Firefox Release 89.0
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
Why does the UI change with every single Firefox release? I find myself having to re-adjust every time a new update is shipped.
What's wrong with having a consistent experience that survives for more than 6 months? It's just a URL bar, and a bunch of tabs. Just leave it be already.
This problem is everywhere. The last thing we should do when we need a problem solved is creating a department or office whose continued existence depends on the problem being there.
Makes me think of "Defunding the police".
There is a reason why there's no "summer 2021 hammer" in hardware store.
As if some pervert burgles your garage and does not go stealing, but replacing your car.
And you're underrepresenting how much change can happen for a given model: over decades the Honda Civic has gone from manual to continuously variable transmission, and entirely different chassis, etc. as technology and safety expectations evolve, and it's no exception.
I get that a lot of people feel differently and that's who Mozilla and many other companies are targetting, but it really bums me out that my tech tools can't be stable and reliable.
I see that the Firefox UI designers agree that it's like fashion design...
I guess it's unsurprising that UX designers would want to continue having work to do.
This is not my experience.
The number one complaint I get from non-technical people using computers is "This doesn't look like it used to, I don't know how to do anything anymore."
The most recent change was GTK driven, where the buttons on common-file dialog moved to the top. But, it hit every app at once so the relearn was abrupt but short. And it was only one thing. Not a frustrating batch of a dozen inconsistent half-baked "tweaks"
The same can be said for developers. Few devs can just make arbitrary changes to an application. They take requirements, produce implementations, and go through review and revision.
It's had various tweaks since, but my day to day experience has been the same since then. This is not an absurd pace of UI change in my opinion.
And yes it is a conceptually simple UI, but with the whole stuff around the web with security, permissions, tab and window management and how an awful lot of modern computer use by an awful lot of people is conducted entirely inside a web browser it's a UI that is worth improving where improvements can be found.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-page-info-windo...
I cannot be the only one that uses that functionality 100 times a day at least, and it's so not conveniently placed I used to misclick "View selection source" instead a dozen times a day, and now I'll be taking screenshots or opening the print dialog by mistake. I've been googling a way of rearranging the context menu on Firefox so that selection search is rearranged or has a keyboard shortcut and not _one_ soul has ever mentioned it in the past decade, which is maddening.
One of the reason I use Edge nowadays is that "Search with Google" is the second option, between Copy and "Search with Bing in the sidebar", which isn't ideal, but it's still search.
Copy? Keyboard/mouse buttons for that.
Select All? Why would I want to do that when I just made a selection?
Print Selection? How common can that actually be, to justify being positions above "search the internet for this thing"??
Take screenshot???? Really??
Why does "Inspect Accessibility Properties" get real estate there? That's a legitimate question.
If you're a keyboard user you can do: ctrl-c ctrl-t ctrl-v enter
It's really sad that both are gone. - https://dolske.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/photon-engineering-n... - https://dolske.wordpress.com/2017/08/04/photon-engineering-n...
When Chrome first came out, the lightweight, clean and out of your field of view tab bar was a welcome change.
FF did pretty good with small changes that, in my view, have made it look better over the years.
edit : Ok, checked the new design. Definitely don't like the tab buttons, mainly because when there are multiple open, there are no discernable borders among them. So a tad bit confusing.
At the same time I like how the tab bar is separated from the address/bookmark bar. Makes it much easier to identify the active tab.
Especially when you have dozens of tabs, the current style make it cleaner.
Mine looks like:
@-moz-document url("chrome://browser/content/browser.xul") { #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; } }
#main-window[tabsintitlebar="true"]:not([extradragspace="true"]) #TabsToolbar > .toolbar-items { opacity: 0; pointer-events: none; }
#main-window:not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }
#sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header { display: none; }
#titlebar { visibility: collapse; }
It doesn't. Maybe small parts of it get tweaks here and there. But your argument about having to re-adjust every update is just dishonest.
Firefox updates are a constant stream of "1% of users use this feature so it's fine to do X to it" but it turns out that a lot of people fall into a lot of those small buckets at once.
New command apparently lacks alternative usage forcing current tab, but still opens image in new window instead of tab with Ctrl modifier. (Maybe it would be possible to plead for re-introduction of similar modifier?)
At least we can still drag/n/drop plain images to the Tab bar.
You have no clue how annoying and nerve wrecking that is.
Changing my daily workspace where I am supposed to be productive is something that should be considered a breaking change. I'd like software to leave my workspace alone if at all possible.
Make another product for those who want it different.
For example, they just changed "Undo close tab" to "Reopen closed tab". Not only is it difficult to justify how this is clearer (any casual computer user should be familiar with the concept of 'undo'), but for a regular user:
- There's a period where you have to adjust, scanning for the correct menu entry each time;
- This change also modified the hotkey from 'u' for 'undo' to 'o' for... re-open, apparently.
Imagine if your editor changed its key bindings, or renamed features with each minor update?
I love Firefox, am a daily user, but I get very annoyed at the lack of proper change control that's applied.
This kind of arbitrary change at the very least annoys users, but can also degrade usability and workflow.
