Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1 | Hacker News Reader

Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

blog.mozilla.org

109 pointsabdullahdiaa176 comments

Their video on the front page contradicts itself. They highlight the UI coded by "user interaction" and no surprise, the Pocket button in the URL bar has tiny usage. And yet, in the new design? It's bigger and more prominent. And they try to say this is data-driven in the voice-over.

Now, yet again, I'll have to just pin Firefox and stop updating it everywhere for a few months until the inevitable "undo all these changes" plugins are ready.

Update: Just tried the new design. As expected, the new tabs take up substantial vertical space and even compact mode (now hidden behind about:config) barely helps. Time for more userChrome.css...

Only 10% of users are using compact mode: Time to remove it.

Only 1% of users are using Pocket: Make it more prominent to increase usage.

Data-driven design!

The funny thing is I didn't use compact mode before (although I did know it was there), and after upgrading to the new UI, the first thing I did was find it and enable it because of how enormous they made the tabs and buttons.

Maybe the kind of people who use compact mode turn off usage statistics, and those who use pocket (non-accidentally) don't turn them off.

I wonder how many users who disable telemetry are also using compact mode and how many people are actually disabling telemetry.

I run a large farm of VMs with telemetry turned on. I programmed them to make happy mouse movements whenever Mozilla embiggens their UI elements. My herd of shill-VMs has totally swamped out whatever telemetry-votes you compact-mode people are casting.

I don't understand the hate or why this seems to take so much headspace in so many (or at least here very vocal) minds. It's a single button, not flashy or animated or otherwise annoying. When the rest of the world spies on you or pushes crypto tokens and abuses websites by replacing their ads with own advertisements, that is what bothers you most and makes you consciously choose an outdated version?

Aside from being unwanted, it also is symbolic of much of Mozilla's worst behavior. During launch, it was specifically described as not being a paid placement: "There's no monetary benefit to Mozilla from the integration: Pocket didn't pay for placement in the browser"[1]. This way key to the discussion about why they chose Pocket over any other reading list plugins -- but this turned out to be a lie: "Hum. Apparently, _someone_ in bizdev thought that "revenue sharing" doesn't involve money, and spread information inside Mozilla accordingly. :rolling eyes:"[2]

Also, I can't find the reference anymore, but I definitely remember promises of getting a pref to use a different backend. AFAICT, that was another lie.

So multiple lies surrounding this product, along with it being continuously pushed on users (I've had it disabled via pref since day 1, and then it started showing up on the new tab page regardless).

And people are surprised when it gets hate.

[1]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2930532/reading-service-pock... [2]: https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/2PYq2w8tejs...

>(I've had it disabled via pref since day 1, and then it started showing up on the new tab page regardless)

I have done the same. You can use this add-on to remove it from your new tab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...

I am in agreement. Although you can tweak and customise FF endlessly, however, you shouldn't have to delve into about:config to disable a malignant feature. The comment by [pseudalopex] probably sums up my view.

Revenue is good. Sacrificing privacy for revenue is debatable. Misleading people about sacrificing privacy for revenue is dishonest.

Ok so is your issue that Mozilla makes revenue (which I think is GREAT as that gets them off the google dependency) or that it ignores previously set preferences?

In the latter case 100% agree and Mozilla is shooting itself in the foot as users that actively turned it off probably simply don't want it and will be a tiny minority. But do we know yet whether this happens again with this update?

Revenue is good. Sacrificing privacy for revenue is debatable. Misleading people about sacrificing privacy for revenue is dishonest.

The button of betrayal is right there in the demo.

Your privacy is not safe with Mozilla. It requires the same level of distrust as other browser vendors, but at least with those vendors people already know. Mozilla luls people in to trusting them and then uses that trust to fund a business model that is specifically about collecting and uploading user data.

What is the point of firefox if it comes with spyware?

This supposed feature is nothing more than a css tweak that somehow needs to upload your urls to this 3rd party provider that is not bound by the privacy guidelines of Mozilla.

It is makes Mozilla a bunch of liars in a way that Google isn't lying. Actually. Google isn't sharing your data with another party.

I wont be switching back to Firefox until they remove the pocket thing and enact policies preventing this from happening again.

Now it's just a worst chrome, with better promises that turn out to be bigger lies.

>upload your urls to this 3rd party provider

First party provider. Mozilla owns Pocket.

I think HN just has hate for certain products and undying love for others. When you hate something then everything bothers you. When you love something you look the other way.

I saw criticism in the original comment, maybe cynicism, but no hate. Hate is a strong word, we should not set the bar too low for using it.

It is hate, but worse than that, it’s tedious to read. I saw their video and thought “yep, top comment is going to be about Pocket integration” and it was. It’s the same in every thread about Firefox - someone complaining about pocket, someone complaining about tree style tabs, someone saying they shouldn’t have changed the plug-in model.

It would be nice to have some new comments for a change.

I've used pocket since it was called ReadItLater and love it, and the original comment didn't seem to be just hate for it.

It seemed mostly criticism of an approach where marketing says X ("we look at what users really use") but the product says Y ("we push feature X cause we like it eve if users don't").

The thing is that these are anti-features. The world needs a minimalist browser, which is just single rectangular canvas that renders the web. All other features are unnecessary clutter best left to separate applications, because not everybody needs or wants the same.

I'd love a browser like that and we used to have something like that.

If you wanted a specific feature, you'd install an extension / plugin.

Software has been going that way since forever, just think back to Nero Burning Rom. Which went from a very capable, heavily specialized application to burn all kinds of CDs with to a collection of mediocre tools to do everything but burn CDs with.

