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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

I just upgraded. It completely changes the chrome of the browser on OSX and it is _absolutely hideous_. There are a lots of unnecessary animations that I find very jarring. I don't know if there's a way to change it back yet.

UPDATE: There is a "Customize Firefox" button which allows modifying the theme, which fixes the colors, but not the shape of the tabs or the animations.

UPDATE: In about:config, you can disable some of the animations with `toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled: false`

UPDATE: You can bring back curved tabs with this: https://github.com/wilfredwee/photon-australis

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Years of work to make Firefox the fastest browser.

Countless research and engineering hours.

With actual amazing, noticeable results as soon as you try it.

With a bunch of useful UI features.

"But tabs aren't curved, so fuck these guys! I won't upgrade!"

Oh well...

It's broke!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W5XXnEXuWM

I didn't have any complaints about speed. Who actually cares about browser speed? But I do care that suddenly, my browser looks completely different, half the functionality I use is missing and there is no way for me to get it back. The fact that this happened as an automatic upgrade without as much as asking me whether or not I want it to happen is not exactly a winning point either.

Edit: It seems that I was too hasty with my "who cares about speed" question. Apparently a lot of people do. I guess I just never found FF that much slower than other browsers. If it takes a second or two longer to load some page it is just not important to me.

>Who actually cares about browser speed?

I do. I can't use a browser that does not feel snappy. I couldn't care less about whether tab edges are round or not.

>Who actually cares about browser speed?

Millions of people who've switched to Chrome. Including hundreds that have said as much in HN comments over the last 5 years.

great. let them use Chrome then. FF was strong in customization. I don't care if site refresh takes 20ms or 50ms - I can't notice.

I do care very much if you break all of my current extensions and as a result the UI behavior I was used to is gone. It's like being forced to switch to a completely new browsers. If I wanted different browser I could have switched to Chrome years ago, thank you very much. Customization is much more important than speed.

>Customization is much more important than speed.

Obviously it's not, since the majority of Firefox user base (which used to be very high) jumped to Chrome 5-10 years ago, despite the first having customizations (add-ons) and the latter not yet (and when it added, incompatible ones).

In fact, by mozilla's own estimates (based on telemetry), only about 33% or so of their users even use add-ons.

sigh... should have ended that sentence with "for me", but I thought that it was clear enough that the entire paragraph is about my preferences, not talking about users in general.

still - as you wrote, folks who cared about speed jumped the ship already. Honestly, I don't believe they're coming back, just because FF's speed is now comparable to Chrome.

> In fact, by mozilla's own estimates (based on telemetry), only about 33% or so of their users even use add-ons.

alternatively: advanced users that tend to use add-ons also happen to be those who know how to disable telemetry.

> Who actually cares about browser speed?

Pretty much every end user, especially non-tech related end users.

It's kind of a huge deal FYI.

> Who actually cares about browser speed?

This, from Hacker News, who not one week ago was complaining about "everything being perceptibly slower" and who constantly complains about latency in applications. Pretty sure everyone cares about browser speed.

Yes, sorry we annoyed you with not wanting existing view-layer functionality to be irreversibly broken. Especially given FF's policy of "no, we're not making it easy to revert. Ever."

I lost my entire workflow one day when I did an "emergency upgrade" to FF that broke my addons and wouldn't even let me fix it.

I got some German actors to play it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8

Its hogging the crap out of my CPU (turns fans on) and is noticably slower than chrome on my 2015 MBP. Much respect to the devs at Mozilla, but my user experience hasn't been great thus far.

I think it looks and feels much better than before.

I think the new design is absolutely horrible.

I strongly disagree, and FF 58 is even better.

Well... it seems that disagreeing to the opinion of the crowd is a very bad thing. /s

I actually agree with you on a few fronts.

1) by default tabs are now white on a white background, with the active tab only being a slightly darker grey.

2) Everything is much more crammed together (tabs and bookmarks toolbar especially) which makes sense on a small laptop monitor, but on my desktop is just annoying.

3) Dialog boxes to confirm closing of multiple tabs have white text on grey background. (?!)

