Mozilla In A Coma
Wow, that new mozilla.org design is ugly *and* uses tables. What a way to promote cutting edge web standards, make a site that uses design philosophies from when Netscape Navigator 4.0 was “cutting edge”. It doesn’t validate either.
July 21st, 2003 at 2:07 am
I kind of like it. Now that Moz has moved into the forefront of gecko browsers, I think it’s important to put to put a consumer friendly face on it. For the first time, people not familiar with the project who just want to give a new browser they’ve heard about a shot, stand a chance of actually finding the right download. It’s also nice to have the various projects all referenced in one location.
If we want Moz to gain market share a familiar front end is a step in the right direction. The new site is something a visitor accustomed to AOL, Amazon, Yahoo and MS can feel comfortable using.
The markup isn’t all that bad. Sure, it’s a silly oversight not to include the character encoding, but manually selecting one and running it through the validator reveals two minor errors (improper nesting of the PayPal form). Not perfect, but essentially sound.
July 21st, 2003 at 11:07 am
I agree it isn’t so great looking, but I do think it’s an improvement over the last one. It’s a little more consumer-oriented than geek-oriented, but still has a really long way to go. I think they should have the front page be really slick looking for consumers with a link to a “developer’s center” or something like that where they can have all of technical jargon.
The whole site needs to be more like this page with easy to understand reasons why to use mozilla/firebird instead of IE. But in a more attractive package of course. :)
July 22nd, 2003 at 12:07 pm
It’s not completely unfortunate looking, but it isn’t great either. I hate the tan colored boxes, the color just stands out too much. Are those boxes the most important content on the page? If not, should they stand out the most visually? No. And tables? Definitely not the way to go for a new redesign.
July 24th, 2003 at 1:07 am
“ugly *and* uses tables”. I think that is very very true. I mean, not that my sites don’t use tables (any new sites that I do won’t, now that I know better), but Mike is right! These are the Mozilla people! For crying out loud, underground communities (http://www.mezzoblue.com , http://kennsrah.net , etc.) are trying desperately to promote Mozilla as the better choice and then they go and put up that… that crap?! Geez! I think they couldv’e gotten 9 out of 10 of the webs top designers to redesign that site for free. Yeah, it’s better looking than the “I’m a BBS on the web” look, but please, it’s NOT as nice looking as MSN.com or Microsoft.com – which is the competition in the first place…
crimeny… I still love Mozilla… They just didn’t score a perfect 10 with that “dive”. Maybe a 4.8 from the Albanian judge will help ;)