Finally, by showing they don't review their minor changes very well, it makes it harder to trust that they won't accidentally introduce some major bug or security flaw.
I honestly wish my editor did. Emacs very deliberately does not do such things, and the result is a complete mess of weird keybindings, and many duplicated commands and modes which are just slightly different to each other. It's so scared of disrupting an existing user's workflow that the product as a whole definitely suffers.
This recent update seems more like a very minor reskinning than anything that would require adjustment.
The visual cue with the circle around it is also gone. Even the lines used to draw the arrow are thinner, making it less visible. Compare:
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/04/19/here-is-what-is-new-and-ch...
It's very distracting to me.
When you actually try it instead of comparing screenshots, you'll see that its clickable area still goes all the way to the edge of the window. The button hasn't moved to the right; there's just more negative space because they removed the circle around it. Deleting that space would actually move the button to the left and make it more difficult to hit. As it is, it's as easy to hit as ever, and the “empty space” isn't there “for no reason”. (Moving it closer to the edge would actually be a mistake; there needs to be some margin for situations where pointing close to the edge changes the cursor's function to resizing the window.)
> lacks immediate feedback
How so? As soon as the mouse pointer touches the clickable area, the button lights up; after a second of hovering, I get a tool-tip explaining what it does, what the keyboard shortcut is, and how I can use it to show the tab's history. Again, that seems the same as it used to be?
Then after some delay, the "area" of the button is shown, but not inclunding the newly "empty" space, which you claim is clickable.
But what is highlighted starts to the right. If my mouse is already close to the edge, it visually signals that it's not over the button, that is, that I moved the mouse too far.
It's very awful experience: not having the limits of the button drawn (which doesn't give me any hint of the area I can target), then not showing the limits fast enough once the pointer is there, then misleading about the limits (forcing me to move the mouse to the right even if I was already on the right place), drawing with the thinner line the arrow (also making it less obvious where it is): four wrongs in just one enforced update which is claimed to "improve" UI. On the most used button.
In the case when the button does light up the instant it becomes clickable, I don't get the perception of ‘I've moved the mouse too far’ — instead, it's easier to see why the highlight isn't bigger: I don't just get a “hint of the area I can target”, I see exactly a standard-sized button, which I'm aiming for — but when I miss a bit, there's also a bonus area where the click still works.
Without the immediate feedback, the highlight seems ‘off’ (in the sense of displaced) in some arbitrary way. But really it's way more sophisticated (an overly pedantically detailed elaboration follows; I promise this is not apologetics on behalf of the Firefox UI designers, but illustrating a point I will attempt to make in the end and that I couldn't be bothered to put in fewer paragraphs out of sheer laziness):
1) There's a bonus area to the left. It's nice to have when you happened to click a bit too far to the left. But how far off you can be in that direction depends on the exact circumstances: E.g. in my case, in windowed mode I can approach the edge to within 1 or 2 px before the mouse cursor switches to ‘resize window’, whereas in fullscreen mode, I can go to 0 px, but pushing beyond that triggers the dock which otherwise lingers beyond that edge of the screen. So that's why it's a bonus area: It'll try to do the right thing, but it's not a promise that clicking there will work. And by directing your focus to the standard-sized button that would ordinarily be all you can click, it's more likely that you'll hit the intended target.
2) There's no bonus area to the right. Because the forward button is to the right. Instead of extending the standard-sized click target, hoping that this is what you meant to do, the GUI refuses to interpret your click as something that could be the exact opposite of what you meant to do.
3) There's a bonus area upwards. On MacOS, moving up even farther gets you to the buttons for closing and minimising the window, but they're a good few px away from the bottom of the title/tab bar, so we can approach that border all the way without risking a wrong click.
4) There's no bonus area downwards. Because that's where the web page you're viewing is, and making the top left corner of the page a link (e.g. to the home page of the site) is really common, so ignoring ambiguous clicks wins out over risking doing something you didn't want.
Thank you for your attention — you made it to the end where I attempt to make a point: AFAICT, the click target is the exact same it has always been. I understand that it can be annoying that they removed the circle when you're used to the circle being there; but I assure you, the circle never was the actual clickable area — it was just the visual target you were aiming for. You want ”the limits of the button drawn”? The circle doesn't do that. The button is a rectangle, and the clickable area is another rectangle that is almost the same, but a bit more generous in exactly those cases where the extra leeway can't do any harm.
> Wait, It's All Ohio? Always Has Been refers to an exploitable template in which two astronauts are in space. One looks at Earth and realizes the entire Earth is made up of something other than what is expected, and asks "Wait, it's all X?" The other astronaut, preparing a gun, says "Always has been."
— https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wait-its-all-ohio-always-has-...
The button area is visible as soon as one hovers with the mouse over the button.
Above: when the new code is turned on.
Below: when the new code is turned off.
The problem is: the area covered on hover should match the clickable area. If left of the button can't be clicked, the button is wrongly positioned. If it is intentionally bigger, the visual feedback should match it. The new code doesn't do that.