If you could predict it, maybe you should consider taking that criticism seriously then instead of brushing it off as “boring”.

There's one person in this thread complaining about how tree style tabs was taken away from them in November 2017. It was yes, but it's also available now (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...). How can I possibly take this person seriously? They're complaining about how something doesn't exist when it does.

As for Pocket, I fail to see how someone's experience is ruined by the mere existence of a feature. Obviously they could ignore it. But they're complaining and have been complaining for 4 years like the sky was falling. Again, how can I take such people seriously?

Lastly, I'm not a Firefox developer. I don't need to take any criticism of Firefox seriously just because some person said it. No doubt the devs need to say "the customer is always right" or some such. Whereas I'm free to call it like I see it.

In what timeline would you take them seriously? Why would they stop complaining if nothing has changed? Your position is illogical, you’re simply refusing to even entertain the idea that they might have a point.

They have tree style tabs now, but still complain about its absence. What do you want from me here, haha.

This is about Pocket and the design choices made, not treetabs.

It looks like Pocket has been moved from the URL bar to where extensions are located. While it is larger, if Mozilla feel they must include it for whatever reason, it makes more sense to have it look like an extension than an integral part of the browser. Hopefully this also corresponds with the ability to remove it from the extension box, as you can do with other extensions.

Not so, it's just supervised data-driving:

Observation: The Pocket button is used very infrequently

Conclusion: To encourage more usage the Pocket button should be made larger

Also "remove clicks" and "remove clutter" are directly contradictory... I want to be able to configure my browser to minimize clicks FOR ME, and I'm ok with having a lot of "clutter" i.e. functionality.

That button takes two clicks to remove. Those who use it will appreciate the new design. Those who don't will never see it anyways.

The new tabs also look nothing like tabs. It’s now a button bar.

It looks great, but it’s not really an inprovement and is clearly designed on a large monitor.

They will go back to the conventional tab design, I am pretty sure about this. Tabs should look like they look in Chrome, not like in Firefox or VSCode. Tab design has pretty much been settled in the 90s, no need for experiments.

It takes a lot to convince UI designers to admit they made a mistake. Just look at any redesign ever.

Just to provide a contrary opinion, I find the pocket button very useful.

Pocket has out of the box integration with the Kobo ebook readers. This means that the amount of work I need to do to read an article on my device is one click[1]. That seems a lot better than any alternative that I know of.

[1] After, of course, authorizing both Firefox and the Kobo device.

> As expected, the new tabs take up substantial vertical space

I just tried it, the vertical difference is 5 pixels, horizontally it’s about twice as much with 5 pinned and 9 normal tabs. Amazing? No. But that doesn’t really seem substantial.

This is with compact mode in both versions.

Compact mode is hidden and not supported now. Count on them removing it.

I don’t think testing it in compact mode is the idea.

GP said "and even compact mode barely helps"

Consider yourself lucky there isn't a giant banner ad for Mr Robot in the title bar. Mozilla's CEO really needs another pay rise for overseeing plummeting product market share.

Firefox doesn't need another UI refresh. It needs performance enhancements and bug fixes. I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for years, and I'm tired of feeling like I'm using second class software.

I agree. I'm still waiting for completion of the wayland support tracking ticket [1] that was opened a decade ago.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

I've been using Firefox on Wayland for the past year or so. There are still some minor hitches here and there, but it's very usable right now.

The biggest problem I find with Firefox under Sway is that its child windows don’t get sane window types. The most significant place where this goes horribly wrong is notifications: whenever a notification arrives, bam! it’s a full tiling window that steals focus and probably takes half the screen, shuffling everything else around, rather than being marked as a notification window, which would make it float in the requested position, get no decorations, and not get focused. And there’s no good way of targeting them properly to work around this: they’re just Firefox windows with an empty title; but so are download prompts and one or two other things. Still, I decided to favour the notifications (at the cost of download windows and the likes) in my current compromise:

  no_focus [app_id="firefox" title="^$"]
  for_window [app_id="firefox" title="^$"] border none, floating enable, move position 79 ppt 88 ppt

I’ve been thinking I should confirm that there’s a bug report for this at some point, though I can’t imagine it’s unknown. But now I look, I actually can’t find anything about it on Bugzilla (though I can find a complaint about it on Reddit two years ago). There is an unacknowledged report about the About Firefox window not floating (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1681158), which I expect is connected. Hmm. Oh, and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1590909 which is fundamentally about this very notification issue, completely unacknowledged after two years. Hmm. Better file something.

Edit: OK, filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712681.

The people who are making the designs are not the same people who are fixing bugs and improve performance. If you replaced all UX designers with SWE you will gain development speed in the short term and end up with an outdated looking app after a few years.

> an outdated looking app

yes, please! That is exactly what I want. An outdated-looking app which is fast, has no new bugs, does not break randomly upon updates.

The funny thing is that I don't use any of the buttons in the browser. I use the URL bar to tell the browser what to show me. Cmd-T for new tap, then Cmd-opt-arrows to view the various things I've asked the browser to show me. Cmd-R for a refresh. Don't need a button for that. Multi-finger swipes for back/forward. My home is set to a blank page, so it's a useless button for me. Seems to me like a simple UI could be had. Got no opions on mobile. Don't use it enough to know what that experience is like. No get off my lawn!!

> outdated looking app

I honestly don't care. The "outdated look" from 10 years ago looked just fine. My browser is not my outfit. I don't need a new style all the time. I need a reliable, performant, secure, open source browser. The UI can look exactly the same for 50 years, and I would be happy.

Yes, they also need to tackle power efficiency, otherwise laptop users will be forced to use either Edge or Safari. At the moment, as I understand it, it pretty much runs all open tabs at full throttle.

