[Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Mike Shaver <shaver mozilla org>]

On 12-Dec-05, at 8:33 PM, Till Kamppeter wrote:

> And we all were of the opinion that
> the GNOME printing dialog (and also the printing dialogs of Firefox  
> and
> Thunderbird) needs improvement.

Before Firefox 1.0, there was much kerfuffle over this, and out of  
that came a pledge from someone in the GNOME camp to separate the  
gnome-print dialog system from the gnome-print "you must render  
through this" system, such that the dialog could be used on GNOME  
desktops.  I don't think it ever materialized, though I can't be  
bothered to look for the bug now.  After the amount of crap I took  
for pushing to get the GNOME file dialog in -- and I mean that it was  
the single biggest usability complaint from our Linux user community  
by several orders of magnitude -- I was in no real rush to go that  
route again.  I remain unrushed, but if people want to do the work  
(including the user-testing work, keeping in mind that we actually  
care about GNOME installations that are more than a year old, etc.)  
then there's probably time to get it changed in Firefox 2 if the  
patch is good enough.

(The KDE people are much less vitriolic about how Firefox is wearing  
white after Labour Day on their desktop, for whatever reason, and  
nobody has bothered to even wire up the file dialog, except for one  
frustrated hacker who used GNOME.)

Of course, we support more than just Linux in the Unix-printing  
world, but if the time has come for an XP_LINUX that differs from  
XP_UNIX, or even XP_LINUX_GNOME, then I'd be willing to hear a pitch  
for it.

> Today I talked with Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer and
> desktop developer here at Mandriva, and David Barth, vice president  
> for
> engineering, about the development of the printing dialogs in GNOME,
> Firefox, and Thunderbird.

I *humbly* submit that that group is not the right set of people to  
be discussing the future of the printing model in Firefox and  
Thunderbird.  By all means put together a proposal for improving how  
we print on Linux, but please don't think that it will be accepted  
simply by fiat (even my mighty fiat, ahem!).  I also caution against  
what we've seen as a pattern so far, which is "well, then we'll just  
patch our build", for various reasons that aren't really appropriate  
for this list.

Mike