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A
Anonymous
May 7, 2012
Question

Vastly improved and easily customizable in Firefox

  • May 7, 2012
  • 4 replies
  • 7322 views

The new forum is a vast improvement in terms of performance—it screams in comparison to the Jive molasses we had been putting up with and it's very easily customizable in Firefox through a number of scripts and AdBlock Plus.

The images below show what a customized topic index page and an customized open thread page look like in Firefox 3.6.28 (the last Firefox release to support a Power Mac PPC) look like, respectively.  OS is 10.4.11.

 

 

These are very welcome changes.

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    4 replies

    Jacob Bugge
    Jacob Bugge
    Community Expert
    May 8, 2012

    station one,

    I have been against customizing, preferring to know what others saw, but your screenshots look very tempting, quite a bit like the fair forums that fell into the abyss just over three years ago.

    So maybe when the dust has settled, if it is not offered as a one click/default solution (maybe it would be more likely to see the sun rise in the west).

    What did you actually do (I have Firefox 12 so it should be possible there, too)?

    A
    Anonymous
    May 8, 2012

    Jacob Bugge wrote:

    …What did you actually do (I have Firefox 12 so it should be possible there, too)?

    It's still a work in progress, Jacob.  These two new screen shots show a further refinement that brings the current forums much closer to what you refer to as "the fair forums" in your post.

    You are correct in your assumption:

    Jacob Bugge wrote:

    The OP screenshots led me to believe, maybe wrongly, that it was easy to get the forum/thread to fill the whole screen, and get rid of the other stuff.

    The page does fill the whole screen.

    Of course you can do all this in Firefox 12, as a matter of fact I have Ff 12 on a Mac-Intel box and it's customized exactly like this one here.

    Once they finish the to-do list here, I'll send you a list of the page elements blocked by AdBlock and the scripts to modify the styles, all of which can be done with standard Firefox Add-ons like Stylish and Greasemonkey.

    Here's the index page as it looks to me right now:

    and here's this open thread:

    Noel Carboni
    Noel Carboni
    Brainiac
    May 14, 2012

    IE9's "F12 Developer Tools" function reported 94 items in 138,997 bytes sent and a whopping 2,409,255 bytes received just to refresh the page on this very thread.

    And that's with the various social networking crap sites most people see at the upper-right blocked.

    It really is ridiculous how much needs to be done by the browser just to put up a forum thread.  Note that more than one WordStar had to be sent in the process!  Good thing I have a 40 megabit uplink!

    -Noel


    Note the amount of data required to just display the parent page:

    http://forums.adobe.com/community/general/forum_comments

     

     

    -Noel

    PECourtejoie
    PECourtejoie
    Community Expert
    May 7, 2012

    It's still Running on Jive, R.

    A
    Anonymous
    May 7, 2012

    Thanks for the timely reminder, but I think everyone realizes the forums are still running on Jive.  That's no surprise.

    The performance, however, is better than what was being delivered by Jive under the old design, comparable to the best performance observed before Adobe switch to Jive a few years ago.  In some of the other threads Adobe staff was saying that performance gains were expected due to less excess baggage, and they are right.  Pages load faster now.

    A
    Anonymous
    May 7, 2012

    In connection with the subject of customization, I'll note the intrusive scripts that I've managed to block with the Ghostery add-on:

     

    This has also helped with some performance issues and it does away with some annoying twitter pop=ups discussed in another thread.

    A
    Anonymous
    May 7, 2012

    Also worth noting, the Advanced Editor is back when you edit a post. 

      

    Noel Carboni
    Noel Carboni
    Brainiac
    May 7, 2012

    Interesting.  Can't say I've noticed any speed improvement.  With IE9 it was interactive for me before, and it's still interactive.

    -Noel

    A
    Anonymous
    May 7, 2012

    Remaining to be fixed are a few things already noted elsewhere:

    • the User Bar breaking up in the open thread page;

    • badly needed sequential post numbers;

    • an indication of which post is being replied to;

    etc.

    In all, very satisfying.   

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