But I also realized I would never notice any of what you're talking about, because I pretty much exclusively use alt-left arrow for back and alt-right arrow for forward. You might try that for a while to see if it sticks in your muscle memory.
(Though it's likely that other things are mangled in your setup if something like the back button is misbehaving.)
Most of the time, it doesn’t take too long to get used to the interface changes – though I think a lot of such changes are superficial (make it look shiny and new) and I’d rather developer resources were used elsewhere. It’s not like there are no open bugs on Bugzilla. Also, I wonder if they do any testing of the UI changes with an older demographic.
Something material to point out as your contribution to firefox when you're interviewing for your next job.
deleting and re-importing history/bookmarks did nothing, but what did eventually work was opening the sqlite table and deleting the rows manually...
I found the file with strings | grep (was "places.sqlite")
sqlite3 places.sqlite then found the row with .dump, then deleted with DELETE FROM moz_places WHERE id = XXX:
This usually means we reskinned and somehow ended with it being slower.
Also the whole release notes are UI changes, particulary for mac ?
I wished the only non-chromium browser with active development was.. idk, different?
Edit: I just upgraded after I posted this. Difference? Slightly darker and forward/backward buttons don't have a circle around them. And pocket button isn't in the URL bar and I can actually remove it (and here the other day everyone was complaining about it being bigger. GONE NOW). That's almost unnoticeable (unlike Android changing the clock location) and I can remove pocket. Win?
So collections/bookmarks weirdness, menu moved to bottom, dark style, major changes on "new tab" screen. I hope there will be no more changes to mobile view in this update.
With the new design my bookmarks menu that previously had plenty of vertical space left now needs scrolling. Tabs have poor contrast and lack visual anchoring to the web content they contain.
I'm going to keep browser.proton.enabled to false in about:config as long as it's possible.
Right click on toolbar, select 'Customize Toolbar', click 'Density' option at the bottom (I'm macos).
What a mess.
- browser.compactmode.show = true, which brings back compact
- layout.css.devPixelsPerPx scales the whole app. I brought it down from 2 to 1.95, which looks normal scale on a retina screen.
- But this also scales down the content of the page. To compensate for that, I want to be zoomed in slightly at all times. So I added 1.05 to toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues, and then set 1.05 as the browser default.
The tabs shrink back down to normal scale, the web stays the same, and it fits much better on my 13" display.
Having the tabs be free-floating buttons is still weird, but you can't win them all.
I hate that too. On my phone that is 2.5x larger than my old Samsung I see less information on screen compared to old phone, because everything needs to be «light» and «clean».
The only reason I use Firefox is because it's the only decent FOSS option that I can use on all my devices. My patience is wearing thin and this is not going to be a good enough reason for much longer.
Make your browser competitive with Google instead of trying to impress your inner circle of designer hipster friends. The CEO gave themselves a fat raise and gutted staff for _this_?!
- Non-Google, non-chromium, non-blink engine browser - Support for good keyboard navigation (vimium etc) - Support for Ublock Origin
And the only browser that satisfies those requirements is ruining my user experience by removal of «compact» mode (I know it can be brought back but it's temporary) and making UI bigger without any reason, because having unnecessary empty spaces everywhere is what's considered good design now.
Recently I opened some page that was filled with ads and banners and only 17% of my screen was actually filled by content that I want to be reading. Now, with the new Proton™ design I guess I'll have to get used to 12% of my screen being used.
Check.
- compact mode
Check.
Orion may be for you (if on Mac)
OTOH, the only other browser that lets you tweak its chrome with your CSS is AFAIK Vivaldi.
[1] https://gist.github.com/myfonj/f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee...
Edit: Welp, the new Firefox update kinda broke MaterialFox: https://i.imgur.com/biLz0e2.png
I never wanted a carbon copy of Chrome, just something that looked good, so I'm glad to see Firefox provide a nicer default experience and add its own unique style. It's actually pretty similar to MaterialFox anyway, aside from the "floating" tab style and slightly higher vertical space usage.
Personally, the previous design was fine and this one is too. Neither has made any meaningful difference to my user experience.
Edit:
Scratch that. I've just noticed that tabs can now have a sort of status line, telling me, for example, that's it's playing something. There was functionality sort of like this before, but this is a nice improvement. Great.
No, this website doesnt have favicons. I have a dozen other domains bookmarked that don't have favicons.
I really don't like the UI changes in this upgrade, but setting:
"browser.proton.enabled" to false
"browser.uidensity" to 1
(while using the `System Theme`)
Seems to have done the trick, so, I can just ignore the UI changes (which is great)... fingers crossed in that this keeps working in the future.
UI changes are very much subjective, so, I think that it's great that some people like the new UI better and keep using it as long as there's also a way to not alienate existing users that like the existing UI.
For anyone not familiar with how to edit the browser config, simply type in 'about:config' into your URL bar and have at it.
Simply: it's make-work.
I'm absolutely sick of this trend of dumbing-down lowest-common-denominator UI, removing useful features and affordances for learning. Insanely huge buttons, rounded corners everywhere, floating controls in a sea-of-white/blackspace...
