English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

The bookmarks sidebar is there

the buttons are gone, the intention is clearly that they will remove it

it may as well be gone

It's literally the first menu item of the bookmarks menu

and the history sidebar is literally the first menu item of the history part of the menu

9:45 PM

admittedly true. i only just noticed that, which shows you how discoverable it is :-)

and as i said, the buttons are gone because the UX people don't like you having a button

The stop button is there - it swaps with reload when you are loading a page

that's not a stop button then

A stop/reload combined button has been a thing that browsers have done for ages

that's a bad user interface design

not in my browser

ever since Chrome 1

9:46 PM

and yes it has, and it's been a bad UI design for ages

very apt that you mentioned Chrome

hell I think Internet Explorer 7 had this combined stop/reload button

yes, they also copied Chrome

well, they kind of copy Chrome and Firefox really

um, 7-9 didn't

10 did though ;-)

Yep. And 10 has been out for a while too, now.

so: hardly something new.

9:48 PM

it's funny, i thought Australis was bad, but i'm actually discovering it's worse

And it only matters if you want to reload a page you're... still loading?

they prevent you adding new toolbars......... and then boast about customizability

@Jez and you could just mash F5 to achieve this effect

erm.... you just reduced customizability

9:49 PM

@badp i just like having 2 buttons. i don't want the meaning of a button to change with time

look ma! a toolbar!

what, the bookmarks toolbar?

@Jez F5 and Esc are by your side then.

@Jez no, the Keefox toolbar.

@badp shame that i want to use buttons. well no it isnt, because my browser has them.

@badp oh, some addon?

I don't know why I'd waste a whole damn bar of space for three glorified buttons

9:49 PM

i mean creating toolbars from the built-in UI

but if I wanted

@Jez well seems like you'll be able to plug the hole with addons fairly easily then!

so?

so nothing of value was lost?

they're talking about how wonderfully customizable it is built-in

when they have in fact made it less customizable built-in

that's the funny

All I'm saying is, if you want to use Firefox 3.0, be my guest?

;)

9:51 PM

in fact, they talk about customizability as if they'd only just introduced the idea!!!

as if FF3 was like IE with no customizable interface, lol

well i don't use FF3 because of rendering features and security, obviously, but i use seamonkey with my FF3 theme which works very nicely

This is how I want my Firefox. Except that I want to close more tabs, but it's hard.

Can I do this with Australis? I'm still on 27 or something.

...I don't think Australis gives you so much rope.

Then what happens when I update to 29?

It will fuck up my browser?

9:53 PM

I see you're using it to mummify your body before you hang yourself with it

@Cerberus i don't think you'll be able to have the URLbar next to the menus. the UX people decided you weren't allowed to move it.

@Cerberus in a word, yes. :-)

@Jez But that's a huge waste of precious space!

@badp Are you talking about the tabs or about something else?

@Cerberus not if you lay it out the exact way the UX people want you to by default

I agree that I need to close more tabs...

doesn't Firefox have a "close all tabs to the right" button?

9:54 PM

@Jez But, huh? I see lots of wasted space in the screenshot?

@Cerberus ...it's still only two rows of UI

@badp I cannot do that, I need some of those tabs. I need to go though all of them. But anyway, let's not talk about the tabs, they matter not. Is there anything wrong with the rest of my set-up?

@Cerberus if it were maximized, there would be less wasted space... but yeah those bug rounded tabs are pretty wasteful. but again you're not appreciating the beauty and sleekness of the UX designers' genious

@badp That's a lot of wasted space, and the rows are higher, too.

@Cerberus I don't want to be the judge of how you should be productive, but that bar at the top looks weird

9:56 PM

@badp How so?

I want a large title bar for when sites have long titles.

no no no I mean the toolbar with links to YouTube and Uncyclopedia and whatnot

A random example among my tabs with a long title that I want to be able to see: books.google.nl/…

@badp Oh, those are all bookmarklets, very productive. I use most of those.

you should be able to, say, press ctrl-l you enter to go straight to youtube?

or ctrl-l un enter for uncyclopedia?