This extension helps immensely: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/

I think it needs Vertical tabs at least

Tree style tabs kept me on Firefox for years beyond when I would have otherwise left. Now I use Brave with an extension that does an ok job of imitating TST. I really wish FF were performant enough that I could justify using it.

Firefox has at least 2 tree style add-ons right now.

Tree Style Tab does that quite well. Does it need to be built-in?

Sidebery is a pretty nice extension for that

What OS are you on? IME it's the best browser on windows particularly with ublock origin.

Is there a Godwin's law for Firefox yet?

The UI heatmap shows that nobody clicks Pocket, but the video highlights that pocket is "refreshed" and is part of the new design. Dear Firefox, that's not how things work.

No, that's exactly how UX research works:

- Users are using X feature a lot. 1) the researcher likes the feature: let's invest time into improving it. Or 2) the researcher dislikes the feature: we need to remove it because it's adding too much friction

- Users are not using feature X a lot. 1) the researcher likes the feature: users aren't discovering this feature, we need to make it more prominent. 2) the researcher dislikes the feature: no-one is using this old, outdated feature, we need to remove it.

(I'm still upset that they removed FTP and RSS support.)

So basically you're saying the researcher decides the product direction and not the users? feign shocked face

In this case I believe a heat map is a bad way to decide product direction. The amount of clicks don't tell anything about the ease of use, only which UI element receives user attention. If the Pocket feature receives no clicks, it can mean that either users don't find it or they don't want to use it.

Of course, product wise I understand FF might want to push Pocket and increase usage. But the decision about whether or not the UI is suitable shouldn't be gotten from a heat map.

I think a heatmap is a reasonable thing to measure. I just wish UX research was a little more scientific (by for example, coming up with multiple hypotheses and then conducting more experiments to eliminate them).

Hopefully they'll copy Chrome as usual and bring back RSS support.

That's exactly how it works. Pocket was unused, therefore move it to the extensions tray where it can be removed if you don't want it.

It's moved with the rest of the extensions icons, where it's clear that you can remove it. It makes sense.

I'm pretty excited about this. In general it looks fine, but I really gotta ask - why do browsers always redesign tabs? They don't change in functionality for the most part and yet they always get refreshed. Regardless, excited to try the new design, hopefully they really have streamlined it. I personally find the firefox menu navigation a bit weird and hard to...well navigate through so that's what I'm hoping has been cleaned up.

I love the new tabs, I found the old ones clumsy and ugly. Design is unfortunately something that is constantly a moving target. If Mozilla stops updating they will surely die - for most users the technical details don't matter, what matters is that their friends go, wow what is the browser you're using? And thus, redesign is just a way of staying alive...

Installed the dev edition that has the new design, and I like it as well. Especially the Alpenglow theme that ships with it looks fresh and colorful.

Will it make me consider trying it again? Who knows, right now I do like that the feel of it a lot. Might use it as my secondary browser for my while to see how it feels

Try it with Ublock Origin. It works best with FF.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

At first i was underwhelmed by the new design. But as soon as i disabled the title bar and added the 'Breeze Duo' extension (i'm on KDE/Breeze) i was hooked. And concerning Pocket - i just removed the icon, works for me.

Because it makes it real obvious that something has changed. Kind of like car headlights. They’re a really prominent part of the entire design that make you want to explore more

Back in GNOME 2, epiphany was the best browser ever because the UI simply followed the GNOME UI guidelines.

I wasn't a huge fan of most of the UI refreshes lately in both Chrome and Firefox, but this is definitely the least welcome so far. I do not really expect these tabs to grow on me.

(Also, it obviously looks fine, but I really dislike the new trend of adding a bunch of empty space for no real reason other than aesthetics. The first thing I do in Firefox right now is remove the spacers next to the address bar...)

I disliked the new tabs at first but after a few weeks I'm totally used to them.

From FDE, I disliked the new tabs at first, and I still do. They have no redeeming qualities.

They’re not denser, they’re not more readable, and they’re definitely not more usable as they’re floating in the tab bar unmoored from the rest of the browser. They don’t make any sense and they’re visually unappealing.

I still hate the new tabs after having used the Developer Edition for a while. There's absolutely no separators between tabs, making it hard to see tab boundaries. Having the tabs on a separate background colour also helps to quickly see which part of the chrome is the tab bar and which is the address bar. Now they're the same colour.

FWIW, Chrome has separators between tabs as well as better contrast between the address bar section and the tab section (1.31:1 for Chrome, 1.08:1 for Firefox).

Those spacers on both sides of the address bar made absolutely no sense, I agree.

But there's some logic to the growth of empty space everywhere. Even laptops have touchscreens these days. Click targets need to be bigger because fingers are fatter than mouse pointers. I just wish they'd keep around a compact option for non-touch devices, but unfortunately another recent trend is to get rid of user-configurable options.

Yeah, this is basically the problem. Similarly, IMO, using GNOME 3 adapted for phones via Phosh feels far more natural than using GNOME 3 on desktop. It really should be an indictment of the insistence that it's possible to make one single design that works well on all form factors, or even just two form factors as disparate as a tablet and a desktop PC. If it's possible, the "state of the art" isn't really selling it.

Windows 10 honestly comes closer than expected, but then misses in such a way that it can feel both awkward to use on a desktop (the settings app is pretty uncomfortable, along with photos and to some extent even calculator) and on a tablet (tablet mode is hard to navigate; I double click an image in File Explorer, it launches Photos. I hit back, it goes back, but the picture remains open. I go back to the photo and try to close it, and now I am all the way back to the start menu. Mission failed successfully. WM_POINTER is also buggy with split panes, so I hope you didn't want to draw while doing something else...)

