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Comment by telegrammae | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is wonderful! Still hoping for much-needed general UI improvements, though. The tabs look bulky and have animation performance issues. The bookmarks manager is outdated and inconsistent with other tools in its look. Same with the downloads manager. All these things aren't a big deal, but Safari and Chrome seem to have a more pleasant overall graphic design.

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I personally disable the animation to make Firefox feel snappier.

    browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInTabs;true  
    toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled;false

Thank you for sharing these!

> The tabs look bulky and have animation performance issues.

The fact that the tabs don't shrink, but instead slide out of view is infuriating. Something like this affects users constantly.

Honestly, I also found Chrome's shrinking tab behavior infuriating. All things considered, I like Firefox's sliding behavior more.

Shrinking tabs are awful, though, when you keep 500 to 1500 tabs open. Not that I'd do something like that..

Doesn't constantly changing the tab size violate Fitts's Law? I'm sure Google did some sort of study on this, but it seems to me that Chrome's shrinking tabs break a fundamental model of usability. I personally find this problematic not only because the target area shrinks, but also because I can no longer read anything on the tab, so I'm forced to hover over them.

I'd love to read any study on the usability of the Chrome approach if anyone happens to know of one. Maybe something on SIGCHI?

Idk what Fitt's law is but I assume it's something like "don't make things disappear when the user expects them to be there".

In that case, I think Firefox violates this. Your tabs are just gone when you could have sworn they were there a second ago...

Your assumption of what Fitts's Law is isn't quite correct. Wikipedia has a description of Fitts's Law [1], some of the follow-on work in that space, and its application to HCI. There's a multitude of books, papers, and blog posts that deal with the application of Fitts's law to UI design and usability, so I'll let you pick your favorite source and go with that.

In broad strokes, the time to accurately complete a task is proportional to the distance to an item and inversely proportional to the size of the item. So, having to scroll tabs increases the distance -- potentially a lot. But, constantly shrinking tabs reduces the target size. I think you'd have to do an amortized analysis on this one because upon a the creation of a new tab the Firefox model only makes that new tab harder to get to, while the Chrome model shrinks all tabs, making each harder to click.

But, I could buy that there's some threshold here where Chrome maintains a tab size that still doesn't appreciably increase error rate while improving distance by eliminating the tab scroll. I'd expect that minimal tab width to be much larger than Chrome's true minimum tab width. But, I'd be shocked if Google didn't run usability studies on this. I just haven't come across anything on my own.

[1] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

Based on my own experience, I think Chrome hits the nail on the head because usually the only helpful thing in terms of finding the right tab is (1) the favicon and (2) the general position of the tab among the other tabs.

General position is particularly helpful because, from left to right, it roughly represents "time opened", earliest to latest.

Firefox doesn't help me find the right tab just by including an 8 character width along with the favicon. Might as well just get rid of those 8 characters.

With the exception of Google being Google the resizing tabs are definitely top ten on my gripes of Chrome.

Safari used to have fixed size tabs as well back in the days of yore, I still miss those.

You can use CSS to customize the tab bar. I personally prefer multi-row tabs and I have it configured to do that.

Tabs first shrink, then scroll as you add more. At least thats the behavior on Linux in v70.

The shrinking behavior infuriates a lot of people too, by making it impossible to find the tab you want. That's my experience with Chrome, at least.

Setting the "browser.tabs.tabMinWidth" preference to 0 in Firefox will let the tabs shrink down fairly small (to just the favicon and maybe one letter of the title). If you want the tabs to shrink even more than that, I'd like to understand why, other than "it's what I'm used to". Which, to be clear, is a perfectly valid reason to want something!

There should really just be a "Chrome" config template for Firefox for people that prefer Chrome UX and styling.

But in general, it's very upsetting that Firefox doesn't actively support editing these user setting fields.

My experience was that if you changed even a single boolean value, the answer to every support question was "reset to default settings and see if it's still broken". Just awful.

If you have so many tabs they don't fit on the top, just install Tree-Style Tabs extension. It puts tabs to the side panel, and organizes them as a tree.

If a killer, life-changing extension exists in Firefox which is not available on Chrome, this is that extension.

I tried it for a while, but honestly, the UI for tree-style was ugly. If I'm going to look at and interact with something for hours on end, I can't have it be ugly.

If you want shrinking tabs then you can get them in Firefox by putting this in a userChrome.css file:

  .tabbrowser-tab {
    min-width: initial !important;
  }
  .tab-content {
    overflow: hidden !important;
  }

You can find details here on where to find/put a userChrome.css file: https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html

Instead they seem to be making the UI worse. The new about:config seems to be a step backwards relative to the old text one (I particularly like that you cannot just browse, you have to know what you're looking for first).

You can still browse all options if you search for "*" (without quotes)

There's a "Show All" that, well, shows all of the entries

You're right there is.

I can see how I missed it, they made a clickable link/button the same color and style as the other non-clickable text: https://i.imgur.com/gqlCVRo.png

was trying to find a bookmark recently, and seems I have 2 or 3 separate bookmarking systems, some here, some there, some from the menu bar, some from an icon.

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