On the bright side, I believe the UI is still highly customisable so it should be possible to make it look exactly as you want, but it's not exactly straightforward.
But as you can see it brings some users back to Firefox.
That said, I won't really notice since I use the Sidebery extension for vertical tabs. But I've got a separate profile running to isolate Spotify and its desire for DRM, and there it's been nice in a small way.
That was present for a few versions now. Playing tabs had the audio icon which could be used to mute/unmute.
It looks close, but details and behavior are a bit off. For example:
- Firefox context menu does not respect system's dark mode
- Different horizontal and vertical margins between items
- Different font rendering (e.g. text looks bolder)
- Different right caret icon
For behavior difference, for example: when navigating sub-menu items, macOS uses cursor velocity and cursor direction to determine if user is trying to go to submenu and immediately dismiss it if user is not. Firefox context menu uses a delay to archive similar effect. (To test this: open a sub-menu in a context menu, then move the cursor up. macOS native menu dismiss immediately, where old Firefox has a small delay before it is dismissed.)
https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/1035362/Simple-Window-With-Assembly40x the energy usage vs Safari. It's atrocious. Laptop gets to silly high temps, has to be bad for battery life... But I'm sure glad we have some new popup confirmation windows. Cool.
EDIT: I use FF on my Mac as my primary browser. Just so frustrated at how little fucks they give about performance and battery usage.
BUT, I really do like Firefox's ability to clear history and cookies on close. I like the extensions for Firefox... Safari doesn't really have any extensions... not really anyway. Things work funky, if they work at all. I think I run 40+ Firefox extensions for work.
Everything from ClearURLs, to Wappalizer, to Reddit Shine. Nothing works on Safari.
Firefox is great, except they don't give a flying poo about battery life or heat issues on Macs. Really frustrating given we're all mobile these days.
I understand that you can't swing resources around freely in the short term but you don't have a bunch of designers sitting around by accident. Someone decided that they should hire them.
I definitely agree that we need to think about people, that was a large component of "you can't swing resources around freely". Firing people is not something that I would like to see. The point I was trying to emphasize is that it isn't as if Mozilla just happened to have X people with design skills and Y people with whatever other skills. There was planning to build the teams and planning to pick the projects. So while I agree that you can't just put people on random projects I wanted to point out that Mozilla had a lot of agency in the decisions that lead up to a team working on the redesign, it didn't happen just because they happened to have a bunch of designers available.
I don't think it's considered rude, since "Human Resources" is a widely accepted term.
Human resources is less bad because it doesn't refer to specific people. And most people can't choose what the department is called. But they can choose what they call other people.
I agree with the idea of other UX initiatives though. They could definitely have the team work on other parts of Firefox even though that isn't as immediately visible to all users.
Is that why the ones they do have keep messing up the UI?
I guess there's an option somewhere to set opacity to 100% but I'm not ready to spend 30 minutes to hunt it down.
[1] Except for some weirdos who disabled telemetry. They're probably so paranoid they believe Mozilla would abuse the studies feature to promote a TV series or something like that.
Now that I've had time to play with it, I'm even more convinced my initial reaction was correct. But I've also had time to reflect on why, and in my view there are two problems with this new design.
Removing visual separators from the tabs makes them much harder to distinguish - the only difference between one tab and the next is a larger horizontal space. In prose, when we want to separate sentences, we don't just use longer spaces; we use other visual indicators like capital letters and full stops (periods). Paragraphs are separated by vertical space, which is visually distinct from a horizontal one.
The second problem is that the tab you're not supposed to click on (the active tab) looks like a button, while the tabs you are meant to click on (the inactive tabs) are presented as text. This is opposite to normal UX conventions.
There are some subjective improvements to the look and feel of this UX change, but overall I'm confused as to why the Firefox UX team would go against established conventions to produce something that's visually more difficult to use and less intuitive than they had before.
Fortunately userChrome.css is still usable if you set an about:config option (toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets), so I can see about fixing the problem myself, but I'm concerned that Firefox's march toward reduced configurability will eventually remove this option.
Overall, my concerns on Firefox are the same as most; in the pursuit of market share, they're moving further and further away from their roots by removing customisation options. Remember when you could change Firefox's theme without using hidden configuration options?
While I think the redesign looks good, I don't really have strong feelings on it. I mostly just want a supported interface, so I finally gave up on compact mode. It's just ok. I guess they wanted to differentiate themselves from Chromium browsers in a more significant way?
While most complaints, including from my spouse, are that the tabs are no longer delineated, that part hasn't bothered me much. I consider the delineation the icon on the left, and x on the right.
Part of me likes the freshening up. I won't quit using Firefox over these changes, I've been using it for 20 years now and won't be changing until I'm forced. There's still no other browser with a built-in search bar that also works correctly with a keyboard shortcut other than Firefox and Vivaldi. Vivaldi has everything I need in a desktop browser, it just isn't supported at all on iOS which is equally important for me these days. And honestly, Firefox is probably the only browser that isn't from Apple or Microsoft that I'd use. Otherwise I prefer something as important as a browser backed by a truly large organization. Microsoft Edge is really hard to beat in my view once you consider all the intrinsic qualities to it like support. I'll put it this way, no one is making a mistake using Safari or Edge.