4) Folder icons in bookmarks toolbar now have this retro black and grey design.

5) Tabs are at the top of the window with no gap, even when not maximized, making window dragging more difficult.

In many ways it feels like a throwback to much older designs.

What OS are you on? The default style on Windows takes your system title bar color (or a dark blue if you don't have Windows set to show the system accent color on title bars); the default style on OSX uses a dark translucent background. Both use light gray tabs and a light gray toolbar background.

If you've migrated from a previous version of Firefox and customized the browser at all, you may not be getting the default settings, though-- right-click the toolbar or Bookmarks Bar, and take a look through the options at the bottom of the page. Themes will give you an option between the default, light, and dark themes (it sounds like you're stuck on the light one); density adjusts spacing in the toolbar area. And you can check "Drag Space" to add space above the tab bar for dragging, or check "Title Bar" to turn the system title bar back on.

It appears something about my existing profile was incompatible with the new version, causing a number of these strange issues. I didn't have a UserChrome.css, nor was I using a custom theme, so I don't know what it could have been, but creating a new profile at least dealt with the strange colour issues.

And thank you for that drag space tip. Definitely part of what I was looking for. I just assumed it toggled the ability to drag whitespace around while customizing!

I actually like the new design, the one thing that I do still miss is the elastic scrolling at the top/bottom of pages that Safari and Chrome have (and every other Mac app that you can scroll in). Just doesn't feel like a native Mac app.

I'm a bit annoyed by the dark header bar now, they previously only used that for private windows, now it appears they use it for both.

You can change it to "light" in the prefs :)

Yeah I just tried that and it changes the private window to light as well. I guess it doesn't matter much cause i don't use private much, but it's weird they have removed that distinction now.

In Firefox private mode you will always see a purple icon with a white face mask in the top right corner

If "Firefox will Never remember history" is set in the settings then the icon will not be present.

If you want that kind of distinction, it should be pretty trivial (less than a dozen lines of code) to implement a dynamic theme to that effect. We've got an article in the https://hacks.mozilla.org queue about exactly that -- stay tuned :)

Here's an add-on that does exactly that: https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples/tree/master/pr...

It's not currently packaged and uploaded to addons.mozilla.org, but you can try it by cloning the repo, navigating to `about:debugging,` and clicking "Load Temporary Add-on." Select the `manifest.json` file and you're good to go.

Firefox never made that distinction. What you describe is a Chrome beaviour. I think it'd be better if Mozilla copied it.

You might be right, I swap between the Firefox and Chrome for home and work stuff and maybe I'm getting things mixed up.

Yeah, Firefox on desktop has always just had a badge on private windows, with everything else being the same. I think mobile uses different colors, though.

I haven't used Firefox for years, and to me it felt very natural and smooth on OS X when I tried the new version today.

I had a very customized UI for Firefox, and was pretty upset by that going away. But after an afternoon with the dark theme I forgot all about it, and am now vastly happier. Give it a good go! :)

Do you have any specific examples?

When you click on a new link, there is an "explosion" animation on the tab where it turns entirely blue for a second. This happens every time you click a link. I'm finding this extremely distracting. I'm sensitive to this kind of stuff so I always try to disable animations on everything I can.

The top bar is also black-ish now rather than the system grey. This looks particularly bad with the new "blue" highlight indicator. The tabs are all square rather than rounded. It all looks pretty hideous.

You mean the blue loading indicator?

No, the active tab now has a blue stripe on it. Every tab has an animation of a darker stripe swooshing in at the top when you hover over it.

You can change the theme to "light" in preferences. If should get rid of the black bar. This has been a common complaint from osx users.

Can't seem to find where it is in firefox preferences. Could you please extend your solution?

This got me too. It's not in preferences, you have to use the hamburger menu thingy. Then, it's shoved randomly at the bottom.

The overall design is really a mess in 57, although browsing does seem faster.

You can also switch themes in the Add-ons Manager: about:addons

Pretty weird to put it there instead of Preferences.

Use the hamburger menu, select "Customize", and it's at the bottom of the screen.

