MSU CSE Capstone update 4/6
6 April, 2012 § 7 Comments
It is the end of the thirteenth week of the project to move the preferences to in-content UI. There are approximately two weeks left to get the project done.
Status update
Joe and Jon spent a lot of time this week getting the current unit tests copied to exercise the new in-content preferences. Jon did a push to the tryserver with all of the patches and there are try builds available for you to download and play with.
Owen and Devan have been continuing on the preference categories and the about:config preferences for enabling the feature.
The students are also working on an overview video of their work this semester.
Next steps
The next steps are to get the new changes pushed to the UX branch and fix the last remaining nits.
JAWS 
Why don’t use the same layout like about:addons?
We’d like to unify the layouts of the in-content pages. At this point we just want to get something working and then we’ll make it look extra pretty later 🙂
In fact all the in-content (or future in-content) stuff (library, add-on, preferences) is gonna be redesigned with the Australis work.
The next move should be to have all dialogs in-content (clear history, saved password, etc.) as Chrome currently does.
It’s really cool students are doing this.
The screenshot doesn’t look like about:addons, is that intentional? http://blog.stephenhorlander.com/2010/06/in-content-ui-visual-unification/ talked about “in-content visual unification”, but I haven’t been following this since.
Will there be hash fragments so if someone wanted to they could bookmark about:options#general or a support document could provide a link to it? It’s nice if browser features work.
I downloaded the firefox-14.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2 from your “try builds available” URL, and Edit > Preferences is still a separate window.
Ahh, it’s pref’d off. In the special build, set about:config’s browser.preferences.inContent to true. Well done, very interesting! It doesn’t have the breadcrumb navigation in Mr. Horlander’s and Tiago Sá’s 2010 prototypes and according to the back button it doesn’t seem to go more than one level deep, so the about:addons “side nav with curvy surrounding edge” could work. Whatever’s consistent.
I understand the MSU project don’t cover this, but will the new inline preferences use about:permissions eventually? What ever happened to that anyways? 🙂
Eventually, yes that’s my hope. I’m not exactly sure what the holdup is on about:permissions. In fact, I’ve got it on my agenda for the upcoming Firefox work week to begin discussions/hackathon to bring about:permissions to completeness.