Re: stacked buttons and address bar... why?

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>]

Hello James,

On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, James Cho wrote:

> So what's the idea behind cluttering the buttons bar with tools rarely used 
> (everything to the right of "Reload") and creating a separate row for the 
> addressbar?  Talk about wasted space, and shortsighted "usable" design.

Welcome to this list. If I may ask, is your reason for posting here to 
provide constructive criticism, or just to spout derogatory remarks? If 
it is the former, you may want to re-think the tone of your sentences.

As for the buttons on the main toolbar: in the way Epiphany is designed 
to be used, the Bookmarks editor and the History window play a prominent 
role. And you may not search webpages often, but others do, and the Find 
button is the quickest way to do it when one is not familiar with the 
keyboard shortcuts. As for the Homepage button, I don't really know how 
often it is used generally - but arguably more often than the Forward 
button, that you don't seem to think of as "wasted space".

>  Did Netscape and Microsoft really get it right then with their 
> original browser designs?

One design doesn't fit all. That's why you can reorganize the Epiphany 
toolbar to your hearts' content with the toolbar editor (under the Edit 
menu).

>  It seems to me that the Safari/Firefox GUI is more concise _and_ 
> easier to use.

Excuse me, but the user interfaces of Safari and Firefox are not exactly 
identical. And if you think the Firefox GUI is concise, you probably 
never saw its Preferences window.

>  Epiphany's default GUI is drawn out and verbose, like a "learn to 
> program" book that describes how to use a mouse and what a CPU is in 
> chapter 1.

Sounds exactly like the impression it *should* make on first time users!

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen	   ***	student of Artifical Intelligence
email: reinout cs vu nl    ***	mobile phone: +31-6-44360778
www.vanschouwen.info       ***	help mee met GNOME vertalen: nl.gnome.org