I guess everything has to be mobile-first now, but it's increasingly close to "desktop-barely."

I don’t know, GNOME 3 on laptops with proper gestures is a joy to use. Also, afaik Phosh is fully rewritten and hardly has anything in common with gnome, even the common apps are inferior to use on mobile.

Does GNOME have gestures? I've been using it since 2009 and never noticed. I googled and found this https://github.com/JoseExposito/gnome-shell-extension-x11ges... plus a tentative design document from 2015.

You need wayland GNOME (actually not wayland per se, but libinput that can properly process gestures, which can be hacked into XOrg, but I haven’t tried that), and there were a few gestures during GNOME 3, but it got revamped into a really productive environment with GNOME 40.

Not the best video, but that’s what I found: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku5YRMN8Uzo

What I like best is the 3 finger swipe up, for the same view as you would get with the Super key, and the 3 finger left right swipe for changing between desktops (this latter may not be showcased in the video I linked)

Basically I disagree. On phone the titlebars actually make sense. Even on a laptop with a touchscreen, which is probably the most ideal desktop-like platform, I still find GNOME 3 annoying.

I’m not necessarily a fan of client side decorations, but with some buttons going into the titlebar, I don’t find it annoying at all. But of course UI/UX is subjective to a point.

That's why Firefox for quite some time has had a special touch mode that increases spacing around elements.

Ah yes, we have no money so let's invest a ton of work into something that will do nothing to bring in new or lost users, but, given our track record, has the potential to alienate even more of our ever fewer remaining users.

Back in the early days of Chrome, I definitely feel that a lot of people switched and continued using it because it looked and felt better.

Maybe it looked better, but I think it felt better because it was much faster.

This is a marketing push disguised as an aesthetic change. Mozilla, please stop trying to make Pocket happen, it's not going to happen.

Chrome was way faster than Firefox before Fx dropped its old addon system.

It was so bad that my main profile (with shittons of addons) at the time took about whooping ~10 seconds to cold-start.

When I use Edge Chrome, ironically gmail tells me to switch to Chrome, that is how people switched to Chrome.

Many people who I know switched to Chrome because I told them to.

I think people forget how good it was compared to both IE and FF. It was fast, responsive, clean and a major upgrade to whatever you were using.

It was not Gmail advertising that pushed people.

Now we get to enjoy ChromeOS across all devices not only Chromebooks.

> Ah yes, we have no money so let's invest a ton of work into something that will do nothing to bring in new or lost users,

In theory Mozilla Firefox is a open-source project and it doesn't need users directly, as much as it needs contributors to help keep the project alive. Deciding if this counts as contributing or not, is an exercise I leave for others ;)

That said, I agree with the criticism that this video (which is supposed to highlight a/the new design) is failing spectacularly at showcasing that very design.

I think I saw one screenshot zap by which showed tabs looking somewhat differently? Otherwise it was just lots of people talking and close-ups of portions of Firefox which already looks the same way? Not very informative.

To highlight the design I would appreciate something slower (less zaps!) and less polished where they would just use the browser and let the design speak for itself.

> we have no money

Daddy Google need to keep them alive to avoid a lawsuit, so free money is guaranteed to keep coming.

Users: we hate it.

Metrics: few people click this

Managers: MAKE IT BIGGER

Dear Firefox Mangers: you make it hard to want to use your product. I used to love it. I only like it now. Really the only thing you've got going right now is that you're NOT Chrome.

Get good!!

For me "love" was last felt for Firefox in maybe the 2.x days, at the latest. After that it was back to "why am I still not using Opera? Oh yeah, the banner ads. Back to FF I guess, even though it's slow now". Then it was "Chrome is like FF but crashes less and the dev tools are better, also Google's only probably evil and not yet definitely evil so it's fine, now I'm a Chrome user". Then it was "Chrome and FF both make my system beachball a lot and eat a couple hours of battery life for, apparently, no good reason, guess I'm a Safari user now, sure didn't see that coming". I'm not thrilled that that's where I'm still at, but, it is.

Firefox needs to Phoenix itself to get me to like it again. It's the Netscape Navigator / Mozilla Browser it replaced, now. Or go nuts and incorporate some other Internet protocols. Maybe become the open social network browser? Anything to give me a reason to care about it again. I want to.

This was bizarre. Neither the announcement or the video really said what has changed.

I’d rather they focus on performance. It’s third in the list behind Chrome and Safari on my MacBook. I use it only for Jira and Gitlab at work with about 10 tabs and it regularly consumes more CPU than Chrome with about 50 tabs open.

To be fair, Jira and Gitlab are just about the two most bloated web apps in existence.

I dont understand what all the dissing about Firefox here is. To me it still has world class javascript performance, it's open source, crossplatform and fast.

Chrome feels sluggish in some cases compared to Firefox. Safari definitely feels lighter, but it's feature set in the rendering and javascript department is lacking compared to FF.

I remember reading about the end of "compact" mode some weeks/months ago. With this update, it seems that change is finally here... Almost.

Downloading the nightly build, some investigation reveals the ability to reduce the space stolen by the user interface for pointless margins is hidden in about:config and can be found by searching there for "density."

Nonsensically, the browser.uidensity field allows values 0, 1, and 2, but:

* 0 has some useless UI margin space

* 1 has less useless UI margin space

* 2 has more useless UI margin space

What?? I guess incremental values were always supposed to go middle, low, high and I am just a crank.

All three options waste more vertical space with useless UI margins than the current version of Firefox. Designers have decided that their user interface is more important than the content it enables, and therefore we all must have more useless UI margin space.

