Friday, September 14th, 2007
Fun Feature
I’ve been working on implementing drag images for Firefox on Windows. It hasn’t happened without a few bumps in the road. Most windows apps are, naturally based on windows common windows classes, which have built-in support for rendering drag images. Not so in Firefox, so the image needs to be generated by hand. I’m about 50% of the way there, I’ve got application -> desktop drag implemented, now I need to add inter-application support (for dragging tabs and the like) and touch up some other things, like sizing, orientation (obviously) and maybe play around with adding a nice border around certain element types like images.
I have to say though, aside from the hassles, implementing new features like this is really fun, especially in a popular app like Firefox.
September 15th, 2007 at 7:25 am
Jim Slater said:
The most recent version of Firefox 5.0 has some great features, like spell checking and restoring sessions if the browser crashes.
My comment regards the fading of colors used in the Toolbar, such as the back and forward arrows, the reload ’spin’ arrow’ and the Home Icon.
I am red-green color deficient and the reduction in the saturation of these icons makes it hard for me to recognize them. About 8% of the population has this red-green deficiency, to varying degrees, but only in the most extreme cases is it truly ‘color blindness’. I can see red and green just fine. The problem is that I have fewer color receptors in my retina than most people, and although I can still see red and green, I perceive them with less intensity and saturation than someone with ‘normal’ vision.
So the back and forward arrows in the toolbar are faded to the point where they hardly stand out from the background, as is the case with the “Home” icon, which to me is kind of a reddish-brown and recognizable mainly from its shape and position.
I run into this problem time and time again in numerous applications. The colors should be intensified or more saturated for those of us who can’t see colors really well, or there should be an option in the Tools section that can increase the saturation of the colors in the Toolbar, which I think is probably going to be quite impractical. Maybe hire a color-blind person to help make the overall layout a little more user-friendly for people like me who see the back arrow as a sort of box grey, and the house symbol as a kind of dark brown.
Thanks,
Jim Slater, B.A., B.Sc., R.P.Bio.
September 15th, 2007 at 8:21 am
Jim Mathies said:
You might look around for user generated themes designed for color deficient users. Swapping out the default icons is a fairly easy thing to do. Although it might be in Firefox’s interests to include a default theme specifically designed for this. I’ll ask around, see what people’s thoughts are on it and post back if I find anything.
September 16th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Gary Krall said:
Guys: Might this be an option?
http://www.accessfirefox.com/