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Comment by jerome-jh | Hacker News Reader

Turns out about two days ago I moved the Chrome icon back to my Android home screen. The latest Firefox Android version (80.1.3) had a catastrophic UI facelift. The top bar moved to the bottom. The colors are ugly. And there is a race condition between the address/search bar and your finger: suggested items appears at the top of the list with a timing such that it is very likely you hit them instead of the recently visited site you were aiming at.

The article makes me sad, but I am also sad to see time/work being wasted for needless UI updates.

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>The top bar moved to the bottom.

There's an option to restore its rightful position at the top.

Thanks for the info. Since the capability is still there, maybe they could ask after the update: "would you like to give a try to our new UI?". A reminder a few days later would give the opportunity to commit to the new UI or revert to the old one. That would be IMO classier.

So true. It's really frustrating when UI overhauls are forced. I understand that with all the changes under the hood, they felt that this was the right time, but a tick-tock cycle is more user friendly and UI changes should be rolled out incrementally to avoid disrupting everyone's workflow. That said, after a few weeks I am happy with the new mobile firefox. The url bar on the bottom is actually easier for me to reach with one hand, which I do a lot. And it seems faster and more stable than before.

There was an onboarding screen when you first launched Firefox that offered several choices. One of them was address bar at top. Others include dark mode and strict tracking protection.

I didn't get that. I think it's something they added in a second update after complaints from people who already updated

I did not get it either, but may have overlooked it.

After the address bar on top, it is possible to disable the suggested search terms, which solves the race condition. It now looks more familiar but it remains:

- opening a blank tap requires a top-left corner tap and a bottom-left corner tap: quite a bit of thumb exercise

- the colors: I cant help thinking of a well-known french porn producer color-style. So I do not mind they are used in incognito mode, but I do for normal mode, which I always use.

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