New home page

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Stephan Soller" <stephan.soller at helionweb.de> wrote in message 
news:i8ufto$17dk$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> Adblock Plus, NoScript and BetterPrivacy are a combination that's hard to 
> find in other browsers.

Yup. And that's speaks very poorly for the overall state of web browsers. 
It's amazing that with so many offerings there's none that are actually any 
good.

> Many browsers today "compress" the UI in order to free more horizontal 
> space for the websites. There is an ongoing development towards wider 
> displays that shrink in height

Which, of course, is an absolutely rediculous trend that's been created 
almost entirely on faulty notions, but that's a whole other rant...

> and the new browser UIs are a logical counter development to that. In 
> Opera however it's just the default configuration and with a few clicks 
> you can bring every toolbar back (and add or remove buttons, etc.). Never 
> found a way to revert that in Firefox or Chrome but I haven't searched 
> every "about:config" option.

Yea, "about:config" is truly awful. I consider any setting that's only in 
there to be non-existant (unless I just happend to come across someone 
mentioning a specific one, as was the case with turning off animating images 
and favicons (I turned off favicons only because FF's "no animate" setting 
doesn't work for favicons)).

>
> ps.: Opera is free since over 5 years, so you might want to take a look 
> since much has changed since then.
>

Just gave the latest version a try (turns out the last I tried was 9.x and 
was about three years old, although I know that wasn't the first time I had 
tried it). I haven't spent much time with it yet, but my initial 
impressions:

When it first started, first thing I did was get rid of that awful "menu" 
button. Then I balked at how incredibly ugly the real menu and tabs are. I 
went to find a way to disable themes, but then discovered that it was 
*already* on the supposed "Windows Native Skin", which is quite obviously 
anything but. Looks exactly like GTK to me. There's the tell-tale GTK 
"Rediculously Excessive Padding", and the almost-equally tell-tale 
"Invisible text for light-on-dark users (black-on-black)". And then as if 
that wasn't bad enough, there's this really amateur-ish hover/pressed 
"highlight" on the top-level menu items, which 1. is obviously non-native 
since native has no hover effect and *I* have my selection color set to 
blue, but this uses white instead, and 2. results in even *more* invisi-text 
(white-on-white).

The tabs don't even try to be tabs at all, just GTK buttons acting like 
tabs. And the menus appear with a fade-in that's clearly *intended* to look 
like the subtle fade-in native stuff uses, except unlike the native apps 
they're jarringly...well, "choppy" is the only way I can think to describe 
it. And there seems to be some weird drawing-conflict between them and the 
"tabs" during that fade-in. It looks really really bad, and disabling 
effects doesn't get rid of it.

The whole UI is just a complete amateur job (which is pretty much what I 
remember from every other time I tried it, now that I think of it). Haven't 
tried any actual pages or any sort of AdBlock/NoScript/BetterPrivacy sort of 
functionality yet.