Edit: Upon further investigation, browser.compactmode.show can be set to true and restore the feature on the customize toolbar page. For now. With the scary parenthetical warning "not supported."

time to post the graph again

https://itdm.com/wp-content/uploads/Mozilla.png

Anyone else see the heat map of the Back button being one of the most-used elements, and far more used than the Forward-button, and flash back to much, much earlier FF designs where the back button was, in fact, larger than the forward button and more prominent than most other UI elements?

Just Googled, actually, and it looks like 3.0 did that. 2008. Sigh.

Also, as a dedicated UI-depth proponent, I find myself in the awkward position of being the "no, not like that" guy re: the new tabs. They're jarring and don't seem like a coherent part of the design. More depth, yes, please yes, but with more purpose & thought behind it.

I believe internet explorer introduced the asymmetric navigation buttons with Windows Vista, if I’m not mistaken.

The back button is still larger than the other buttons right now. Not anymore in the new UI, though.

I think the new Firefox design philosophy is marketing and buzzword. Because that's what that useless video and that blog post, which was devoid of easily accessible information, suggests.

Besides, Pocket in Firefox is personal now! I am going to ignore this browser until they totally remove it (like completely; not bundled in any shape or form) and only allow it as a normal third party extension.

Besides, it fares awful on Macs and besides many OS level integrations that even Chrome and Brave do.

I am done using second grade softwares whether it's FOSS or whatever. It's 2021 ffs, and they literally had decades to get their shit together.

> Besides, it fares awful on Macs and besides many OS level integrations that even Chrome and Brave do.

Been using Firefox on macOS for at least a couple years now. It has been making massive advances, fixing bugs and getting much better integration.

Smart zoom and "elastic scrolling" (or however that's called) are implemented now and work great to add usability and make it feel more at home. Battery life seems great, performance in general is at least on par with Chrome (except for Google apps, but even for those I still find it good enough).

Care to say which things still bother you with current Firefox beta (the one mentioned in the article)?

Been using it for quite a while with the Developer Edition and I have to say while the tabs looked weird at first I absolutely love the new look now!

Maybe I'm missing something, but the core aspect of browser functionality that everyone uses -- like loading websites, using tabs and windows, press the back/refresh button, saving bookmarks, and maaaybe toggling ad-blockers -- don't seem to require constant design changes.

It takes quite the effort to consistently worsen user experience ignoring any user feedback and defending dubious telemetry as if it were a godsend. I am aware this does not contribute to discussion, but after more than half a decade I'm just too tired to keep up with whatever foolish design choices are taken, I don't want to be an hostage of software I use anymore. Floating tabs that occupy precious vertical space in nowadays wide monitors, and can only be shrunk with usercss because compact style is out of the way? Empty spaces and padding all over the place? Everything feels dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for no purpose but look trendy—and useless. Truth is that this browser simply is not fitting for the "power usage" it was famed for, now actively going against its users and keeping all actual user feedback away from bugzilla, where they are promptly deleted or labeled as off-topic. Swallow the ungoogled-chromium pill for now, I suppose, with another set of anti-user chromium design choices and lack of first-class features such as the most basic ever "MMB to open a new tab", ignoring the glaring engine monopoly issue. What this browser is today deserves its <4% usershare, this I say as an user since 2.0.

I was sceptical but this actually looks fresh and makes my visual system relax into the simplicity. Yay for going forwars bravely.

Needs a "video" label, there's no content without the video.

Wasn't there a big redesign just recently?

No, that was days ago. Definitely not "fresh" enough.

They say they want us to worry less.

This is now making me worry about what I do next. Will it be possible to revert this madness or is it really time to abandon Firefox?

I know that in the big picture it’s small, but a good part of why the Firefox is the UI. In compact mode, with dark theme, on Linux, Firefox is - for me - the ultimate browser UI that just gets out of my way.

This new “modern” look is oversized, distracting and wastes space. Nobody’s asked for it and the blog post wording really sounds like trying to justify change for the sake of it.

Sad times. What has happened to Mozilla?

Am I making too much of it? Maybe, but it’s certainly not making me “worry less”. It’s filling me with dread. And from the other responses here and on Reddit, it’s clear Mozilla is out-of-touch with it’s biggest users.

Overall, I think the new version looks better. The only thing I don't get is why they made the tabs into floating buttons with empty vertical space on both sides. On the one hand, I think it looks nicer than the current tab bar, but I don't see what UI/UX purpose it serves to change such a fundamental affordance. (Maybe someone knows?) I feel like they could modernize the tab bar while still keeping it a tab bar.

I was an old school die-hard Firefox user back in the day, have since switched to chrome... I want Mozilla to succeed and fight the browser monoculture.

I'm just not really sure what the "killer feature" to bring users back is? Chrome has kept their core UI relatively stable since forever. Meanwhile we are onto another big Firefox redesign where we make the tabs look different? Why follow UI trends (big spacing) that your core userbase dislikes? I could understand it if Firefox was a different kind of product, with a different set of users.

I don't really know what Mozilla should be doing here, but I don't think these annoying UI tweaks are it.

One killer feature which made me switch from FF to Vivaldi (but AFAIK available in Chrome as well) is the fast changing of profiles.

This is what they killed the rust and mdn teams for? Oooff...

They dismantled the team who maintained the mdn docs? That’s shortsighted. mdn is a magnet for web devs and helps Firefox to stay in developers’ minds.

Yes. They have since then regrouped into the Open Web Docs Group, and are funded through donations. (https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs)

However, notice how all top tier sponsors are Edge, Chrome, or even Facebook, with mozilla nowhere in sight.

