Lepton – Firefox UI Fix
github.com
github.com
I really hate the trend of increasing padding in various apps / websites. One of the first things I usually do is search for "how do I make more condensed view here".
I am probably in minority here - most people use touchscreens (phones / tablets) but there is still a group of people who have bigger screens and would love to see more data than empty space.
OTOH, I don't see why they couldn't have kept things adjustable with a ratio. And I miss the Status Bar on the bottom.
Even with this fix it's still ridiculously tall --- in the space it manages to show only 3 lines: tabs, address bar/controls, and booksmarks bar, my current browser has 4 lines: a title bar (which shows the full title of the page, not these horrid cut-off fragments), a menu bar, tabs, and controls/address bar.
most people use touchscreens (phones / tablets)
...running Windows? I doubt that.
> ...running Windows? I doubt that.
of course not, windows 10 mobile is already dead. I am talking about general trend - a lot of people are fine with just smartphone and/or tablet and do not really need to use windows pc/laptop
[edit: formatting]
The problem here is that for some bizarre reason, most designers try to come up with a single solution that fits both mice and touchscreens. That should never happen. And that especially should never happen with something that is supposed to run on platforms where touchscreens are a gimmick — which they are on all those Windows laptops.
And, I mean, phones and tablets don't even run the OSes that desktop Firefox runs on. This particular redesign thus makes zero sense.
They do/might but adding all that empty space in the desktop version of Firefox is quite pointless, considering that it has a mobile version.
I get that there are people with Surfaces and whatever. There are also people with 30" screens. A mobile UI that fits a phone's screen but not a tablet's is considered poorly-designed. It's high time we acknowledge the same thing is true on non-mobile systems.
That being said, things are not as easy to fix as they seem. Paddings have been getting bigger as the use of contrast in UI designs has decreased, and as UI elements have gone increasingly fatter. Without either of these visual cues, the only way to "isolate" pieces of information is by keeping it apart from other pieces of information -- i.e. by whitespace. If you just took one of these interfaces and reduced all padding values by 50%, you would get sane spacing, but the whole thing would be a jumbled, unreadable mess.
(Edit: obviously, adding some visual cues like borders, if not full-on 3D frames, or at least using colours that people over 30 can differentiate on a cheap monitor in a well-lit room, does fix the readability issues, but it also gets you burnt at the design stake for being a heretic so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
That might suggest that having no titlebars on systems that can display more than one window at a time isn't the best idea, either ;-)
Anyway, at least you can easily turn the title bar back on.
P.S. Am I the only one losing the fight with smaller pixels? As monitors get higher res, I keep having to increase the font size to be able to read them. Even on 4K, twenty-mumble inch monitors, I can only get one 'visible' window at a time.
* browser.compactmode.show=true - enable compact mode
* browser.menu.showViewImageInfo=true - show menu icons
I've hidden the tab bar, though, so there will likely still be an accent there.
This was basically the problem with old-style XUL addons; they prevented the browser from improving, actively hindering in important areas like performance and security (by which I mean security of the browser itself even with no extensions—architectural things like sandboxing and going multiprocess), and so eventually they were done away with because they just kept on causing trouble.
And that’ only considering the practical problems of allowing this. The security implications of allowing it are rather significant too: a malicious add-on could almost completely conceal its existence, preventing you from removing it.
It would be significantly less powerful than what could be done with XUL, but it would provide a more reasonable interface to go beyond simply changing colours and background images.
I can acknowledge that there would be challenges creating such a feature in a way that is resistant to abuse, but I think it could allow the browser to regain a big competitive advantage at a fraction of the cost of the old implementation.
WebExtensions, on the other hand, has a carefully-defined API with much more dependable stability guarantees.
If each and every tile is 60% whitespace then there's too much whitespace for me.
For example, ability to add a folder to the toolbar and being able to put icons for plugins into it - right now, every plugin's icon just shows up and clutters the toolbar instead of me being able to only show those that I use most often and put the rest in a folder. Another example is ability to export a sub-folder of bookmarks so that if I need to save them to another browser, I don't need to do hacks like exporting all of them only to import them to a scratch folder and picking what I need.
I've put most of those icons in the 'Other tools' double-right arrow submenu (translating the name, may not be the exact phrase). When you rightclick and choose Customize toolbar, the little window that appears on the top right part is that submenu's contents, and you can drag and drop from anywhere else into there to move things around.
It must be hard to implement seeing as no one bothered, though very old FF versions had an addon that did exactly that.
I'm not a fan of the new Safari style either, but in that case it's at least because they are trying to let the pages bleed into the full window.
- some people are doing tab summary in their browser (nlp)
- tab grouping is re-explored in chrome, it was nice in past firefox, it's not a useless idea but could be revisited
- archiving helper (no more 404 maybe ?, partner with wayback machine maybe ? or archive.is)
- history view
They very might lose users because of the design of tabs. Tabs is almost the only UI most users see. If they feel dated, the whole browser feels dated.
The "floating tabs" style is very minimal, fresh and modern, and honestly still unambiguous. I'm pretty sure this new style was a good move.
...and to them, "dated" is more likely to mean a step towards having a relationship with someone.
Agree. I don't believe one second anyone was like "geeee, where are tabs and what are these buttons?". It's very obvious it's just a tab redesign which doesn't change anything at all.