Stylish review
Someone posted a very long review on the add-ons site. While the score of the review was only 1/5, I found the text very interesting. The reviewer raised some good points.
- When a search doesn’t yield any styles, the site should suggest to check the global styles. It did that until yesterday, when I did some clean-up. I should add it back.
- The install process should be made clearer on the style pages themselves. They presume the user knows what load a style into Stylish does.
On a few points (and these seem to be his major beefs), I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
- Stylish made him lose his customizations because he couldn’t remove the style. Not sure how this could have happened, except if he didn’t restart his Firefox after removing the style. I think the link to the forum thread need to be more prominent to help confused users like this.
- He says there is nothing explaining the difference between site styles and global styles. There are descriptions on the top of those pages.
- He seemed to think -moz-document rules are Stylish specific.
- He complained that Stylish uses a window icon instead of the Firefox icon, and said that no other extension he knows of does this. In fact, DOM Inspector, a Mozilla-created extension, does.
A few things were things that probably can’t be helped.
- He couldn’t find any styles useful enough to him to go through the trouble of installing. This is understandable, considering it sounded like he was simply browsing the list. Even I don’t browse through the list looking for sites to improve - I generally stick to a few general-purpose styles and site styles for sites I visit often.
- He didn’t differentiate between the usefulness of the styles he tried and the usefulness of Stylish himself.
I really, really wish users would come talk on the forum about the issues they’re having. I don’t really mind bad ratings because the good ones make up for them, but it’s hard to read about problems users have when I know the solution and can’t get it to them.
November 28th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
sheesh
that must be the longest post i’ve ever seen on amo
I think your point about making the forum more prominent - perhaps with a ‘come on in and ask any question you like’ approach - is very valid
the majority of his problems seem to stem from either his inability to understand the concept and scope of stylish and/or userstyles - or - your negligence in explaining thoroughly the process involved in utilising the extension
it’s probably a little from column a and a little from column b but you are constantly improving the site and documentation which makes what i consider to a be a straightforward and easy-to-use extension even easier to implement
as for the rest of his diatribe he seems to have a bee in his bonnet about something
you wanna i pay him a visit ?
November 28th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
One thing I’d like to see improved, is the text on the front page seems too verbose. Adding a 1,2,3 list would help IMO:
1 - Install Stylish
2 - Find a style you like
3 - Press the install button
November 28th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
Maybe this George Shaffer: http://geodsoft.com/
?
December 6th, 2006 at 4:51 am
I’ve only discovered stylish today, and it’s doing great for me. I just wanted to comment on your “make the forum thread more obvious idea”.
Having noticed the mozillazine thread and browsed over to it, I was completely put off by the fact that it was 50+ pages long — finding the answer to my specific query in an unsorted list of random questions and answers seemed like a recipie for wasted time, so I gave up. I think that a more helpful thing for newbies like me would be a faq or something similar, or maybe a threaded forum somewhere. I do appreciate that this involves more work for you though.
p.s. on an unrelated note, where do stylish styles actually _go_ when you install them, I’ve been browsing my firefox directory to no avail…
December 6th, 2006 at 5:01 am
Typo alert! I should have said 30+ pages, not 50+
December 6th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Yes, Chris, I’ve been looking into forum software to integrate with the site. A single thread sucks for trying to find previously posted information. A FAQ is also a good idea.
Stylish styles go in stylish.rdf in the profile folder.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder
December 15th, 2006 at 6:35 am
Hey i’m new to stylish too, and a forum would be quite well, what about a mailing list?
Another thing, i’ve seen some styles using things like p[class=”something”] and others more elaborated (i think even using regexp) for selectors… i don’t think i’ve seen that in css. Is that firefox only? where can i find more info about this selectors?
This is a great extension. Thanks for it
December 15th, 2006 at 7:15 am
a forum would be a nice improvement. but please, if you provide an rss feed to the forum, make sure it behaves like mailing lists. that’s the best of all worlds..
December 15th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
carlos, the best place to go to learn about the selectors is the specification itself. I’ve given a brief overview in this post.
carlos and alta88, what mailing list-esque features are you looking for?
December 16th, 2006 at 8:59 am
1. threading. while a forum consists of serial posts (so hierarchical threading like in newsgroups isn’t required), all posts need to thread group. so a refno or inreplyto field needs to be added to the rss header so the rss client can thread replies to the original post.
2. entire post contained in summary. in Tb i’d prefer text (with images, links) in the message pane and not the web page for fast load that a summary provides. a lot of rss feeds limit the summary.
3. replying. rss header should have a reply-to address, which can be used server side to post the reply to the forum. since this might be some work to implement, a link that puts up a reply page in a browser would do.
4. date/author. the date posted is important, must sort by that within thread. date received is useless, as rss is batched.. also, sender must be the author’s login/id on the forum.
oddly, no forum does rss right. php has a mod but the default doesn’t work as above; if someone did that one right it would make a lot of forums instantly usable via rss. blog comments should follow the above too.
thanks for asking!