(Please don’t let the title distract from my analysis — it was just too good to pass up!)

With a new version of Firefox depending on at least three separate themes to integrate into dozens of disparate operating systems, I think it’s high time we took a look at the evolution of Firefox’s on Windows XP. With its massive user base, the XP theme should integrate so seamlessly that users would be offended to change it. Mozilla made native-ness one of their top priorities for Firefox 3, but can they walk the walk?

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Navigational Buttons

Let’s see how the primary navigation buttons have stacked against their Luna baseline:

Windows XP

Qute (Firefox <.9)

Old Winstripe (Firefox 0.9)

Winstripe (Firefox 1.0-1.5)

Firefox 2 “Refresh”

Proposed Firefox 3

The most obvious thing to point out is the choice of colors that have persisted throughout the themes:

Green = Backwards/Forwards
Blue = Reload
Red = Stop
Yellow/Brown = Home.

Being able to associate specific colors with specific functionality was one thing I loved about Winstripe. You didn’t even have to scan for a button of a particular shape or remember a particular position: want to reload? Move to blue. Want to go Home? Click yellow.

Firefox 2’s “refresh” made a crucial mistake that I’m afraid seems to have been reproduced in Firefox 3: the Home button is two dimensional. Physical objects like houses and printers, under the XP style guide, should be isometric.

Notice how in IE6, Qute, and Winstripe, the Home button is tilted to an angle; that’s how it should look. I thought this had been ironed out by the time Winstripe was finalized, yet with Firefox 3 we’re seeing a Home icon almost identical to its Old Winstripe counterpart — which was excised because of its nonnative appearance.

And get a load of reload! And Stop, as well. Those new, revamped Firefox 3 glyphs fit right into Windows XP...

Proposed Firefox 3

Windows XP Undo & Delete

...as formatting commands. Come on, Mozilla! Glyphs may work fine on Vista — and I’m sure these icons blend right in with Aero — but on XP they don’t even have the personality of Undo & Delete.

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Cust, Copy & Paste

I haven’t met a single person who uses these buttons within their web browser.

Windows XP

Qute

Winstripe Old

Winstripe

Firefox 2 & 3

It seems like Mozilla doesn’t know anybody using these buttons either; these are the only icons that haven’t been updated for Firefox 3. And that’s a shame, because they look terrible.

The Qute icons resemble their XP counterparts, but they’re way too cartoony. Winstripe is better, but I’m not sure about that green arrow. Is it some kind of metaphorical link between copy and paste?

Without a doubt the worst offender here is the latest theme. Since when is Copy represented in XP by a clipboard?! It’s not rocket science:

Scissors = Cut
Double Document = Copy
Clipboard = Paste

Other than the scissors blending into the toolbar, the indistinct copy and paste buttons, and the incorrect coloring of the clipboard... I forgot where I was going with that.

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New Tab & Window

Without any XP equivalent, these buttons have been open to interpretation.

Qute

Winstripe Old

Winstripe

Firefox 2 “Refresh”

Firefox 3

There’s a lot of consistency here except for Firefox 2, where the icons became hideous: the plus sign is inconveniently placed and obscures the icons, the icons no longer have distinct shapes or colors, and they melt into the toolbar.

I fully welcome the new icons, though I think the new “New Tab” button looks too much like a folder and doesn’t have a distinct enough color. It should be more beige/tan/brown.

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Other Icons

The balance of the icons are a miasma of miscellanea that serve special purposes but don’t fit into any other category.

Windows XP (No Download Manager)

Qute

Winstripe Old

Winstripe

Firefox 2 “Refresh”

Firefox 3

Like the “New Tab” button, there’s no native symbol for Bookmarks. Unlike all other browsers, Microsoft calls bookmarks “favorites” and represents them with a star. It seems that Mozilla is moving in that direction (not the terminology, but the symbol) since Firefox 3 includes new “starring” functionality and the Bookmarks icon is a marriage of the two metaphors.

The new History button is a worthy successor to Qute and Winstripe. If anything, its more native than the XP History button.

Not having a native Download image has created a series of ideas and theories about what “download” should look like. Its metaphor has always included a down arrow, but results have varied.

I find the new Firefox 3 Download icon confusing. It’s too big, the back part of the gray box-like thing directly traverses the down arrow, amounting to a gray box with a green line coming out of it. I much preferred the Download icon used in trunk builds until just a few weeks ago:



And it’s not like this icon has been removed; the completed download box still shows this icon. In my opinion, this icon is perfect for XP: it uses a native-looking windows hard drive icon under a down arrow. What better metaphor for downloading could there be?