That bookmarklet does something else.

None of those link to sites as such.

@Cerberus does it search the selection?

...because at least on Chrome that becomes ctrl-l un tab search term enter :P

9:58 PM

PwnYouTube: javascript:(function(){url='http://deturl.com/download-video.js';document.body.a‌ppendChild(document.createElement('script')).src=url+'?'+new%20Date().getTime();}‌)();

oh.

The Unclyclopedia one is KeepItWithMe.

I use it less now that I have Pushbullet on my phone.

Either way, as you see, I have zero wasted space.

Everything is really compact.

Is that still possible if I use a theme on Australis?

Yeah, I guess you might want to hold off on upgrades then

at least for the default theme

@badp I never use the default theme, this is Classic Compact.

mind you: I make extremely light use of Firefox

10:01 PM

@badp that says it all though, doesn't it? UX people, presumably thinking like you, only caring about their (and a few others') usage profiles

@badp Hmm lots of wasted space.

any other customizations can go hang

@Cerberus oh, you've lost that too

I, by contrast, am a very heavy user. I depend on Firefox very much, and don't want to have to change my routines of course.

@Cerberus That's incompatible with Nightly 31, so I can't help you there

@Cerberus I'd advise you to run, not walk, from Firefox

10:03 PM

it's long been taken over by people who are hell-bent on turning its UI into a mobile app

...mind you, I'm a heavy user of Chrome and that's what it looks like for me

all of the extensions are hidden away in the dropdown or in the context menu

Actually since each extension is a separate process, I've been cutting down hard on those, too.

@badp Ah, yes, incompatible themes and add-ons...that's why I hold off on updates anyway until I have the time to properly back-up my profile and test a new version.

Given that we're talking about nightly builds it'd be a miracle if anything worked with it :)

actually that's a 9 day old nightly

@badp we're now talking about things being incompatible with 29, though... a release build

that's a pretttty big clusterfuck coming i think

10:05 PM

@Jez is it incompatible with 29? I dunno

i just checked. classic compact is, as is S4E

so yeah, pretty darn incompatible

@badp Is there no way to remove the empty space and put menu items and bookmarklets next to the address bar?

100k-150k users for each

@badp Oh OK, that makes sense.

@Jez Oh, well, that happens with every update. You just have to postpone updating, as usual.

@Jez Oh, yes, Statusbar 4 Ever? I use that, I need a status bar obviously.

@Cerberus i doubt most users postpone updating.... especially as firefox has adopted the Chrome model of (checking for update UPDATE FOUND UPDATE!!!!!1!oneone)

10:07 PM

Hahaha.

Especially the oneone.

@Cerberus yeah, Australis breaks that

it removes the addon bar which S4E used

@Cerberus Chrome doesn't really have menu items.

But, hey, the good thing about Firefox and open source is that we can just use Palemoon, right?

@Cerberus yep. use that or SeaMonkey.

and i'd advise you to switch now.

@badp Oh, was that screenshot Chrome? I thought it was Firefox. Haha I guess they look too much alike these days.

10:08 PM

@Cerberus yeah, that was Chrome as I use it

@Jez I have used Palemoon in the past.

It was fine.

Personally the era of awesome customizability ended with Opera 11

@Cerberus LOL that's exactly what i thought, it took me a minute to realize it was Chrome :-)

That's the last browser I bothered to move things around in

@badp ever used seamonkey recently?

@badp so you've adopted a kind of defeatist attitude

give up, because customizability is being made too hard. understandable.

