Firefox plans to remove large URL bar | Hacker News Reader

Firefox plans to remove large URL bar

bugzilla.mozilla.org

42 pointsbutz31 comments

Firefox is dead. Was dead for a long time. I won’t bother with it again after all these death-by-a-thousand-cuts changes and the way the CEO is handling things at Mozilla. I’m using <insert another browser name here>, and even though it has <insert several drawbacks and user hostile functionality here>, it’s not as dysfunctional or frustrating as Firefox is. Did you hear about that 17-year old bug that was fixed recently in Firefox? You gotta say something about Firefox and priorities.

/s (stands for sarcasm, if someone isn’t familiar with this notation)

Have I captured the essence of forthcoming comments above?

- Sincerely, a Firefox supporter who so far disagrees with some individual decisions but nevertheless will use and support its use

Agree. But for fucks sake, Firefox I'll still use you, but each update I'm more disappointed. I still use you due to a lack of a better option. That's it.

How about a big, multi-line URL text field on mobile browsers?

Can't stand horizontal scrolling to the beginning or end of the line to change a domain or parameter. Let me edit in multi-line mode when I tap on the URL.

This is indeed a problem. Especially the last character is really hard to target because it coincides with the end of the field. Or always takes me several frustrated tries.

Most phones you can use your space bar to scroll left and right. Drag your finger across.

Didn’t know that. On my iPhone it seems to scroll through the suggested words completions only.

Ahh, apologies, I thought I'd tested on my wife's iPhone, I hadn't yet :-)

Press and hold the space key and you can navigate text with your finger.

This is actually a great idea, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Are there mockups of what it will look like instead? If this is getting rid of the enlargement effect when the URL bar is focused, good riddance

Does anyone have a screenshot or video of that? It gets a lot of hate here but I've either never seen it or never noticed it...

This page has images of both the inflated and normal size address bar: https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b...

Thank you, it turns out I just didn't even notice it.

The bar enlarging drives me absolutely mad. I hate it. It's crazy to me how you couldn't have noticed it.

I always find little quirks like this funny. Human minds ey.

Haha but it barely just gets a border! Maybe because I use a dark theme? When you say "enlarging", do you mean the drop down showing? Or the extra border?

Yeah I don't get it. It's the same as half the text fields on the web that get a border when focused.

e.g. https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/forms/form-control/

Extra border! Drives me mad!

Hope so, that was a horrible update and I had to mess around with custom css to get rid of it. Not even sure the point, no other design system uses components like that. Click it and it gets bigger with a shadow like a floating window? What were they thinking?

One of the first things I do with my userChrome.css is remove all of those effects.

The most recent post says the work on the address bar has barely begun, and I don't see where it says they will remove anything.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698656#c2

> Yes but when the cake batter breaks something else its needs to be reported if for nothing else than to just bring attention to the breakage. many times little changes cause an issue and by the time its reported can be lost. to dismiss as invalid seems radical and defeats the purpose of having a dev build.

Reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg punchline which I've probably used elsewhere...

Man, I shoulda just said, "Yeah."

What’s the joke, a bit of a fan of his style in small doses. There is video of one of his shows where he bombs out and jokes about bombing with the audience.

Mozilla really needs to pivot Firefox to be the power users browser. Ensure that the early adopters, the geeks, the developers want to use it.

Specialise.

This always gets brought up, but if they do that their search revenue goes down. They're locked into competing over the mass market with Chrome, because that's where the money comes from.

How many power users use the default search engine in Firefox and willingly click on Google ads? I think it's safe to say it's a tiny fraction compared to the average user.

How many power users would be willing to fund a specialist browser out of their own pockets? That's a good question, but I don't think we'll have a scenario to find out any time soon.

I would - somehow... - integrate the URL bar (and a few buttons) into the Tabs themselves (not the tab strip, but into the tab itself) and get rid of yet another toolbar.

i would also move bookmarks bar above the tabs...

What happened to the AwesomeBar?

The raw cake batter analogy felt unnecessarily snarky.

It didn't read that way to me, he has already tried to explain it without an analogy

There is a history.

First, you are told, "It's too early to complain about this, it's not finished."

Then, "It's too late to complain about this, we are already committed."

Standard corporate management political tactics, promoted to your browser.

Firefox also has a history of then saying "don't complain, we will replace this with a new API in the future, come back then" and then silently never does anything

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