Until Firefox 2, the Print button was always unique: gray, isometric, with clearly defined top and bottom flaps. The Firefox 2 rendition looks way too similar to the FF2 New Tab button, and the Firefox 3 version looks like a flatbed scanner or an external CD drive. Winstripe had the same frontal view of the printer, but used shadows to better define its purpose.

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Like cut, copy and paste, the icons in the Error Console haven’t been changed from their glossy Firefox 2 version. And the red close button that appears frequently in Firefox on tabs, the find bar, and so many other places hasn’t been replaced. It looks better suited to Vista, completely nonnative in XP.



In short, the new theme feels cobbled together in a haphazard fashion without serious thought given to how all the icons would interact as a coherent unit. The shame of it is, Mozilla has an excellent theming community and a competition within it could have produced a much better theme based on popular support.

Unless a lot of images are replaced at the last minute, the most native-looking aspect of Firefox 3 will be the new combined Back/Forward button.

In recent months, newly elected Count Lou Tintarello has forced the construction of seven obscenely expensive public works to fuel the faltering upstate economy:

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I. P. Freeway

The I. P. Freeway is named after star athlete I. P. Freeman (1921-1953), the first man to win Olympic medals for the 100 yard dash, the javelin toss and swimming. He was the second man to die from throwing a javelin into his own back and the first to do so underwater.

“It’s about time that our county’s most famous resident had a freeway named after him,” says Stan Upton, a local grocer and grandson of the late Mr. Freeman. “My grandfather has never been given the fame he so rightly deserves. He died a hero, and the least we can do is name that road after him.”

The I. P. Freeway is built over the Greater Northern Oxglove River, which even environmentalists hated.

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Lighthouse of Lexiconington

At first the people of Lexiconington questioned why their landlocked city was getting a lighthouse, but the influx of tourist dollars shut them up pretty well. Its design is based on diagrams of the legendary Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The lighthouse’s main attraction is its rotating panoramic skydome, which gives visitors a breathtaking 360° view of Lexiconington, from its verdant unincorporated marshes to its thirteen garbage dumps. A free mausoleum is housed in the lighthouse’s basement, next to the Burger King.

Controversy still remains, as the lighthouse’s spotlights are constantly fixed on the landing strips at neighboring Lexiconington International Airport. LIA’s claims have thus far been unverifiable, as the county no longer collects data on airplane accidents.

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Hall of Fungi

Perched over the scenic Ozanokie Valley gorge, the Hall of Fungi has been a longstanding staple in the national fungi circuit. Under the Help America Spore Act 2008 it is now an officially protected landmark and will be completely renovated.

The Hall was founded in the 1880s as a microbiology research center but lost its funding after progressive era muckrakers uncovered connections between members of its governing board and the Mantissa crime family. “Many of us, who would have liked nothing more than to better understand this Kingdom of Life, are now relegated to menial...vocations,” wrote New York Times columnist and biologist Justin Doge. “The Hall has been more impactfull to the Science of Biology than any heretofore organisation.”

Major breakthroughs cited by the Hall include confirmation of a link between death cap mushrooms and human death, and over thirty overtly racist fungal taxonomies.

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2000’x5000’ Concrete Lot

Over 200 acres of unspoiled forest land was clear cut last October to make room for a massive concrete lot in honor of former astronaut and senator Stretch Armstrong. While in low Earth orbit, Senator Armstrong remarked how “uneven and ugly” the planet’s surface was, heralding him on a thirty year crusade to “blow up the mountains and fill in the lakes.” He also served briefly as a spokesman for anti-ghost powder.

Public support for planetary flattening followed Mr. Armstrong’s gut-wrenching keynote speech at the shadow Republican National Convention in 2007. “We may not be able to—right now—to dissipate atmospheric conditions...[but] the technology to smooth our world’s little wrinkles is within our grasp.”

The lot is expected to have a lone Fotomat booth at its exact center.

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George W. Bush Preemptive Memorial

George Walden Bush, a mailman from Route 38 West, is “probably going to die soon,” says an anonymous source close to the family. The remarks follow a routine medical examination.