I like most everything about Firefox, the browser hasn't ever been ruined, but you got to wonder if there's truly even a place for 3rd party browsers in this era. If I weren't a legacy user, I'd just use Edge and be happy not knowing what I'm missing out on with alternatives.
I don’t dislike them as much as I initially did. They’re just a little to big on low resolution monitor.
Personally I’d like to see browsers move away from trying to be “special” and just follow the design of operating system. A little tricky on Linux, but for Windows and macOS just follow the guidelines from Microsoft and Apple.
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/tree/photon-styl...
This is pure speculation on my part, but I assume the "Firefox team" wanted the selected tab to stand out visually. The selected "tab" turns white in the default theme. But if the tab is attached to the URL toolbar, then the URL toolbar also needs to be the same colour as the selected tab. It would look odd if they were attached but each was a different colour.
I assume the "Firefox team" wanted the active tab to stand out visually, but not the whole URL toolbar. So the tab becomes a button and is detached from the URL toolbar. Now the active "tab" and the URL toolbar can have different colours: A "louder" colour for the selected tab to make it stand out, and a "quieter" colour for the URL toolbar that lets it recede a little from the foreground.
That's what I think may be the reason for the tab change - but as I say, it's pure speculation (and could be completely wrong).
If I want something that looks like Chrome I can use Chrome. It's not like it's more expensive or anything...
These days I'm more satisfied with the default CSS on e.g. the Firefox Home page, although some pages like "view source" still do not respect dark mode unless I edit them.
They have UI people and designers. So they are going to be doing UI and design things. IMHO they are better off with these people than without. Browsers are very competitive. So, keeping the UI fresh and up to date is important.
Also, they can't keep everyone happy by changing nothing, which would make yet other people unhappy. So, kind of a damned if you do and damned if you don't. I feel the changes are mostly reasonable and not disruptive so I see very little reason to get upset over these changes.
After removing all corner rounding and tweaking tab bar I am quite happy.
[1] https://gist.github.com/myfonj/f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee... This file starts with instructions how to make it work; I'm on Developer edition, Windows, dark theme. Same instruction wit illustration can be seen in Twitter thread [2] [2] https://twitter.com/myfonj/status/1387584962354982912
I have a 400 LOC userChrome.css file because the new redesign was barely usable since Firefox beta received this makeover.
- There is no tab contrast, and very difficult to tell tabs apart. Made worse on sides without Favicons.
- I loved the mic/speaker icon when a tab is playing/listening audio. They had to make it TWO lines in the tab, and made it difficult to notice when you have more tabs.
- I could use some icons in the right top menu. It looks nice and easier to use in Edge, that has icons for every option.
- Compact mode is gone, that was discussed here before.
That said, I like the native elements (buttons, up/down arrows, etc). The new icons in the addressbar look nicer and fits nicely in.
It's always been on one line for me, and I use the default styling.
Beyond that, I do not understand why the active tab cannot be "connected" to the browser chrome. I don't hate the strong shadow nor the subdued non-active tabs but the disconnect feels like an unnecessary abstraction.
It seems every UI eventually turns into a featureless sea of white (or black) once enough "modern" "designers" have their way with it.
I seriously do not understand the appeal of "clean" or "sleek", and the ridiculous hiding of everything that's important; the appropriate analogy here is that of a machine shop, where tools and work are everywhere you look --- and a "clean" one with everything put away is a sign of nothing being done.
Vertical tab sidebar means you can see more tabs at a time, the collapsible tree means you can organize them into logical groups, and it's super customizable.
Tab contrast and audio icons are identical to the way they were in FF 88.0 for me.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
Looking at the screenshots, UI changes seem mindful and subtle to me. They even removed some useless iconography.
Content aware tabs aren't such a bad idea and seem to be executed nicely. Having an option to remove the clutter would be nice, though.
I've been reading about people switching to Chromium due to UI changes for over a decade. Still doesn't make sense to me. I feel people just want to vent but I could be wrong and UI changes do have this powerful effect on some.
Still though, Gnome and FF making UI changes somehow generates tons of rage that I mostly ignore but sometimes find amusing.
I give it a try every now and then, but somehow it never sticks. Random perf hangups, keyboard shortcuts not working like I'm used to, but this time I didn't run into anything obvious yet. Hm, now that I write this, Ctrl-A/Ctrl-E are wrong: They're supposed to jump to start of logical line, not visual line on macOS, and Firefox gets this wrong. But it took a lot longer until I ran into an inconsistency like this.
The UI looks a lot less clunky than I remember.
Nice job, Mozilla! Keep working on OS integration :)
But if you didn't like the preceding batch of changes, and then this one comes along, I can imagine you're going to give negative feedback. It surprised me more to see so many people that like it!