No? Like there is enough surface area to work on multiple unrelated parts of Firefox at the same time.

Also, Rust team is most definitely not killed, Servo is, which frankly, made perfect sense. Developing one browser engine is hard enough as is, let alone two.

You contradict yourself. If there's enough surface area, then there's enough for alternative and better engines.

Rust & Wasmtime: https://mobile.twitter.com/tschneidereit/status/129386814195...

Dev Tools & All of MDN: https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333...

There is an increasing amount of Rust being incorporated into Firefox, it is just not Servo.

And while it is possible to develop two browser engines at the same time (though it is not surface area, it is a different module competing for the same spot, so no, I’m not contradicting myself), it is still a dumb decision to split the already few people with the necessary technical knowhow around such an advanced domain. Otherwise you would see thousands of browsers out there, yet all we have (ones that implement a reasonable amount of the web standards) is chrome+edge, safari and firefox.

Let me guess, comments turned off on the video?

checks

Yep.

not sure i like the complete separation of the tabs from the rest of the browser. makes it seem disconnected and thus uncorrelated which tab corresponds to what is being rendered.

To me it still seems fairly clear which tab is being focused since it's the only one outlined.

I think separating the tab into its own bubble may pave the way for more interesting UI in the future. These bubbles could be stacked or displayed vertically while remaining aesthetically consistent.

These tabs also seem to more clearly communicate that they can be dragged around.

great points, thanks for sharing

I hope this is a step forward for Firefox. I hope this is not yet another redesign for a desktop app that tries to make it look like a mobile app by removing features and adding gratuitous amounts of whitespace.

Desktop is not Mobile and they should not have the same interface. Windows 8 showed us what a disaster that was, but every company since seems to have to learn this lesson themselves. (Looking at you spotify and others)

> I hope this is not yet another redesign for a desktop app that tries to make it look like a mobile app by removing features and adding gratuitous amounts of whitespace.

I've got some bad news for you.

One thing I don't understand is why they felt the need to make the UI bigger, I can't be the only one who mostly uses a 13" screen

Everyone's doing product design on giant screens these days.

One of my FF UI/UE headaches is consistent use of a dark theme. If you do not want to feel like a deer between the headlight whenever you open a new tab or click on a new URL at night there is still no way around userChrome.css hacks. And even then it doesn't work 100% of the time.

Hope it will finally be fixed in this release since it has been years that people are complaining.

I hope the June version fixes the new tab behavior in the mobile app.

Old Firefox (older than about one year ago): I tap the URL (a large target), the keyboard appears and I also get the screen with Top Sites, Bookmarks, History and Highlight (the most recent pages I visited.) This is what I use to go to the sites I visit most (eg: HN.) If I tap the tab button (a small target) I get the list of the currently open tabs.

New Firefox: I tap the URL, only the keyboard appears. To go to Hacker News or any other sites in my bookmarks or recently visited list I have to either start writing its URL or tap the tab button (top right), then the new tab button (bottom right) and eventually get to the screen where I used to be in the old Firefox with only one tap. I fail to understand how this was an improvement over the old UI.

At least today's video shows two of the people in the design department. If any of you is reading this: thanks for this UI disaster /s

A lot of mean-spiritedness in the comments section today it seems..

You must be new here…

I really don't get why Mozilla keep making disruptive UI changes while a very significant amount of users take the time to ask them to please not do it. At this point it feels almost as an act of aggression, it's honestly incomprehensible to me.

I’m excited for native context menus on macOS!

This 21 year old bug is fixed in the next version of Firefox!

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572

That’s great. Finally they’ll match the dark mode setting. Hopefully that applies to the window decorations too?

Yes, the menus match the dark mode setting. And they look great!

Please just bring back pre-Fenix Android Firefox together with performance improvements. There are still only a hand few of addons supported, lot's of bugs that remain unfixed. This is not the time for another redesign

I don't use add-ons or plugins. I just want a secure browser that -

1. doesn't have a memory footprint the size of Texas. 2. doesn't have memory leaks that eat all my remaining RAM.

And it would be nice to have it within 20 years.

I hope this is a step forward for Firefox and I expect that there will be some genuine wins in here, but I really hope this is not yet another redesign for a desktop app that tries to make it look like a mobile app by removing features and adding gratuitous amounts of whitespace. The word "streamlined" is usually the harbinger of such regressions.

Desktop is not Mobile and their interfaces should not be the same. Windows 8 showed us what a disaster that was, but every company since seems to have to learn this lesson themselves. (Looking at you spotify)

Looks great, can't wait to try it.

Kudos for those who worked hard on it.

It is a shame so many comments are putting down the effort. Firefox is still the best browser out there where privacy is a concern.

Quick, we need to make a video with some up to date memes in it.

Seriously, the video didn't even show anything. I have no idea what'll change based on that jump cut fest.

Putting the Pocket stuff aside I've been using this on the Dev edition for a few weeks now.

I quite like it. It feels snappy and looks clean. Good work FF team.

I use nightly regularly and was not excited by the new aesthetics, so I would join most of the other commenters here .. but to avoid weighing on the same side of the boat, I'd rather ask what would be a top 10 priority list of features to add / fix in firefox for the HN crowd ?

1 - Battery life. Their last big win was "now only as bad as Chrome, which is still pretty bad!" and that was a while ago.

2 - Resource use more generally. One shitty tab shouldn't make my whole system slow, even outside the browser. Safari (as with the battery life thing) manages this better than the rest. Do that.

Those two are basically table-stakes to get me back to thinking about using it regularly.

