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by looopTools 790 days ago
I really like the concept of SeaMonkey, but the project needs some major UI updates and way more love to be relevant today.
2 comments

This definitely no. The reason i use it is the UI. Firefox, Chrome, Edge UI is a mess, a disgrace of UI design. I had to edit the user.css to get scrollbars at reasonable width.
I had a look into this because I became curious because the scrollbars are definitely sometimes annoying. Turns out that they removed the ability to edit Custom.css and do stuff like this in 2014. I wonder if there's another way to do that now? Haven't been able to find out.
Having scrollbars of reasonable width is not antithetical to having a UI that looks like it was made after 2006. You could easily have something that looks like Chrome and has a larger scrollbar. You could go for a different look, just not one that literally looks ancient.
It looks perfectly fine to me.

Changing for change's sake would mean that Chrome will need a new interface soon in order to not look ancient...

Not the same thing dude. This interface is straight outta 2005. Chrome's interface has been being tweaked constantly over the years. It doesn't need an overhaul because it's not 15+ years out of date.

But I mean, you do you man. There's nothing wrong with liking retro interfaces. I once tried to do everything to make my computer look like Windows XP just for nostalgia. Regardless, the product has nice features that would be cool to use, except most people don't want one application on their computer to look like it was there when 9/11 happened while everything else looks new. There would be nothing wrong with having an application with the same features that's not off-putting to most users.

But sure, they can block themselves into a niche of people that don't care if UI looks nice if they really want. That's allowed. Not illegal lol.

>Not the same thing dude. This interface is straight outta 2005. Chrome's interface has been being tweaked constantly over the years. It doesn't need an overhaul because it's not 15+ years out of date.

You basically repeated my point. Change for change's sake. And it looks similar to 2009 Chrome, so yeah it's quite literally 15 years out of date.

>look like it was there when 9/11 happened while everything else looks new

So change for change's sake it seems.

Nevermind man. Design is supposed to look nice and look like it goes together with the rest of the ecosystem. It is not mutually exclusive with functionality. But you clearly don't care about design that looks good. You are clearly not a design guy. You do not have an eye for design. You do not care about design. As I said, that's fine. It limits the audience of the product but it can be incredibly niche like that if it wants to be.
i agree. why fix something that's not broken :D
Strong agree. Concept sounds great. The UI looks like something out of 2005 and that's just not okay. It simply cannot be relevant while looking like that and updating its UI would not have to cause any loss in functionality. It's honestly a waste of time for devs to be working on something that looks like that, since you're cutting out half your audience.
> Strong agree. Concept sounds great. The UI looks like something out of 2005 and that's just not okay.

Why is that not OK? Wouldn't that mean that its UI has avoided the last ~15 years of general decline in structure and usability that we see commonly afflicting "modern" UI designs?

I think I now understand the mentality of a Cybertruck buyer
Lmao. Nice roast but I'm not sure I'd get a Cybertruck even if I could afford one. It's sorta cool in its own way though. I respect the Cybertruck. #CybertrucksDeserveRespect

Edit: I mean that it's cool in how it looks but yeah I would never buy Tesla because the products seem unreliable and dangerous as hell

The thing is that you were complaining about SeaMonkey due to how it looks, even though the way it looks is generally associated with an era of software design which expected much higher degree of reliability and user control than is common for "modern" software.

I don't think that's a purely contingent association, either: with software, how the UI looks and how the functionality works are deeply intertwined, and I think there may be a more direct correlation between "modern" software being unreliable, unconfigurable, and insecure, and it having haphazard UI designs that lack underlying organizing principles or adherence to well-established conventions.

So your original complaint seems to imply almost the opposite of what you are saying here -- that superficial aesthetics are more important to you, even to the point where you'd accept poor functionality and user-hostile anti-patterns as a viable tradeoff.

Im not really sure how on earth you have inferred that I think aesthetics are so important that I would compromise on functionality for that. I never said that. I am saying that both are necessary, whether you want to believe it or not. Just because you are nostalgic for the good old days where UI was more functional in your opinion, does not mean that applications have to look like they were made in 2005. What is stopping us from integrating some modern aesthetic elements into a design that is highly functional? Recognising a problem in the design of some modern apps does not necessitate us reverting to an outdated past vision. We can easily look forward and make a new alternative.
IMHO you need to step back and consider that there are more views of design, you think some newer look is "more modern" and better in itself, you say "outdated past vision". But those concepts are subjective too.

I like the Modern SeaMonkey theme. I also like the look of the classic theme (not default, but the old default, sometimes called "XPFE Classic"). Not sure if just out of nostalgia or because it looks neat to me. What I value more is that SeaMonkey's looks are customizable. I don't know if it's customizable enough to make a theme that behaves in the way you prefer, but at least there is room for customization. (I'm mentioning this because I do think this is an interesting feature to have.)

So, please consider relativizing your position, it seems you're insisting on a bias against the design just because it is not recent enough, but also wording that as an absolute.

To me that sounds like people who say some train models "look old" and "have to be replaced" just because they feature Budd-style corrugated stainless steel.