Found by going to Tools->Add-Ons and then clicking Themes

FWIW, the tab shows the loading progress in blue, so you're seeing the result of quick page loads. Not arguing your experience, just clarifying what is happening.

You might like the "Light" theme, which I think is available by default. That won't do any rounding for you, however.

No, it's actually a "this page has finished loading" animation. Personally I like it, but of course taste varies.

> Do you have any specific examples?

Labels of background tabs became very transparent. This makes them completely unreadable, as my desktop background is quite dark. So, these tab labels are written with black letters on a dark blue background. So freaking good usability! /s

Switch to the "light" theme in the customization options. It looks better.

I think the look is a great improvement.

Thank you for sharing how to disable the blue flash when opening new tabs. I have the same complaints you do, though I'm running Windows 7.

I also notice now that when I close a tab the screen flashes white. This is very distracting when closing a tab with a dark background.

The loading animations are really distracting and bad. Some better UI to disable them (or ideally just get rid of them by default) is needed.

If you dislike them, you can disable those kinds of animations by toggling `toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled` in `about:config`

There's a big scary warning about making any changes in about:config, so I'm reluctant to do so.

Changing a single about:config setting is pretty harmless (you can just reverse the process if you need to), and callahad is a Mozilla employee. You can do it without worry.

And it's impossible to put the tabs beneath the address bar, or to have actual toolbars.

Decades of UI/UX knowledge, down the drain. Usability is gone.

> toolbars

Man, am I glad that UI/UX knowledge went down the drain

Toolbars are better than almost any alternative as long as they were honestly designed for completing a task. They got a bad rap because of all the spyware that average users were accumulating.

> And it's impossible to put the tabs beneath the address bar

I do not understand the significance of having the address bar above tabs from the UX perspective.

If anything, I feel that it should be below so that it can appear as a part of the tab's content - because it's contextual (each tab has it's own "instance" of the address bar)

> Decades of UI/UX knowledge, down the drain. Usability is gone.

Exactly the opposite; this is an evolution that has been taking place over the past decade.

Firefox has had tabs-on-top as the default since Firefox v4.0[1]. Chrome has had tabs-on-top for its entire existence (starting in Sept 2008); Opera had them before Chrome.

The merits can be argued either way, but don't act like this is sudden or arbitrary; it's neither.

Consider that maybe--just maybe--the dev teams at Mozilla, Google, et al. have done some usability studies in the past decade that informed these decisions.

I get that you may prefer tabs below the URL bar, but your claims about the greater state of UX are baseless and absurd.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmgtW2Iw-kE posted June 2010

EDIT: Google made a comic for the release of Chrome 1.0 that includes an explanation of their original rationale for putting tabs on top. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_18.html

De gustibus non est disputandum

The idea that someone else can know what another wants better than the other person is absurd. Your arguments might be valid for defaults, but they must be configurable defaults, because taste is subjective, arbitrary, and, despite what some believe, never in error.

I know what UX I want better than anyone else. Nobody can gainsay my personal taste.

I've found a way to move the tabs below the address bar here: https://github.com/Isaac-Newt/userChrome-styles

Thank you for helping me.

It took a bit of work but I was able to get it pretty close to how I had it before.

https://i.imgur.com/qygcIv4.png

I used the light theme and density = compact and enabled the title bar. And then I followed the instructions on this reddit thread to put the tabs on the bottom and the bookmarks above the tabs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6x2tmz/can_i_have_...

I also added a little CSS to space things out a little.

Thank you for helping me instead of acting like you know better.

Tabs on top makes far more UI sense than tabs on bottom.

I wish I could find a full-size screenshot of this, but here:

http://news.mynavi.jp/articles/2010/06/29/firefox-tabs-on-to...

Green is "page-controlling UI", Magenta is "browser-controlling UI".

Was thinking of upgrading...until now.

Can anyone post a screenshot?

Try clicking the link..

Plenty of screenshots at https://mozilla.org/firefox/, but I'd suggest giving it a shot yourself. Lots of work went into cleaning up the UI, adding appropriate, subtle animations, etc. On macOS, the titlebar and sidebars use platform's "vibrancy" effects, etc.

I wish the animations were more subtle!

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