3 - I gather from this thread that they collect "telemetry", including mouse movements, on an opt-out basis. We used to call that, unequivocally, spyware. No. Stop. I don't care that a bunch of ad salesmen made this normal, it's still gross.

4 - Better in-browser performance (separate from not junking up my whole system, performance-wise, as in #2)

5 - I think to be compelling, they either need to slim way down, or bulk way up, feature-wise. Either laser-focus on being the light, slim, simple browser that FF hasn't been since like the mid '00s, or integrate more Internet protocols to try to break us out of this crappy local maximum. New social protocols (Mastadon?), maybe pick one of the old-school-web protocols and run with that. Maybe IPFS. Something. Probably several somethings, ideally supporting and enhancing one another. Give me reasons to want to use FF again, either because it does things nothing else does, or because it's lightning fast, has a postage-stamp memory footprint, and is easy on my battery. Notably, I think, the fat-FF route is also a pretty damn clear route to monetization, which they seem to want. I fear they've missed their chance for that, though, and the time to start was at least 5 years ago when they had a huge headcount and lots of money.

i liked firefox focus for the slim way down side of things, it was obviously borderline crippled but so simple, fast and burden-free ..

100% would love to see broader protocol support.

i hope there is a toggle button in front menu to disable javascript just a click away.

not buried levels deep in settings.

You could install uBlock Origin, then click on its icon in the top bar, then click on the JavaScript icon to disable JavaScript on the current website.

If you want to disable it globally and forever, spending some time in the settings once doesn't seem too annoying.

You know there isn't.

Ugh.

Tell us what's been added.

Tell us what's been removed.

Tell us how interactions have changed.

I've been using the Web since the mid-1990s, Mosaic and Netscape initially. I've seen a lot come and go. Much of it has been bad. Major revisions strike dread in my heart.

As jwz has noted, UI is different, in that changes to it provide relatively little payback:

[I]n the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o... (HN-safe Archive link)

Firefox is still somewhat relucantly my preferred GUI browser. My first love remains w3m (fast, light, keyboard, terminal), though the hostility of increasingly large portions of the Web, including unexpected quarters (Internet Archive, hullo!?) to plain non-JS HTML is discouraging.

The Nyxt browser looks increasingly appealing:

https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/release-2.0.0.org (HN discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nyxt)

I use and lean heavily on Pocket. If I'm lucky it merely falls over, more usually it explodes in native villages killing thousands of innocents. Pocket still gets worse the more you use it: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763106)

Of the list of issues given, only find-in-page (Android app) has been notably added, in over four years.

If the new desktop browser borrows from Fennec, I've got issues there as well, as Fennec:

- Abandons keyboard shortcuts such at ctrl-L (navigation), tab switching, tab close.

- Abandons print-to-PDF.

- Doesn't support reorganising / reordering bookmarks.

- Abandons view-source.

- Bastardises error codes. (A set of 403 errors simply resulted in a blank page, I had to try other browsers to resolve a recent site issue.)

- Abandons the navbar "reader:url=?" hack. (Often sites only intermittently support reader mode.)

- Supports only a small subset (though, yes, a useful one) of Firefox extensions.

As a long-time power user, I want power-user tools and capabilities. I strongly suspect Mozilla will be deprecating these.

As the supporter of users with little technical knowledge, limited vision, mobility challenges, and cognitive impairments, I can assure you that any change is a net negative. (For one, a recent website refresh to their principle site of interest has been a months-long set of frustrations.)

UI should not change. That means getting it right if you possibly can, and where you cannot, owning those mistakes until doomsday. Again, as jwz notes, Apple sticks to its metaphors, no matter how screwed up those might be (the platform drives me nuts, frankly). Apple has seen two UI refreshes in the lifetime of Macintosh, and OSX is now older than Mac Classic was when OSX was introduced. (Hell, I suspect half the people reading this have no first-hand knowledge of the original.)

All I heard was "We're going to break your plugins again, because reasons".

I've tried the new design (using flags in about:config) and none of my plugins broke. I'm running Facebook Container, Midnight Lizard, No Thanks, a Medium extension and uBlock Origin.

Have you actually tried it yourself? If not, why post a rather shallow dismissal?

I was almost going to say something similar, because on Android there are still just 16 add-ons available and it has been a long while. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?type=extens...

How is it relevant to parent being wrong?

Neither plugins nor extensions are mentioned.

Perhaps it didn't quite fit in with the finger-clicking, hand-clapping soundtrack.

I'm fine with Firefox developer edition, but I find it's hard to see which tab is selected in this new design especially when using dark theme.

For the Pocket haters:

1. Why?

2. How would you implement a replacement functionality, whether in or outside the browser itself?

3. If you're using an alternative now, what is it?

FF user (off and on) since Phoenix chiming in.

I'm going to level with you: I've looked at that Pocket button and all the Pocket ads FF throws at me on new tabs and on their obnoxious new-version announcement tabs, for years, but I do not actually know what Pocket does. I think it's some kind of cloud bookmarking or something. Maybe also something like the Reader view? I'm not sure. Whatever it is, I don't miss it on Safari (my daily driver these days, mostly for iOS integration and performance reasons, god knows not for feature-related reasons) and I've never cared enough to figure out what it does on FF when I use it.

I guess my alternative is bookmarks, which are 99.99% just a feature to let me feel safe closing all my tabs (and then never, ever looking at all those "important" bookmarked tabs again, ever—like, I've got many-years-old bookmarked sessions that were so important I couldn't close them without the security of bookmarks to make it feel OK to do so, but I've never looked at those bookmark-folders and very likely I'll die having never looked at them). I diligently export them every time I retire a system disk, so I've got a bunch of bookmark export files sitting on disks that I've also never imported or otherwise looked at. Probably I'd find all kinds of cool shit that past-me was looking at, but who's got the time.