10:10 PM

it's more like

we don't seem to require customizability from the internet

you use a webpage and then, boom, a day later everything changes

and there's no "back to the old layout" button

and... people complain and whine for a while, and then they settle down again

depends.

if it's a big change for the worse, i might switch services

@Jez Yeah they really look much alike these days, don't they? I wonder why.

i generally try to avoid using websites for services i will use long-term for that very reason, so webmail as a day-to-day email provider? no way

so... I dunno up to what point do we really need customizability, and to what point I'm putting my webpages and browsers into the hands of extensions that might suddenly become interested into becoming spyware

@Cerberus various reasons. likeminded UX devs from Mozilla moving over to Chrome, flat-out copying, movement to genericize all browser interfaces to be more mobile-friendly on every platform

10:12 PM

@badp People use userscripts and userstyles. And they hate sites. At least a browser is software on my computer than I have control over. I can make it stable, instead of a constantly changing beast that I need to adapt to time and again, usually with little benefit to me.

@badp How can they suddenly become spyware?

@Cerberus I... doubt even 1% of the total amount of Facebook users adopts userscripts and userstyles

You shouldn't update software without checking whether the update is safe and high quality.

@Cerberus arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/…

@badp also, the major sites don't really tend to have massive overhauls. Wikipedia for example. Google has changed, but more gradually than the Australis trainwreck

@badp Yeah, well, 99% of the population is neither smart nor literate, so they don't concern us. Right?

10:14 PM

Facebook i don't use so no problem there

Slashdot's redesign is spectacularly unpopular

@Cerberus Are you calling me dumb? :)

I absolutely hate when Google breaks an essential userscript, like GoogleMonkeyR. It happens once every two or three years or so?

other redesigns... well some aren't too bad. they don't take away fundamental functionality

but when they do, they are invariably unpopular

yeah Google has been doing evil for a few years now

@badp Let he whom the shoe fits wear it, as we say in mother Holland!

@Cerberus mh?

10:16 PM

@Cerberus Depends on your definition of smart or literate.

@badp Oh, sure, I read that article. You should never let anything update automatically on your computer!

I keep postponing blocking Chrome's automatic updates. I should do that.

@Cerberus lol

@Robusto The one we both agree on.

E.g., "not as smart as me"?

@Jez Yeah I don't care about what Facebook does, I don't use it often enough to get to know the menus anyway, so I don't notice when they change again. Google Search is the main website whose changes bug me once in a while.

@Robusto That's a good smart!

@badp What's mh? Yes, that is Google Monkey R.

10:19 PM

@Cerberus the script homepage literally reads "mh"

Mmhmm.

I'm just saying, if I don't trust something with autoupdates on my computers, should I have them installed in the first place?

@badp Well, if you trust the source of the auto-updates, you can consider it.

@badp Oh, I see it now.

I never use that page anyway, I get it from the Userscripts site.

Mitch

@Templar it's much more formal. only people who are academic or want to sound academic use 'hence'

10:49 PM

@Mitch I think it's a little less than much more formal.

Yeah.

You will see hence in an article by, e.g., Ars Technica.

google's doodle today should be of a trainwreck

when clicked on, it should search for "Australis"

Haha aww.

I thought there were add-ons to undo most of the changes.

11:05 PM

yeah but you shouldnt have to install addons to get core functionality

11:24 PM

@Jez I agree, but still, then at least we can solve the problem for ourselves personally.

11:53 PM

8

A: Singular of "dice"

I have never heard of "dice" being used as a singular. As a collective noun which could include one, sure: Go on and roll the dice. How many dice do I roll? Just one. But as a straight, unambiguous singular? Roll one dice or even worse Roll a dice sounds off to me. So I went to ...

Seriously, this is the accepted answer? Let's hear from Ambrose Bierce.

DIE, n. The singular of "dice." We seldom hear the word, because there is a prohibitory proverb, "Never say die." At long intervals, however, some one says: "The die is cast," which is not true, for it is cut. The word is found in an immortal couplet by that eminent poet and domestic economist, Senator Depew:

A cube of cheese no larger than a die
May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.

Ah, I misunderstood his meaning. Oh, well, never mind.

But here we have Stephen King prosing on about how one should never use adverbs. He gives three examples of "said Tom swiftly" sentences (and their antidotes), then says: "The three latter sentences are all weaker than the three former ones, and most readers will see why immediately." Uh, Steve—hate to disagree with you, dude, but immediately is an adverb.

Be careful of the rules you make, for you will surely break them.