While not being a fan of Unity myself, an important point is that efficiency is not a goal in itself. Also, it has nothing to do with what keyboard shortcuts people have been using for 15+ years. And in general what is efficiency? Many "power users" cram their screen full with processor temperature displays, tiny network traffic graphs, hard disk data throughput applets, calling that efficiency ... and Unity apparently takes away too many pixels away from these toys? :)

Well, I totally approve of this power user lifestyle, I love it. But wasting time by configuring pointless stuff is almost the same as the perceived time waste of clicking around in a nice looking interface and watching the window animations. I say "perceived time waste", because what really,measurably, wastes time is constant context switching. That has nothing to do with processor speed or 3D acceleration, but with the mind having to adapt to different tasks in too short intervals.

No matter if you hate Unity or not, Ubuntu deserves credit for stirring up the UI landscape in Linux, creating an unique identity for the Linux desktop, instead of imitating Windows or Apple or Next.

I have to admit I was just raging.

However, my frustration with scroll bars has nothing to do with Opera, I just needed an outlet.

As usual, Don Norman has more insightful things to say about this topic: http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/gesture_wars_20272.asp

Isn't it like a speech input for an Infocom game?

Some of these games also were able to understand pronouns like "it", "him", "there" ...

It seems to be trendy right now to emulate paper in all possible places.

The first step is to get rid of the scrollbar, although it shows important information at a glance, not like "page 3 of 26". It can even show where to find search results, see e.g. Chrome's scrollbar. But, hey, it doesn't look "minimal" so let's just get rid of this UI element that was developed for like 30 years and still has room to improve. Let's make it more "attractive to interact with", more "fun"!

The next step is to go to page flipping, because, well, that really improves orientation inside a document and navigation speed. NOT! People hate PDFs for a reason. The kitschy ways of flipping through pages on the iPad is a nice graphical gimmick, but beyond the fast fading novelty, it is very unpractical. How to skim a through document, how to quickly find an image that you have seen there? By flipping through all the pages again? Flipping pages would bring of course back new possibilities to solve problems with new crappy UI widgets, like a overview of images or a button to jump to an index, overlay it transparently over something ... too bad this problems already have been solved by the scrolling document and the scrollbar.

Browsers should enable people to read more, not slow them down and read less. If I want to look like an idiot while reading on a screen I will find another way of doing so, I don't need the UI to be fiddled with to optimize livestyle.

The blogpost mentions a "familiar MySQL environment" ... that's not much SQL.

Yes, and that is fine, but it is definitely not possible to turn it off!

People, it is an illusion that you just can turn stuff off everywhere. You can turn off things up to the level of how the system was designed. And KDE is now designed for over-componentisation, over-information and over-configuration. It needs a consistent narrative. Maybe it will develop one. This is needs something that would be good to turn on, not off. :)

Indeed! Most of them cannot even produce hypertext :)

However, with a bit of work it is possible to make them generate code that is more or less readable for the users.

Anyway, not-so-great readable code is still better than code that is only optimized for computers. Almost not different from going binary. And that is against my understanding of the web's spirit.

What happened to view source, the browser function that build the web?

I think it is not nice to deliver unreadable code to your users. Removed line breaks and indenting spaces, obfuscated javascript variables, automatic changing of meaningful file names to some hash-gibbeish ... do not like.

"Vorratsdatenspeicherung" in Germany did essentially the same thing. Good that the constitutional court ruled this law illegal in March this year and all records had to be deleted. But the European Union presses Germany to re-implement another, very similiar law. So the activists have to work EU wide to stop the crap this time.

Snow Applet is also very good.

People who buy this car don't care too much about bucks.

digiKam has a terrible, clumsy interface. When it comes to tagging it is probably the only software that got this concept more wrong than F-Spot.

Also, the interface is not "slightly different looking", it is designed with quite a different concept. Just look for example at the amount of menu options and their ordering.

(Disclaimer: I have been using digiKam for quite some time. After being annoyed by it to the core for years and some trying i went back to storing images in folders and browsing them in thumbnail view :))

Maybe it will rather make people go to sites that are not plastered with advertisments instead?

The alternative probably being everybody using the same environment :)

Anyway, it's just plain weird that Adobe is claiming requiring Firefox being a problem.