:30]:
> On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 12:45, Philip Langdale wrote:

> > a) "Exit saving session", implemented as a File menu item in galeon 1.
> > I can't really see any other place to put this, but perhaps you can.

> BAD. Is galeon all of a sudden the session manager too? Sessions are per
> login to a gnome session, not per instance of galeon in memory. When a
> user logs in their session begin and when they log out it ends. Sessions
> are not per app.

> Why force users to understand that all web browser windows are running
> under one process and that when they close all web browser windows that
> they have taken galeon out of memory. I would hope to see galeon avoid
> netscape's big mistake of having a "quit" menu item as well (even filed
> a bug). (good link on this
> http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$374)

So you're saying that in order to upgrade from Flash 5 to Flash 6, I need
to install the new plugin and then reboot my computer?  Since there is no
way to close my application I guess I have no other choice?  And if I log
on to a web site using secure cookies or HTTP authentication I need to
reboot my computer to be sure I've really logged out of those services?
Sounds more and more like windows to me.

(Replace "reboot" with "log out" if you want, not that I think our dumb user
would be knowledgeable enough to know which one to choose).

> > d) External Downloader support. Well, we had this until the very last
> > minute when marco commented it out... I'm not sure there's much of a
> UI
> > issue here. It's a matter of some prefs (dirty word, I know) to
> indicate
> > whether an external downloader is being used and what it is.

> Whats the benefit? What does this fix? Why add the ui complexity? If
> there was an actual official gnome downloader, i would expect galeon to
> automatically use it, but there isn't. If the problem is that the galeon
> downloader sucks (i'm not saying it does), fix it. I see absolutely no
> reason for this preference.

Since Galeon's mantra is "The Web, only the web", the download manager is
really a side step.  There are other projects focusing on "the download 
manager, only the download manager".  Surely, you cannot expect Galeon to
compete with these?  Galeon would probably be best off removing the download
manager and _only_ support external managers.  And with the number of
download managers available out there, do you really think there's one
ultimate DM among them?  It needs to be configurable.

> > f) As a related issue, I would however like the ability to persist the
> > decision to save to disk, so that files can be saved simply by
> clicking
> > on them without any other interaction. However, such persistence must
> > take place on a mimetype by mimetype basis which brings us back to
> > accusations of having our own mime db again. Creative ideas here would
> > be much appreciated.

> This is what right click "save" is for. The first entry in the menu is
> the same as the default action, hence it should always try to open it. 

Right-Click-Move-Mouse-Click is unnecessary difficult for such a common
operation.  If I wanted a broken shoulder I'd be using windows.  What
happened to Shift-Left-Click though?

> > h) Gesture support. Not a lot to say here; we need prefs to turn it
> > on and off.

> uggghhh, added complexity marginal if not negative net gain.

I assume you're not saying that this must be everyone's opinion?  But this
is a natural plugin candidate of course.

> > things like the reload context menu offering reload all/bypass cache.
> 
> It should just work. 

In order to make this "just work", Galeon would have to reload all/bypass
cache each and every time.  Wouldn't this be exceptionally slow?  Or would
you rather deny the user the option of bypassing cache/proxy?

> > b) Generally unconfigurable behaviour. I'm still unconvinced about
> > disposing of prefs, especially for highly idiosyncratic things such
> > as mouse scrolling behaviour. I don't belive there is such a thing as
> 
> What possible preferences would you really need for mouse scrolling?
> Anything useful should be a global default anyway. 

You really cannot expect a user to want the mouse scroll to do the same
in galeon as in gnumeric.  It _is_ of course silly if galeon has to check
both a global option and a local option in order to find out what to do
when the user scrolls his mouse, maybe gconf should support applications
overloading global options?  Transparently to the application of course.

> Its been consistently shown that an abundance of preferences makes them
> useless.

And a lack of preferences turns them over to linux.  At least they used to.




Eivind