1. the menus use their own font instead of the one specified by the OS (Windows 10). And of course, there is no way to disable this, or at least I could not find one.
2. The "current tab" highlight looks too much like an entry field. Please bring the tab metaphor back, or at least allow the user to keep the existing interface.
3. The padding on the browser tabs (and may be the address bar) have increased. Why?
In short, I don't want a "cleaner" interface. I want an interface with clear affordances.
2. "Current Tab" is badly designed[0], because I can no longer tell which is the current tab. This is especially true if you're using container tabs.
3. I don't mind this much, but I have a wide-screen. But I can see this being a nuisance on smaller screens.
Finally, red is red again. PITA since FF3.5 — Thanks
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/tab-...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/tab-...
The use of more vertical space is also bothersome but a personal preference
Overall, meh, at least on Windows. Feels like nothing important has changed other than it looks worse and screws with muscle memory. I'm sure I'll get used to it.
It feels like the "form over function" type of designers had their hands all over this. Experience is taking a backseat to design and I always hate that
They're just lucky that Edge-Chrome's odd floating Favorites box is what it is, or they'd have the worst offering (and even in Edge-Chrome you can open the Chrome-like Bookmarks tab).
I was legitimately hopeful that everyone would just copy Chrome's very functional and clean Bookmarks approach, but I guess we have to keep dragging around this kludge from the 1990s.
Overscroll and (to a lesser extent) native context menus are huge to me.
I've been using Firefox full-time since Quantum again - mainly for speed - but it's amazing how nice it is starting to feel too.
I outright didn't use Firefox for years due to this. I like 89, though. Very glad they finally got this done.
Why isn't that on all the time, even in normal browsing mode? Like, what breaks because of that? I thought cookies were locked per-domain since the invention of cookies.
Traditionally speaking, anything with a "Login with facebook/google/microsoft/apple account" would break, because the cookie wouldn't be able to work across domains.
This isn't the case now though, mostly...
That is sort of what this mode breaks. Even if your web page on foo.com loads an image from bar.com, bar.com still cant set a cookie that it will get back next time you go to bar.com. So cookie's aren't "per-domain" any more, they are something much more complicated.
And yes, it breaks stuff .... so if for example, if you watch an embedded Youtube video on page A, youtube probably doesn't know its you and if you signed into Youtube previously as a suscriber to avoid ads guess what, you're now going to look anonymous and you'll get treated to ads even if you pay to not have them on Youtube normally.
The menus and omnibar look the same to me though, for better or worse.
It seems like FF is getting worse with every release. Who thinks the changes (read: regressions) over the past few versions are a good idea? Who is the target audience of FF?
Don't know but:
> I need every vertical pixel I can get.
If this is really important to you (as it is for me), try Tree Style Tab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...). First just installed it to move the tabs to the side, but now I gotten so used to tabs in a logical tree that anything else is a big hassle to use.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
EDIT: Ah, looks like capableweb beat me to it by a fraction of a minute!
Even the burger menu doesn't have the small arrow to show where it came from.
It feels like a continuation of the trend to remove hints UI about which things relate to each other.
> Tabs also got a glow-up to be a touch brighter when active.
Tabs shouldn't be a touch brighter, they should be highly contrasted against inactive tabs.
I think the mobile OS Firefox attempted would have been great for them if it had succeeded.
What would make me download and use firefox today? I download and install Chrome on my mac because I feel more productive with the developer tools when I'm doing web development. When I wasn't doing any frontend work I actually stuck with Safari.
- Tabs have been redesigned to look like buttons. Why? Surely altering the appearance of an interface component or control to reflect something it isn't is basic UX 101? And why remove the outline of non-selected tabs? Isn't "affordance" of components also UX 101?
- Themes: Isn't one of the goals for a web browser to minimise the "chrome" (the toolbars, tabs, status bar) so that as much of the browser page is visible? Theming a thin toolbar strip seems a bit pointless. (It's pointless in Chrome too, why copy them?)
Exactly! The tabs are no longer "attached" to the page, my brain sees them as two different things now -.-
I'm excited about top-level await and PerformanceEventTiming
edit:
"browser.proton.enabled" => false
"browser.uidensity" => 1
long term solution seems to be via userChrome.css: https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html
edit 2:
Apparently they also added this annoying rubberish effect when you reach the end of a scrollable area, which can be turned off like this:
apz.overscroll.enabled => false
Which would be a mistake, not only did compact get slightly larger itself, but the now-unsupported compact mode merely match's Microsoft Edge's UI pixel usage. If it's just normal and tablet mode, Firefox is now larger than Edge. Edge is supposed to be the good-default browser, not the power user's choice.
It would make more sense to have compact (in reality this is desktop density), and tablet mode. Just remove "normal". At the rate they're going, may as well go whole hog and remove compact and normal, having everyone use tablet mode density. Burn the house down.
Compact mode looks so much better than normal it's not even funny. Mozilla needs to stop disrespecting our precious vertical pixels.
I don't think you'll win over the masses or power users with an oversized Fisher Price UI.
