Newgrounds Classic

A short while ago I started a survey on NG Classic.

Page 1 : NG Classic Survey

The first page was a simple poll and has no bearing on development other than to get some feedback. I’m going to go through the results and the aim of each question objectively starting at page 2, this is the most familiar answer for why someone uses NG Classic to the reason I made it.

If you are talking about the firefox theme; then yes I do have NG classic. I use it because it is damn sweet. The colors and set-up are great. The real icing on the cake is the animated rising sun thing. I can find myself just staring at it when I am waiting for new posts on the BBS.

Page 2: Beyond Firefox

Do you believe NG Classic should be developed for the following?

This question was to see if there was any demand for new skins, with a few suggestions already made. These suggestions scored the following:

• Thunderbird: 28%
• Opera: 9%
• Both: 7%
• People who don’t know or don’t care: 56%

Out of these you would normally assume that the latter don’t factor in. The truth is they do as they lower the demand for the other items listed.

What other programs(if any) do you think NG Classic should be developed for?

This was to see if there was anything I hadn’t considered and the first chance to change the focus away from being exclusively to Firefox 3. There were many answers given but a few stood out:

Winamp
This would be an interesting project but I would have to consider the lack of portability involved and the fact that Linux and Mac OS X users who have NG Classic would miss out. For this reason it is not likely to happen any time soon, if at all.

Windows XP/Vista Themes
This was the most requested alternate program of all but again I have to say no for one simple reason. There are two Windows themes I know of that are in development and I will link them in the order the threads for them were started:
iLott’s Newgrounds Windows Skin and FeindishDemon’s Newgrounds WB skin.
Bug whichever developer you want for more info on these skins or if/when they will be released to the public.

Page 3: Browser and Email

This page was used to reinforce the answers given on page 2 to balance the supplied answers weight against the custom answers.

What browser do you use most or prefer?

Needless to say this shows a stark contrast to actual market data, but considering the source there is an obvious reason why.

• Firefox 2: 72.6%
• Firefox 3: 17.8%
• IE6/IE7: 9.6%
• There were no Opera or Safari users who filled out this survey

When looked at person by person the fact that all the people who asked for an Opera skin use Firefox shows that the skin is already reaching them(all of their major browsers were Firefox 2 and 3) and there is no need for an Opera skin to be developed at this time.

What email client do you use most or prefer?

• Outlook/Outlook Express: 0%
• Thunderbird: 19%
• Webmail: 63%
• Other:18%

Now this answer is very interesting, especially the 63% using Webmail. Maybe they will convert to Thunderbird if they knew they could have a NG Classic theme, bypass their Webmail storage limits and receive the Newgrounds RSS Feeds all at the same time…

Page 4: Final questions

Quote from Page 1:
vnjchbu gybvh NAQMSDFNWMDFGNUHDGMKJ

The goal of this page is to get some feedback on the new features and a last chance in the survey at making an improvement in NG Classic during the development process.

What are you looking forward to in the Firefox 3 version of NG Classic and why?

In this question there was almost a 50-50 split, meaning that both of the listed features are well received. The only exception is this cryptic optional response:

like space or modern

What can it mean? Only the author knows…

Do you have any suggestions that you think would make NG Classic better?

This is crunch time, and will take a far longer time to make decisions based on the results of this survey, there are many factors that go in each idea and I won’t fill this report with them all, however some are noteworthy:

a newgrounds toolbar. Possibly something built on conduit that gave access, for example, to the latest news, flash/audio subs./top ten, etc.

This is beyond the scope of NG Classic by being an extension, instead of a theme component. An excellent idea for a future project if it doesn’t exist at the completion of NG Classic 2. If I were to make this, the search would be using the Newgrounds search function externally rather than Google.

I don’t know if the NG Staff will allow this, and that would have to be something to be investigated before beginning. I believe that if it were to be made there would no extra traffic other than the Feeds and a few searches in quick succession.

Make sure it doesn’t run as slow

There is no “resource friendly” way to bring animations to a Firefox theme. If there was, I would be using it.
I am reducing the amount of texture memory going into V2 however memory is not the issue here. The animation uses a lot of CPU power to display and a new animation method will be introduced that is unavailable to Firefox 2.

As I always answer to performance related questions read the last few lines of the description and follow the directions and help provided. These directions will allow you to stop the animation, making NG Classic run on less than a tenth of the CPU resources. If you upgrade your computer or decide you want the animations simply remove the line described from userChrome.css.

Yes, there will be a new project, one that is the sole result of this survey and it will be developed as soon as NG Classic V2 gets back on track and will be announced in it’s pre-beta stage.

As for the rest of the ideas, I’ll let this quote from the last question do the talking for me:

Mebeh