September 2004 – Kevin Gerich

"Live Bookmarks" is not RSS

September 30, 2004 Kevin31 Comments

A few days ago we changed Firefox’s Live Bookmarks status icon to something less geeky.

Live Bookmarks status icon before and after

As people rightly pointed out, Live Bookmarks shouldn’t pretend to be RSS. The status bar icon should not represent multiple flavors of a syndication format. It should represent the Live Bookmarks feature.

Here are some of Stephen Horlander’s original sketches for a replacement Live Bookmark icon

Live Bookmark icon sketches by Stephen Horlander

Initially the RSS button design was suggested by members of the Mozilla Visual Identity team. At the time, it seemed natural that we’d want to use something similar to the semi-ubiquitous orange RSS chiclet found on web sites that offer news feeds. I even rationalized that RSS is becoming an almost generic term for news feeds, and even though Live Bookmarks supports RSS and Atom, an icon that said “RSS” wouldn’t confuse people. What the heck, Apple does it too!

But that’s a poor excuse. You shouldn’t need to know what RSS or Atom is to use Live Bookmarks.

Pretty Widgets, Part 2

September 16, 2004 Kevin49 Comments

Here’s a followup on my attempt to make the HTML widgets on Mac Firefox presentable. I’ve had to make some compromises here to get the widgets to look nice, for instance I force the background-color and -image on buttons. And text box borders usually use my colors rather than the ones specified by the web page CSS. For these reasons these styles would probably not be acceptable for inclusion in Firefox, but in most cases I’ve found these to be more comfortable than the primitive default widgets.

Instructions: Close Firefox. Right-click on your Firefox application, choose “Show Package Contents”, and then open the Contents > MacOS > res folder. Make a backup copy of your platform-forms.css file. Then copy these files into the res folder:

Important: If you followed my instructions in the previous blog post to modify your userContent.css file, either delete it or remove my additional code before trying out the new and improved widgets.

A little bug: I’m not sure how I can get rid of the black border around the inside of the selected select box. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions for improvements!

Silliness is its own reward (Updated with extra mirth!)

September 15, 2004 Kevin33 Comments

Looking over the selection of Firefox buttons at the new SpreadFirefox site, I was inspired to make this:

To the obvious question, I say: Why not? This is an audience participation blog post. Warm up your Photoshops and your MacPaints and lets see your take on the little browser that could!

UPDATE: This comes from Scott @ techory.com:

Get Tirefox - All season browser

He has another one on his blog. Cool stuff!

UPDATE 2: Daniel Keep sent this one through email. Thanks Daniel 🙂

Firefox 1.0 Preview Release

September 14, 2004 Kevin24 Comments

Mozilla Firefox One Dot Oh Preview Release is available! Live Bookmarks is one of the handful of new features in this release which focuses on stability and security. The Mac version also has an updated visual style. Grab it, try it, and tell us what we’re doing wrong (and right)!