It's now hidden by this bool in about:config, `preference browser.compactmode.show `
Because they need to know where to focus their efforts.
The scrolling feels smoother and slower. Maybe it's updates in general, even switching between already rendered tabs appears a bit slower. OTOH, maybe it's always been this way since I updated to Big Sur but didn't pay attention. No it's certainly slower, even as I'm typing this comment the cursor is lagging behind trying to show characters. This is the worst FF update that I ever recall.
"Backup and sync data, sign in" is used more than "new tab"? "Print" is used more than save? More than exit? More than anything?
> "Updated prompts: Infobars, panels, and modals have a cleaner design and clearer language."
Changing "don't allow" to "block" makes me think they will do different things, temporary no becomes permanent no; was "don't allow" actually blocking the site forever in the past, not just denying the request this time?
> "For macOS users, we're introducing the elastic overscroll effect known from many other applications. A gentle bouncing animation will indicate that you reached the end of the page."
Is there an option to enable this on Windows, please?
There is so much padding now, that the titles are shortened to a single character when you have more than a few tabs, despite the tab bar already being horizontally scrollable.
Thankfully that doesn’t seem to be the case!
Automatically translated.
A tab that doesn't look like a tab but like a button. Progress!
=== Some introduction about this.
Proton(https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Proton)Firefox’s new design released June.01 Photon is 88 or lower design.
Proton’s overall feel is good, but there were a few things I didn’t like and wanted to improve.
- Padding gaps are wide
- Remove icons from panel
- A tab that looks like a button
- Tab indicators (Ex. Only one of the favicon and sound icon is displayed)
I've improved all of these things.
- Padding & Icon: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix#padding-comparis...
- Tab Indicators: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/Screenshots...
I've also provided a version for those who like Photon.
- https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/tree/photon-styl...
Experimental legacy edge like hover effect feature: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/118779970...
- https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/tree/interactive...
I'm really unhappy with the UI changes.
https://i.imgur.com/zrCvxFj.png
That will be a no from me Mozilla.
Also they did the Chrome thing that when you start typing your search on the homepage it moves what you're typing to the address bar instead. WHY ?!
I'm so tired of having to fight against my browser of choice.
I've used a combination of parts of https://github.com/ShatteredIcicle/firefox-ui-regression-men... and https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix to make these changes.
> I don't understand this decision. First the removal of compact mode was motivated because is has bad discoverability. Then community raise its voice to say that not what it wants. And the answer is to make the setting even less discoverable…
> Of course is won't be used if it is less and less discoverable. And this decision break the meaning of doing telemetry on compact mode altogether, how are we going to mesure if people prefer Proton normal vs Proton compact if they don't even have the option showed at all???
> Please keep support on compact mode, don't let it rot and broke
>Cohesive, calmer visuals: Lighter iconography, a refined color palette, and more consistent styling throughout.
Also the cookie-handling update, moving Total Cookie Protection from strict mode to normal mode, is a good thing especially for non-techie users:
>We’ve enhanced the privacy of the Firefox Browser’s Private Browsing mode with Total Cookie Protection, which confines cookies to the site where they were created, preventing companies from using cookies to track your browsing across sites. This feature was originally launched in Firefox’s ETP Strict mode.
"Cohesive, calmer visuals: Lighter iconography, a refined color palette, and more consistent styling throughout."
Sure, let's remove things that help me find what I want to click on quicker.
They've since regained their sanity.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-al...
> We've reduced visual noise by removing unnecessary iconography and provided clearer labels.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/89.0beta/releasenotes/
Ugh, I love FF, but I hate that decision, and the apparent bone-headed decision making process. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028 if you want to feel sad about your favorite browser =(
I tried to "Submit Feedback", to urge FF to roll this back immediately. But that page also didn't let me get to the point.
So I'll give my feedback this way: I'll install another browser now. Any recommendations?
- downloaded Firefox 88 at: <https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/relea...> (Windows)
Install, accept Create new Profile". Then immediately:
- check "Check for updates but let you choose to install them".
- uncheck "Use a background service to install updates"
The only thing I didn't like was the way the UI looked, so this update comes as a very welcome surprise for me.
Thank you Mozilla!
edit: this is so bad I can't even scoll through about:config to take a look. Typing this text has a >1s delay. Looks like I'm going to need to bite the bullet.
I was willing to give it more time on Android, but it would randomly stop loading pages and that was the last straw. I begrudgingly use Chrome now :/
This should be less drastic, as Fenix was a complete rewrite. Whereas this seems more of an incremental update to the styling.
But I guess tab design is more important.
I like the context menu update.
Dark mode about:preferences seem to be darker and bluer. Highlight color is hardcoded to light blue, even though I have orange set in Mac prefs. Don't like, but can't remember highlight color was however.
Also don't like how the tabs are disconnected from the rest of the toolbar. I want OS standard tabs. Who has ever asked for this? Just a year or two ago they finally reverted the round tab fashion and I hoped that would be the end of it. :-(
It's even used as outline on this textbox I'm typing in. I would expect it to use the system accent color, but it does not! Any ideas if I can customize just this color, without installing a different theme?