Mr. Bush is an accomplished mountaineer, scaling both the Pyrenees and the Himalayas before age 25. “My idol growing up was Calvin Coolidge,” Bush admitted in a 1978 interview with Adventure! magazine. Upon returning to Oxglove County in 1980, Bush was hired for a managerial position at a floundering restaurant. Six months later, the place was ready to franchise. By 1982 he was head of a global fast food empire. He later became a mailman.

Enough petition signatures have already been collected to place a statue of George Bush next to his favorite hog rendering plant. Responding to criticism that it is meaningless to construct a memorial to a living person, the office of Lou Tintarello tased a roomful of reporters and engraved the plaque with “1946 — ~2008”.

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Leaning Tower of Olathe

Built in early 2002 by vigilantes, the cellular tower of Olathe Landing stands as a testament to both the ingenuity of a ragtag group of college students who later got jobs as Verizon bean counters, and to their inexperience with site surveying. Any idiot with a credit of architecture under his/her belt would have understood that the marshy topsoil of Olathe Landing requires a firm cement foundation for all structures, including doghouses.

Within one year the tower had shifted 15 degrees and one of its legs protruded from the ground, skewering passing deer. A sharp rise in demand for mobile phones coupled with ungodly budget cuts convinced the county legislature to—instead of paying $100,000 to have a telephone company build a real tower—give a guy $20 to tape it down and another $50 to rustproof it.

“I’ve always been proud of that tower,” says Olathe Landing high schooler Bridget Parker. “I see it through the grimy bus windows on the way to school every day. It reflects the cheapness and transitory nature of our postmodern culture.”

Now that the tower is a county landmark, it can no longer be used to carry digital phone signals. Unfortunately the budget remains frozen and no new cellular towers can be built, although $2 million has been budgeted for telegraph line maintenance.

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Flightless Owl Preserve

A sprawling 400 acres has been ceded to the Canopy nonprofit foundation to build a habitat for the near-extinct North American Flightless Owls (Strix terrae).

One of nature’s tastiest creatures, the flightless owl has always been prized for its tender, pre-marinated flesh. Trappers and hatters have also sought it for its elaborate plumage. The only specie of owl to possess teeth, many area aboriginal American artifacts affect themselves with “fowl ivories.”

In 1851’s Oxglove Spirit Owls, Rainbow Sauna, a matriarch of the Oxcans, gives a written account of her tribe’s oral history on Flightless Owls:

For trying to steal Noble Field Owl’s winter vittles, the Bureau of Spirits acted in a Timely Manner to enact strict retribution against them. Thus, they were shamed Eternally for their Avarice with a Crippling Blow to each wing; for their Vanity they were crowned with a Mantle to scintillate Great Bears and Soyotes.

The Soyote was a related owl breed that went extinct centuries earlier due to rampant cannibalism. Drawing from the folklore of three other tribes and the works of twenty Lamarckian researchers, Spirit Owls is the first and most comprehensive cryptozoological text/cookbook regarding extant owls.

Flightless Owls grow to a length of 65 centimeters with a wingspan of 10 centimeters. They weigh an average of 34 kilograms. Although illegal to hunt, the eggs of the Flightless Owl have historically been poached.

Warning: this post will may contain demoralizing elements and graphic depictions of adequacy.

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On the grounds of the Ulster County Community College lies a structure so foul that the college’s employees refuse to discuss it with outsiders.

The Robert S. Kelder Conference Center was a thriving part of the infrastructure for over 20 years, housing various state and local agencies and providing classrooms for driver’s education. Then about two years ago it was shut down because yearly flooding weakened its roof and boiler and infested it with mold. Its only purpose now is to store old furniture and really old computer equipment until recyclers will take them away, or until a public auction that’s definitely going to happen one day...

Everyone hates the place, especially the people who have to take inventory of everything in it. Guess where I used to work?

I remember once opening a box of crusty Iomega ZIP drives and finding a cute little family of spiders the size of quarters. Thinking fast, I whipped out a nearby mouse and lassoed the box closed. As someone in the IT field I’ve been trained from birth in the arcane art of mouse manipulation.

Despite all the melancholy, I’m very much an optimist; to me the building was always half not infested with mold. Seriously, Kelder was only a small part of an otherwise great job. And the position I recently... let’s say tried out... made me love that haunted-house-in-training all the more.

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Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been making web pages for years. The problem is that I haven’t been making them commercially. So when I got an offer to work at a web site design company, I jumped for joy! What luck! I immediately e-mailed links to my most impressive web apps, such as my slideshow generator and cryptography widgets. Finally, a foot in the door!