So summarizing: its intent isn't clear?

FWIW: Pocket is similar in general design to a number of "read it later" services (the Android app is still identified as "com.ideashower.readitlater.pro"), such as the now-defunct Readability, still-extant Instapaper, Maciej Czeglowski's Pinboard, and the FS/OSS Wallabag. There's a ... (very?) loose kinship with tools like Zotero, Calibre, and Elsevier-owned Mandelay, also knowledge-management / article management tools.

Pocket lets you:

- Save articles for later reading.

- Display many (though not all) of them in a simplified and standardised "reader" view.

- Apply tags. (I abuse this feature horribly.)

- Add highlights. (3 per article for the free version, unlimited for pro.)

- There is of course a social feature allowing shares and recommendations. I avoid this like the plauge.

- There is, inexplicably, no way to share, export, or otherwise save a bibliographic reading list, say, of articles on some topic.

- Exporting the article listing is possible (JSON format). You'll have to re-fetch items individually if you do this.

- Articles are not saved and you're still subject to linkrot, edits, or substitutions at the origin source.

- Saved content is accessible from any device by account, either from a Web client, from Firefox itself, or through Mobile apps (iOS, Android).

The functionality exceeds that of bookmarks, sacrifices local control and storage.

It's not Pocket's business to know what I want to read. Never used any of those services and never will unless I could self host it. However I understand that it could be convenient for a lot of people. Anyway, I suspect that the user base of Firefox is getting more hostile to this kind of services as the number of users shrinks and they get more concerned about privacy. To Mozilla: you either push for privacy or you push for Pocket.

I kind of self host by parking interesting pages in new tabs and read them later. I've got more than 100 tabs open in my Firefox on Android. They're also a replacement for bookmarks.

I get the privacy concerns, and share them to an extent. My Pocket account, as with most of my Internet activity, is pseudonymous, though proof against an advanced actors is of course unlikely.

You can simply not use Pocket, as with other Firefox capabilities most people don't use. I'm not aware that it exfiltrates data simply by existing.

My open tab count exceeds 1,500 :-/

Pocket replaced a Firefox Sync based reading list. Firefox Sync is open source and end to end encrypted. Pocket is neither.

I used to trust Mozilla and recommend Firefox without reservations. Now I have to scrutinize every new feature and tell people some of Mozilla's privacy claims aren't true.[1]

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/

Personally, I like the Pocket button. Why?

(1) I was already a Pocket user

(2) Using Pocket in Firefox is a way for me to support browser's development that's not adtech.

Not looking forward for this particular update. But as long as userChrome.css will be supported, I'll be using Firefox.

And this kids is how Web ===> ChromeOS.

This looks good to me. It would be nice if they could modernize and simplify their logo a bit.

Every announcement makes me happier that I disabled auto updates several versions ago

From a UI/UX perspective, yes.

From a security perspective: hell fucking no. You need those updates.

Even if you're just doing plain-jane browsing, with no finance, commerce, professional, government, or personal interaction, you're putting your entire system at risk.

(TailsOS users possibly excepted.)

Then why can't I have separate security updates? I'm fed up with some fashion people breaking my software usability all the time, just because some hot new way to arrange tabs has to be tried out.

You sometimes can, though you've got to know what to ask for, and what you're trading off.

FWIW, this is what platforms such as Debian attempt to provide. It's a challenge, and something of a losing battle, especially with complex and fast-moving tools, notably Web browsers, but also development toolkits (scripting languages, Web development environments, etc.). Debian stable attempts to provide a stable feature set + bugfixes for all packages. Increasingly, even on Stable, there is the option to install packages which continue to offer feature updates, including for web browsers. Though there is also the option of an LTS or ESR package install.

These are specified versions with extended bugfix / security support, typically called Long Term Support (LTS) or Extended Service Release (ESR) version of a package. You'll find these with the Linux Kernel, for example.

And yes, Mozilla has an ESR programme which "receives major updates on average every 42 weeks with minor updates such as crash fixes, security fixes and policy updates as needed, but at least every four weeks."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/enterprise/

Firefox ESR is currently at release 78.10.1:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/78.10.1/releasenotes/

I believe that's based on 78.0.1, first released in June, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/78.0.1/releasenotes/

Firefox Desktop is at release 88.0.1, release May 5, 2021.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/88.0.1/releasenotes/

Theoretically, perhaps. But I'm not super worried about it. I only visit a handful of sites and have scripts and third-party resources blocked by default and have HTML5 features disabled. I have Firefox (and all of my browsers) sandboxed in my system.

Most of the important bug fixes from Firefox as of late have been in these areas that I have disabled, such as WebGL rendering, responsive design mode, 3D CSS, custom fonts [1], WebRTC [2], and so on.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-1... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-1...

I'm more worried about some new feature introducing a security hole through one of these new features intended for modern browsing. Given the number of unfavorable changes that come with every release compared to the number of fixes, though, I'd rather just skip the auto updates for now. I only update when I (reasonably) know that nothing that I'm used to will be irreversibly broken/removed and when I have the time and patience to update my userChrome again to keep things as they are.

Security fixes should be totally separate from UI and functionality chhanges. We need more software with long-term-supported stable releases.

Functionality and UI changes breed fear of updates which lessens security.

In an ideal world, absolutely, I agree.

We're not there though.

And there are an number of bug categories (phishing, social engineering, etc.) which intersect on UI/UX.

I have been hearing people saying this for over a decade now...

So they came up with an excuse for why all my extensions are going to stop workinh again... Great.

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