You need userChrome.css custom. -moz-accent-color: Accent Color -moz-accent-color-foreground: Accent Color with text color
still no ability to not check for updates. only given the option of 'automatically update' or 'check but let you choose when to install' . it really makes no sense to me. if they are letting you choose when to install, which could be never, why not offer an option of never update?
popup just now saying 'your privacy matters'. the last thing i want is for a browser to ever try and help me 'learn' about how it is helping me with my 'privacy' or anything its doing. it reminds me of opening up Internet Explorer back in the day, the endless amount of garbage you have to check to confirm you've seen the notification before it just finally leaves you alone.
searched 'google' in the input bar - another popup, this time helping me 'learn' how to use the URL input bar, with an 'Okay, Got It' confirm button.
decided ive had enough and closed out, with a popup saying im about to close 2 tabs
I don't think these UI changes are going to attract much of the Chrome userbase, but meanwhile they do have the effect of alienating a lot of the existing userbase. They look more like acts of desperation, while the marketshare continues to slowly decrease. It's sad to see.
I know in compact mode it's similar to how it was previously, but knowing that's now hidden away and unsupported doesn't exactly inspire confidence it'll stick around for long…
Makes sense these actions would be close together, right? So what's the motivation for moving one (address bar) away from the rest?
Simply worst design tbh :(
Also good to keep non-chrome browsers alive.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... - bit easier to manage, you can place a sensible button next to "Open a new tab" that gives you a menu to open a new tab in specific container, also easy to assign site to a container which is vital
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... - this makes a temporary container every time you open a new empty tab (if you open a tab from within it stays with the temporary container), when you close the last tab from the container it will remove the container after a while. This extension should not be used with tab syncing from the former extension if you use Firefox Accounts to sync tabs and stuff.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a... - this makes it manageable to use the temporary containers extension. Because every time you open a new tab with new Google search you will see a cookie consent popover. It gets old fast, this clicks it for you.
Frankly, that's all I have now. You can't customize the UI like you used to, the extension marketplace for FF and Chrome are pretty much parity, and the speed of FF (and Chrome) is great. I think they're both power hungry, though.
Both are recommended by Mozilla, so they are checked to not be malicious. Recommended extensions are another bonus over Chrome as you cannot tell in general if a chrome extension is safe.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/?utm...
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Yeah, why change how things look when you've got data to harvest?
But really I agree, the look is definitely not an improvement.
However, Chrome also seems to be rather consistent with its minimal UI philosophy. Firefox's UI doesnt appear to have a philosophy, I liked it regardless, at times.
I have yet to try it myself, but thanks for the additional design & privacy work, Firefox team!
Lockwise is seriously awful and needs an overhaul.
Hmm, looking at css, it's still possible to toggle browser.proton.enabled to false, to get at least some of the old UI back (tabs will be less crappy), but the new "color" theme will persist.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/73dvty/tutorial...
Stream a call through Firefox vs Safari and it uses literally 40x the energy. And turns your MBP into a toaster.
Been over a year, we all live on streaming calls, shame they haven't addressed this.
This is surprising. I rarely have over three tabs ever, and i usually like to keep it at one. If i really need to multitask that many things I'd prefer to open another window and either splitscreen or move it to a different workspace.
I don't like the redesign. I think I'll be moving to brave or ungoogled-chromium despite my dislike for chromium dominance.
That said, I wasn't completely happy with how TST sat alongside the default tab bar (and my use of pinned tabs) - thankfully its infinitely customisable so I put together a basic, timed custom style to clean things up a bit (with respect to my personal preferences!): https://gist.github.com/theprojectsomething/6813b2c27611be03...
It's not about multitasking. I open every link in a new tab and generally close the tab once I've consumed that tab. For example, I opened both this article and the comments in new tabs at the same time.
Generally I close down most tabs at the end of the day.
I'm sure this redesign will again mess up my workflow.
Two weeks ago I had a major cleanup after I reached over 1800 open tabs(with few duplicates). A few years ago I though 100 tabs were excessive. Turns out they're just better bookmarks than actual bookmarks.
Luckily Firefox can handle it without any issues or slowdowns.
They need to separate out the UI updates from the the rest of it. Then they'd actually have a browser for people.
For me as a die-hard, old-school Macintosh user the irritation is just too much.
This wasn't a problem when you could just hide the tab bar and use windows instead. But having loads of windows open, all with one tab AND the tab bar, that's ridiculous.
[1] https://www.fsfla.org/pipermail/linux-libre/2020-August/0034...
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
This is normal "noise" for all code inside the kernel. That's the reason why having the driver mainline is good. But try to find any other activity since the start of git history in 2005.
It doesn't show the driver is in use in the wild. The hardware might as well be extinct.
Then again, I fully understand that kernel hackers have better things to do than listen to my ideological quibbles and start removing kernel code that might be important to someone running a hospital with Xeroxes that only work with AppleTalk, but by that point what is the chance that the same hospital would at the same time be going around and updating all the devices to 5.10?