Reply to post: Re: Designers..

Re: Designers..

The thing about visited vs. unvisited links looking the same is one of many things I fix with Firefox extensions. I don't care if a page looks different on various browsers-- in fact, that is my intent. I make it look the way I want it to look, savagely stripping out the designer's intent and replacing it with my own. That was the original vision of the web-- HTML was only meant to mark the text and elements as being a certain type of content, and the user's browser would decide how to display content of that type.

Of course, almost as soon as the web became mainstream, it began evolving away from that ideal, and now browsers are more oriented to faithfully following the site designer's whims than those of the user. Well, I don't want a browser that serves the webmaster... I want one that serves ME. That used to be what Firefox was about, but now the goal over at Mozilla is to copy whatever Google is doing with Chrome.

Even so, addons are the saving grace of Firefox. All of Mozilla's idiotic decisions can be reverted... Australis is handily dispatched by Classic Theme Restorer; the removed status bar (no, addon bar is not the same) can be restored with the unfortunately named Status-4-Evar. More and more, it has fallen to addon devs to make Firefox live up to its billing.

Similarly, the idiotic design decisions made by webmasters can be undone with addons too. When I can't tell if I have visited a link or not, I click the icon on the status bar corresponding with the Monochro addon... it instantly discards the page-specified colors and replaces them with ones that I have chosen (which Firefox can do natively; this just switches it on without having to go through the menus). Instantly, all links are blue and underlined; all visited links are the same darker purply color that has always meant visited link. It's also good for dispatching stupid or illegible text color/background combinations.

I used to use that all of the time, but as Mozilla has implemented the feature, it obliterates all backgrounds with the solid background color I've set (#e1e1e1, to keep my retinas from sizzling from the blinding white glare that everyone seems to think is mandatory these days). Unfortunately, many of these "designers" use backgrounds for actual content, and with the option to override page backgrounds set, I can't see that stuff.

Of course, that's typical these days, but "background" tags are supposed to describe, um, backgrounds, which are by definition not content. Why code a page correctly when you can do it incorrectly and still have it work? The trend now is to assume that the browser works for the web developer, so of course it is going to render the page exactly as he wanted it, correct or not.

So that's why I have to be able to switch the background color override on and off. When it's off, though, I am still subjected to the ever-present white backgrounds. There's an addon for that, too... the appropriately-named DarkenBackground. Works a treat 99% of the time... but for those rare instances where something doesn't look right to me, I still have the override color button.

I have an addon to override scripts that prohibit or redefine my browser's context menu (which to me would be like a MS Word document banning right-clicks; what business does a document have telling the program's UI how to behave?), GreaseMonkey to remove annoyances with userscripts (I have one that disables many of the page-reloader scripts that aren't caught by FF's feature to warn on meta refresh, another to restore google.com's cached-page link, stuff like that), and of course the usual ones like NoScript and uBlock Origin. I have one to delete all cookies on command, another to delete cookies when a tab is closed...

Some of those addons are within the scope of Chrome's addon structure, but not all of them. The ones like Classic Theme Restorer that back out Australis and allow the user very fine-grained control over the UI are not possible in Chrome, and Google is okay with that, since they know the one true way of doing everything, and if you don't agree, it's because you're wrong.

I don't know what will happen when FF drops much of its huge, powerful addon library in favor of Chrome addons in under a year. Firefox is unusable without the addons... all the other browsers I've tried are just unusable period. I have very specific demands of a browser, how its UI must be, all that kind of thing... and only Firefox (and other related browsers, like maybe Seamonkey or Pale Moon) so far is configurable enough to give me what I require.