Re: Debian Start

Adnan, for some reason, your post that is present on planet debian doesn't appear on your blog at the moment (Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.). I would have commented there if that were possible. Anyways, I will give my opinion here, with different hats on.

(User hat on) The idea to have a similar start page on the different browsers is a nice idea.

(Web designed hat on) Some implementation details on your mockup are discussable, most notably the design in pixels (which doesn't help for the vision impaired needing big fonts), the list of fonts to be used, and the border being part of the background image. Also, considering the targetted browsers, SVG could be a nice addition.

(Iceweasel, Xulrunner and WebKit maintainer hat on) The content at the bottom suggests the page is intended to be put online somewhere. Browsers start page shouldn't require an internet connexion.
There should also be space for browser-specific icon and text. I'd really like to keep specific links, such as to bug reports and README.Debian (though the latter should really be htmlized). Speaking of these links, another one should be added some day in the future, to provide a link to a page explaining how users can help the maintainers (thanks to whoever came up with this idea during my BoF at DebConf).

2009-08-25 20:24:42+0900

firefox, webkit, xulrunner

Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Re: Debian Start”

  1. Bernhard R. Link Says:

    Also note that you can do

    echo “browser.startup.homepage=http://whatyoulike/” > /etc/iceweasel/myglobalstartuppage

    and

    echo ‘pref(“browser.startup.homepage”, “file://localhost/etc/iceweasel/myglobalstartuppage”); >> /etc/iceweasel/pref/mystartuppage.js

    and all you users that have not changed the startup page get what you choose.

  2. schmichael Says:

    The link at the bottom could be grabbed via Ajax or iFrame and nicely degrade to something like “You don’t appear to be connected to the Internet.”

  3. Adnan Hodzic Says:

    Mike,

    I read you reply on the planet, thank you :)

    I was moving to a new server, it’s all explained in the post:

    http://foolcontrol.org/?p=712

  4. foo Says:

    In addition, it should be part of the desktop-base package so that users who do not like branding can remove it.

  5. glandium Says:

    schmichael: Ajax is not allowed from local files. iFrame would display an ugly error if you don’t have a connection :-/