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Comment by Shorel | Hacker News Reader

Despite all this criticism (because negative 'insightful' comments are what drive clicks nowadays), I just switched back to Firefox from Edge BECAUSE I love the new tabs' appearance.

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I actually love the tab design, which is odd, because I hate anything new. What I did NOT like is the vertical spacing, which stank of the superfluous header bars from the late 90s/early 2000s.

I applied a browser CSS change to fix it, and now I think it's great.

    /*
     * remove dead space in browser tabs bar
     *
     * Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/nq6kto/if_you_dont_like_the_new_design_you_can_disable_it/
     */
    :root { --tab-min-height: 30px !important; }
    :root #tabbrowser-tabs { --tab-min-height: 30px !important; }

I also am in this camp, and used the "compact" UI theme previously. With editing the-

about:config

I have the new tab theme, and the compact UI once again.

And if anyone is also trying this route - change `browser.uidensity` to 1 will restore the compact theme.

This indeed looks much better. Unfortunately this will be removed starting FF90, according to the reddit link above.

Oh, well looks like I'll need to delve into editing the browser's .css now to adjust it to my liking.

I'm in agreement with you here. I do like the design, just loathe the excessive useless margins. It's a web browser, not a web site. I don't know why everything needs massive margins/padding nowadays. I like condensed.

Anyway looked a lot worse in screenshots, with my system theme and tweaks I am actually liking how it looks. What I don't like very much is the new shield icon inside the address bar, looks more like a weird hexagon than a shield, but that's rather minor.

thanks I hate that the browser is taking that much space. browser purpose is to serve content, not to be in the way of content.

I'm in the middle ground. When I first heard the complaints, I thought I was going to hate it.

After using it, I simply don't care. It's fine either way to me.

I don't care that much about the tab change, but the contrast against the background for the URL and search boxes has gone waaaay down, to the point where I'm finding it noticeably slower to acquire them. (I have to look for the text in the box now, rather than the box itself, because the latter is nearly invisible.)

I used to use Safari, until Big Sur came out and ruined its UI by making the contrast way too low -- I was having trouble even distinguishing where the page content ended and the browser chrome began at a glance.

So I switched to Firefox a few months back... It's disappointing that they've now made exactly the same mistake, but at least there's Firefox Color [1] that allows me to easily restore some contrast without spending time writing my own CSS.

[1] https://color.firefox.com/

Exactly. First impression is meh, but I'll get used to it. Whatever.

I like to bash Mozillas new direction, and I was fully prepared to jump on the UI refresh hate bandwagon.

But I don't know why I hardly noticed a difference. I mean sure it does look like a button, and I don't really get the point of it, but the thing I was worried about was the increased screen estate. Maybe it's because of my gtk theme, maybe it's related to fixes in hidpi UI scaling, but it actually seems to use less screen estate to me.

Am I crazy? Or are there other people that feel like its using less screen estate?

They fixed some things partway through the process with the compact theme - the address bar is now shorter while the tabs + their padding is taller than the tabs in old compact mode. I haven't done a side by side but I think compact -> compact ends up being a wash in vertical real estate. There were some older images where new compact was taller than old normal and new normal was taller than old touch when it was in firefox beta however.

As someone who uses Firefox as their daily driver consistently for the past several years, when I first heard that compact tabs were going away I was pretty disappointed and a little annoyed. However, I installed Firefox 89 just to give it a try and I actually rather like the new interface.

Are you on macOS? It seems most of the people liking them are on this OS (despite the article's author). I wouldn't be shocked to learn that all these Mozilla designers are using macs :)

Personally it's unusable on my Windows 7 computer. I know it's a dead OS but still.

I'm in Linux and I like it, although some userChrome tweaks applied to it already, and it's respecting my system theme/colorscheme, so it looks actually kind of good.

Windows 10 here.

I'm using LMDE4 and it's working well for me.

I mostly like it, especially along with container tabs.

It is a bit hard for me to form an opinion on the UI design as yet. But this release has been forced on me by their auto-update feature (no choice to wait with updating), and since then after opening FF it freezes my entire Ubuntu 18 to the point where I have to restart. In app reviews I saw I wasn't the only one with this issue.

i've been seeing FF freezes on arch too, though thankfully just the browser (which i need to xkill) rather than the entire desktop

I also like the new design, but I switched back to Safari after a day because Firefox kept taking 150% CPU. It was actually really snappy at first. I'm not sure what happened. But yea it wasn't just a one time thing.

I use firefox all day long on apple with zero issues. Sure it wasn't something on your system? like an errant plugin? (yeah I have a memory/cpu graph running 24/7)

Hm, I didn't try disabling plugins. Good call, let me try that.

When I see that, it’s usually because one of my tabs has a site with something in it like an endless scroll list or something else inefficient that allocates tons of elements in the DOM and never releases it.

Hm maybe. But I only tried sites that I already had open in safari with zero problems. Someone else suggested maybe a plugin was screwy; that seems plausible to me.

I think it's a bit of a nice improvement, or just different in a way I don't mind. Which is a sentiment that doesn't provoke me to make forceful statements about the change being good or bad.

I used to browse with FF and Google Chrome. But now FF is so similar to Chrome that I hate to Alt + Tab and be unable to tell them apart.

That is good to know, because what I am most afraid of is this new look driving away people, or making people not switch to Firefox.

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