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Comment by ebegnwgnen | Hacker News Reader

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ebegnwgnen

Go to Menu -> Customize.

Tick "Title Bar"

Drag & Drop the "search" widget aside your URL bar

Drag & Drop the Five buttons you mention where you want

You're welcome.

(for the status bar URL link preview on hover it's already the case by default)

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However, the status bar is no longer persistent, but only appears when hovering over a link. Also in the past you used to be able to control the text in the status bar via the window.status variable in JavaScript. This was disabled as it was used for malicious purposes (faking link destinations and misleading users by putting page-controlled content in the browser chrome), and after that there didn’t seem much point to wasting 20–30px of precious vertical space all the time.

I would also note that the address bar and search box got merged for a good reason, because their functionalities steadily converged over time as the address bar became more powerful and useful. You can still have them split if you really want, but it is unlikely to actually benefit most people.

And have it all reverted at random because well "there seems to be along time since you last used Firefox, do you want to lose all your configurations? Yes. Later."

Each time I see that prompt I have to pause and consider the otherwise wacky theory that there evil forces trying to cripple Mozilla from the inside.

Why. Just why.

It's hard to try to come up with another explanation, to be honest. When I try imagine how incompetence can explain everything that's happened with Firefox in the past several years, it feels like I'm going for the gold in the mental gymnastics world championship.

I dunno. Software often have very unintuitive features, like the problem of closing with CTRL-Q on Linux, that looks like a "damn, why did they put it there on the first place", but actually is something GTK does if you follow the guidelines (what goes to show that most software doesn't follow them).

My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.

>My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.

I think this is actually a good feature, one of the few introductions which I think if worthwhile, even if the implementation is a bit lacking.

You have to balance the user being able to see the message with not annoying them, and it's not difficult to achieve.

Configuration bloat is a real problem in most applications which allow third-party extensions, and I've seen some stunning examples of extensions bloat on some people's computers, Chrome users included. On the other hand, when I question it, they tell me, "I use all those!"

This article I came across here on HN really enlightened me: https://www.asktog.com/columns/000maxscrns.html

Hum... Keep in mind that there is no option to not erase your configurations. And that "configurations" has a very bread sense, including everything from about:config settings, themes, extensions, history, cache, cookies, saved passwords, and even for a short period including bookmarks (thankfully that one they stopped erasing). And, by the way, Firefox will revert from a backup if you are logged in into an account, what is probably the reason the devs didn't nuke this by themselves, but also leaves plenty of room for conspiracy theories and user enragement.

Having a button somewhere where the user can go and reset those things is ok. But keeping pestering them until they click on the button is really not.

Thanks for clarifying that, I have seen the dialog before, but never investigated what it actually does.

It sounds like something which started out as a good idea and was then steered into user abuse territory.

Thank you for your reply. Your suggested solutions are not complete, however.

The status bar is not persistent.

Also, for whatever reason, the URLs displayed in the status bar are cut off with an ellipsis, even when they would fit inside the window.

The menu bar -- File, Edit, View, etc. -- is still not displayed. And when it is displayed, the keyboard accelerators are not. I do realize this is in part the window manager and OS's accomplishments.

By the way, most of the actions you described are not even possible without using the mouse. Firefox, and most desktop applications, used to be 100% accessible without using the mouse. (Mac has always been an exception, but it was covered 100% on Windows and close to complete on GNU.)

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