The interview went well, I wore my good sweat pants and griped an adequate amount about Internet Explorer 6. Turns out that they didn’t use a lot of Javascript there, so my most impressive scripting skills were pretty much non-starters. But I’ve made beautiful static pages in the past — and the place was surrounded by restaurants — so I went with my gut.

I wish I’d listened a little more closely to my gut, though, since it was picking up all kinds of warning signs: it was a Tuesday afternoon, yet there were only two people working; half the cubicles were empty — not just unoccupied, but empty; if I didn’t have a laptop I could use a computer that was probably a Pentium III; and I would be paid on a “per-project basis.”

There were also no cups by the water cooler.

On the plus side, I got to stay for two hours after the interview helping the other guy there style a navigation bar. I joked about how we could do it in two lines of code using the :first-child selector, but since we were developing for Internet Explorer 6 it would be pretty futile to... what? You’ve never heard of the :first-child selector? Don’t worry, neither had he. But I had fun explaining it; the sound of my voice is very soothing.

Even before the interview, I knew that the company used a content management system called Drupal. Apparently it lets you put together a web site with very little actual coding. I spent the whole week watching online videos on it and reading about it. And the day before I started, my interviewer (who was also the owner) sent me a task list and a podcast about the latest version of Drupal. I skimmed the list. It didn’t seem all that hard, just tidying up a web site. So I listened to the podcast until one in the morning. Surely my first day would be a crash course in Drupal.

Since first impressions are tough, I showed up a half hour early in a display of eagerness... and promptly waited a half hour for the “early” guy to get there and unlock the place. If I’d gotten hired a week or so later, there would’ve been no problem; apparently, an early morning yoga class is subletting some of the cubicles.

When the boss came in forty minutes later, he introduced me to everyone as a “scout,” told me to use my own judgment as much as I could before asking questions (you just know this isn’t gonna end well) and set up my workstation for the day: it was a Pentium III, a five-year-old-laptop. But it was more than enough to run the ten-year-old software on it. It was hooked up to the saddest beige monitor ever, and a keyboard with a broken number pad; the corker was definitely the Apple Mighty Mouse.

From the look of the site I was supposed to work on, it was probably written on this computer. The code was completely invalid and full of conventions that went out of practice a decade ago. When I asked the boss when the site was made he said it was one of his first. In any event, I couldn’t do any of my tasks because of the unreadable code. So I spent three hours making the code valid and readable and adding semantic elements. Surely my hard work will be rewarded!

Then I took my lunch hour. I say “took” instead of “clocked out” because there was no time management system. I ended up going to three different restaurants; the first had no tables, and the other two had just horrible food. It turns out that the place with no tables had once sold my father food with a large chunk of wood in it. I heard there was a pretty good deli around the block, but they were closed.

Feeling refreshed, I jumped right back into de-mangling table layout and using tiny CSS tricks to make the site look more modern. Evidently I did my job a little too well. Just as I was about to update the last page, the boss dropped by to see what I had done all day. Turns out (aren’t you getting to love that phrase?) that what I should have done was use the Dreamweaver template to change all the pages for the site at the same time instead of fix each page individually. Earlier, when I’d asked if I should do something similar with PHP, he said not to bother.

I didn’t know I was supposed to use a template since it was the second-to-last task on my list of priorities. Turns out that I was reading the task list upside down the whole time, and that the first tasks were on the bottom. I hadn’t noticed since the top task was a description and none of the other tasks seemed related.

As far as I know, all the valid code I wrote is gone now. But they were trying to convince the customer to switch to a Drupal-powered site anyway, so none of my work mattered. I decided to just go home without completing my final task, which was quality assurance.

^^ That paragraph is my favorite.

I avoided mentioning money in my “I Quit” e-mail, just to see if I’d be offered compensation for my seven hours of coding, maybe for the two hours of consulting I’d done after the interview... nope. Not even an “attaboy.” It’s just as well; I wouldn’t want to tell him my address and the only reason I would ever go back to that area is because there’s supposed to be a store nearby that sells capes.

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In an unrelated matter, I’ve updated this blog’s template slightly. The navigation bar at the top uses two lines of code to achieve the exact effect they were looking for. A special extra line of Javascript was needed to compensate for Internet Explorer 6, and it took me under ten minutes to complete. The only people who will have issues are those who are too paranoid to leave Javascript turned on, but not paranoid enough to switch away from an older version of Internet Explorer.