The main problem for me with firefox is that it doesn't play ball very well in terms of KDE integration, but it's my problem - I can be criticised fairly for moaning about this, because mozilla is unashamedly a kitchen-sink thing, and it has a perfectly good plugin system for me to scratch my itch with.
It does irk somewhat however considering the fact that my binary firefox does appear to have had things moved around in accordance with the Gnome "how-to-ruin-HCI-in-the-most-completely-broken-and-stupid-ways-we-can-think-of" Guidelines.
Onto what Chris was saying, the whole desktop-wimp thing comes at you from several angles, two of which are using real-life paradigms to ease organisation and understanding for users in the short term, and marrying graphic design concepts/implements with the user interface which (whether anybody likes it or not) offers up things that cannot easily be achieved.
Granted, the root-window with icons thingy has its flaws, but there is at its hub a nugget of good idea, all it takes is the implementation to make something good of it.
It's not essentially a bad idea.
Further - it can be postulated that the Desktop folder as per Microsoft Windows came into being as a result of several, erm, misguided decisions, but has it not at the end of the day worked out well?
imo If you didn't have an actual, separate directory called "Desktop" (or whatever) and instead used the home directory, you would be doomed to use some other, functionally similar grouping of files to decide what was shown on the root window, even if that was just file flags, extensions or preceding dots.
That is, if you didn't want to be "forced" into having every file in the home directory on display at all times, or of having an empty screen instead of a root window.
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I never understand this way of thinking, you must agree that the WIMP interface opened computing up to people who would have never touched it otherwise. Humans generally relate to something which in itself relates to a physical environment. Although limiting once you venture outside tasks the designers didn't envisage, it gives ordinary people a chance of finding out how to do something without continuously referring to documentation.
Heh, you almost say it like it's a good thing :P .
Ian Bell wrote:
Brett Parker wrote:
Personally, I get really frustrated with the file dialogs in GTK2, but I live with it, as the only app that I used that has these things is firefox, and 99% of the time if I want to download stuff from firefox I right click, copy url and use wget in a terminal.
IMHO gtk file selection dialogs have always been crap. When deciding which gui toolkit for development work I initially chose gtk because it was written in C and I definitely did not want to learn C++. One of the reasons I abandoned it was the poor file dialogs.
Ian
It's been pretty important in shaping my opinion, that. Say what you like about kde/qt, but when it comes to file management in general, let alone the standard dialogs, they're years ahead - actually acknowledging the possibility that a GUI user may use a keyboard to drive things, may want to type in the path themselves including filters, find as they type, and so on.
It offends my very soul so much to have such unconfigurable, no-keyboards-allowed GUI that calls / "filesystem" that that one thing alone often has me closing the 'window' in disgust :) .
I'd largely prefer to do everything with a keyboard myself, but the way I look at WIMPs is this - if you're going to do it, do it properly, with style and competence.
Whilst I usually prefer to work in a console, I see no reason to step back in time to w32 or gtk-based desktop environments when OS X is available commercially and KDE is available for free.
Each to their own, as long as, please God, the situation remains thus: everyone using open source software gets to choose exactly what they want running, and whatever you like there's always some competition.
Cheers,
--
Ten