Poll: Form and Function

[thefourthvine]

So, I've finished tagging all my entries. Notice my index posts that allow all of you, including anonymous users, access to all my tags.

Notice that they look fucking awful. And the print is tiny, so I'm not even sure anyone will use them. Plus, I seriously do not want these to be the top entries in my journal for however long it takes LJ to put a "Tags" link on the info page; looking at them depresses me, and I'm probably the only person who actually looks at my journal regularly outside of a friends list.

But, on the other hand, I did tag all those posts. I have no idea what the point was if I can't find a way to let everyone use them to search by fandom and theme. So this poll is asking, basically, for you to identify the lesser of the evils, because they all look fairly evil to me at this point.

And while you're here, could you weigh in on other appearance aspects of this journal? I mean, if I'm going to pitch a major wobbler over the hideousness of my index posts, surely I could also spare some time to worry about the fact that my journal is, well, pretty darned hideous? And that it may also make other people's friends lists hideous?

I mean, OK, I'm going to spare that time anyway, so I guess what I really want is for you to spare enough time to form an opinion. I would greatly appreciate it.

But mostly, please god someone tell me what to do about this whole tags issue, because - the horror. The horror. My dogs are averting their eyes from the screen, here. Dust mites are scoffing at my primitive grasp of website design. It's all very very bad and wrong. Help meeeeeee.

[Poll #518389]

Comments

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

And "In time, LJ will provide", yes I certainly hope so.

They'd better. Although the great thing about LJ is that even if they don't, some user will probably come up with a way.

Your font is too small. I use a laptop, and I'm, like, blind. So I have Firefox tricked out with a minimum font size of 14pt, and I still use Ctrl+ a lot to increase the font. Unfortunately, I suspect this is a basic problem with how most of the styles have been designed. IMO they ought to leave font size alone so that the user's settings won't be overridden.

You are entirely right. The default font size in pretty much all S2 layouts is somewhat bitty on high-resolution screens. Unfortunately, although I can make it bigger, I can't make it big enough without messing up the way the layout displays. I have no idea why it's set up like this, although I suspect form over function had some kind of play here, unless the people who did all these styles use incredibly low resolution. Thank god for Firefox. (Or Opera, in my case, as I have issues with a few of Firefox's core features.)

[lorem_ipsum]

...And if you could make the fonts big enough for me, you'd be screwing it up for someone else who needs small fonts for some reason.

Which core Firefox features do you have a problem with?

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

Well, the big problem for me was that Firefox is memory hungry. I use tabbed browsing to serious excess - right now, in just this one window, I have 21 tabs open, and it's not uncommon for me to have three or four windows open, each with that many tabs. And, of course, I run other programs besides just the browser, and I leave my computer on constantly, and I leave all those windows open all the time. Under that kind of use, Firefox demands more and more system resources, and keeps grabbing resources even when I'm not doing anything with the program, until it crashes.

That's why I eventually switched to Opera, which I find uses about half the memory of Firefox in these sorts of situations - prolonged, intense, heavy use. (Obviously, I still have to have a ton of memory, but then, I know how I use computers, and I buy them with this in mind.)

But there were two other aspects I didn't like. I would have tried much harder to solve these if not for the memory thing.

First, the ad blocking and pop-up blocking isn't as good. When I was using just Firefox's internal pop-up blocker, I saw more pop-ups than I ever have. (That doesn't mean I saw all or even most of them; I've been using blockers since pop-ups began.) With the add-ins, it worked better, but even so - more ads and pop-ups got through than I was used to, or than I wanted. Opera's built-in blocker works better than Firefox's. Even better, with Opera, I can go back to the freeware add-on blocker I used before Firefox (it wasn't Firefox-compatible). It blocks basically all the ads, and it's also more flexible than the add-ons just for Firefox.

Also, in Firefox, you can search for a bookmark, but you can't modify its properties when you find it that way; the properties menu option is grayed out. You have to scroll through the bookmarks manually if you want to modify properties. (That must be fixable, but by the time I found this problem, I knew I would be dumping Firefox, so I didn't try to fix it.) This wouldn't be a big problem for most people, but my strange use of bookmarks makes me pretty dependent on being able to modify properties in bookmarks I've searched for.

So, all in all, while I really liked the idea of Firefox, not to mention some of its features, it just didn't work for me in practice. But I still recommend it, albeit with qualifiers, because the problems I had aren't ones that would affect most users. (I recommend Opera, too, and also with qualifiers; there is no one perfect browser. Opera's weirdnesses just happen to be more compatible with me.) And, again, I suspect that I might have been able to solve the problems if I'd tried hard enough - it just wasn't worth the time if there was another browser out there that didn't require such a lot of modification.

[lorem_ipsum]

> Firefox is memory hungry.

Oh. Yeah, I have that problem with Firefox, too.