Have you seen CSS3 columns in Firefox 1.5 beta 1 yet? September 12, 2005 10:44 AM   Subscribe

Have you seen CSS3 columns in Firefox 1.5 beta 1 yet? Do you think they make ask mefi easier to read on huge monitors? Here's a avi demo movie of them in action.
posted by mathowie (staff) to Feature Requests at 10:44 AM (12 comments total)

Looks like the International Herald Tribune, which I always thought looked interesting, but never really wanted to emulate.

How hard is it to just have a smaller browser window on a huge monitor?

Meh.
posted by GuyZero at 10:49 AM on September 12, 2005


How would this work when you have a bunch of comments? Would each comment be broken into it's own set of two or three columns? That seems like it would be harder to read, not easier.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:54 AM on September 12, 2005


I was only implementing on long passages, like the extended section for now.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:56 AM on September 12, 2005


Nice, pretty, but for MeFi?: meh. (Coming from one of the longer-winded posters on MeFi)

Design-wise it totally breaks the top-down linear text stream.

Besides, how many people actually have huge monitors?

How about a clickthrough counter for front page posts? There's all kinds of other things people have actively begged for. Granted, they're probably less sexy.
posted by loquacious at 11:05 AM on September 12, 2005


Columned text works in print but not on the web. Just my two cents from trying hard in the past to get it to work. People don't mind scrolling up and down, but left to right is unusual, breaks the attention span and is annoying.
posted by Rothko at 11:06 AM on September 12, 2005


Holy crap - 13 MB for a 15 second clip. Anyway, putting complaints about file sizes to one side, that looks like a really nice feature however I think it's something I'd want to be able to switch on or off. Would this be better as a Greasemonkey script perhaps (once GM works in the Beta version)?
posted by dodgygeezer at 11:06 AM on September 12, 2005


Yeah, it's neat, but it's not great for MeFi or AskMe. It's really distracting to go from one-column intro, to a two-column MI, to a one-column thread of comments. And it's even worse right now because previews show only one comment.
posted by Plutor at 11:07 AM on September 12, 2005


(One column.)
posted by Plutor at 11:08 AM on September 12, 2005


People don't mind scrolling up and down, but left to right is unusual

Looking at the clip it appears to create or remove additional columns depending on the width of the browser window so there would be no need to scroll left to right.
posted by dodgygeezer at 11:09 AM on September 12, 2005


Could this be an option to turn off? Say, maybe some cookie-based thing where you get fed one CSS file or another based on preference?
posted by Tuwa at 11:10 AM on September 12, 2005


I'm running 1.5, and I came here to specifically say that I don't like it.

It doesn't make it easier to read, and it causes all sorts of problems that have already been mentioned.
posted by trevyn at 11:11 AM on September 12, 2005


Ok, just checking. sheesh.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:13 AM on September 12, 2005


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