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Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I'm still not used to the new tab style that was introduced last time. 90 seems fine, but not much to get excited about from the user perspective.

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The tab bar is functionally useless if you have > 10 tabs open, so I don't even know why I'd notice. Aesthetically, it's fine for me.

Option to hide it completely (replacing with a mobile-style full-screen modal view with properly sized previews and keyboard navigation / fuzzy finding if you allow me to dream) would be nice.

Yeah, I'm fine with them taking up more vertical space, but it's the reduction in horizontal space that most hurts usability, especially with more icons that show up now next to the favicons, further reducing available space. It's still better/preferable than Chromium/Chrome's awful shrinking tabs horizontally down all the way to just favicons when you have a lot of tabs, but it's getting close to feeling that cramped.

(I also though have moved a lot of my day-to-day tab switching to Tree Style Tabs, though. I'd probably be angrier if I was already using an add-on like that.)

I started using Tree Style Tab to manage them, and I like that very much. I agree, a mobile-style manager would be interesting.

Sounds a bit like you'd like Tab Groups. I used Tab Groups extensively until that functionality was ripped out and put into a shitty, poorly maintained, broken add-on. A quick Ctrl+Shift+E and I could organize everything into work/research/gaming/wikis/whatever and quickly search all tabs or within a specific tab group to switch tabs. The add-on kind of works but isn't as feature complete and from my experience was pretty buggy and wouldn't properly maintain my groups between sessions sometimes.

Honestly web browsers have been in a steady decline for me ever since FF34~ish with the exception of better modern CSS/JS support. They kill features and functionality I use extensively and rarely provide any alternatives. Few of my browser extensions even work since FF killed off all old addons. It forced me to use Chrome and now Chrome is looking like they'll be killing off a good number of extensions I use in the near future. Can't have a browser for power-users because power-users don't make up enough market share. sigh

> until that functionality was ripped out and put into a shitty, poorly maintained, broken add-on.

Since you didn't quite say it explicitly: The real insult was that they factored it out into an extension, and then promptly broke the extension by ripping out the API surface it needed.

I didn't say it explicitly because I never bothered digging deeply into why it became so terrible - after being burned enough times by FF during that time period I decided to bite the bullet and switch over to Chrome since at my experience was at least more stable/had less breakage every update. Ironically enough it seems Chrome may be pushing some Extension API changes that will break things and force me to go back to Firefox.

It's gotten to a point where I'd gladly use an old, insecure browser with features I like that enables a workflow I'm comfortable with than being force to use a more secure browser with all the features gutted or gimped. But I can't even do that because then every other site refuses to serve me content unless I update my browser to a supported version.

Tab groups is a big reason I moved to Brave. The stock tab group implementation is excellent, and they have a scrollable tab bar now too.

Edge probably has it best with vertical tabs and that Chromium-native tab group setup.

I use tridactyl’s `:b` often. No previews, no fullscreen, no fuzzy matching, but at least full titles and word search.

Window management is still horrible in Firefox, meaning if I want to close all Hacker news tabs in all open windows no add on seems to handle it properly. Chrome has added built in search of tabs across windows though, would love the same for Firefox

You can use ctrl-tab to switch between tabs and it shows a thumbnail of each page.

Does not show thumbnails to me.

I'm aware of ctrl-[shift]-tab. It is too slow if you have more than a few.

It shows thumbnails if you have enabled "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" in settings

Huh. I'm not sure I want to know the logic here.

Thanks.

I remember seeing a lot of complaining about the tabs in the last release thread but they dont seem to bother me at all.

What is the issue with the new tabs?

The missing partition between tabs irritates me greatly. Especially as the label of the tab fades out to the right, there is no indication for the exact x-space taken up by a tab. The only fixed thing is the favicon. Furthermore, the fading out of the text is greatly irritating me. My vision is the best and I constantly try to focus on those parts but they are not out of focus, but faded out. Just a vertical separator of some sorts would help with visibility in my eyes (literally! :p)

The missing partition made it nearly unusable for me as well. Thankfully, I eventually found a solution at https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html; since then I’ve had no problems.

They bothered me greatly on the first day. To the point where I started messing around with userChrome.css to change them back.

I was fine the second day. I think it was just a case of someone moving my cheese unexpectedly.

Personally, very very personally, I don't like the look, I prefer all my apps to be themed by the OS and to use the underlying widgets. That's not how FF is built though but that's okay since when they do bring change like that I still can user userchrome (I still can user userChrome, right ?) /meme.

IMHO, they're pretty, but waste quite some space for no gain apart prettinnes.

There is a petition on the Mozilla Ideas forum to retain the "Compact" interface option, which would conserve space in the tab bar:

https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/719764

The issue with the new tabs is that they are not tabs, they are buttons.

What was wrong with the old ones?

loving 'Firefox-UI-Fix' which fixes all the density changes introduced as well https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/

Agreed - this makes the ui much better.

It's annoying have to manually enable compact in about:config to get back to the compact layout in new profiles.

I just made mine look like the old black tab bar again with userChrome.css.

I ended up just turning the tab bar off and using the Tree Tabs extension

An example for the curious:

https://gist.github.com/7accb09dbddd494f53dc889877c1f524

I also didn't like the change. I prefer a clearer separation between tabs, but I don't notice it anymore. I'm not a great tab user, though: just a handful at a time, but perhaps an extra window or two for different tasks (e.g. general browsing, keeping an eye on our websites, and some standard library/stack overflow/AWS/etc. pages).

does anyone know of an about:config to the switch tab style back? Its still hard for me to notice which style is actually selected with Dark Mode

You need to set browser.proton.enabled to false. There's a number of browser.proton.*.enabled settings for various parts of the UI as well.

thanks. that's helpful.

I'm still not adjusted to it and will probably never be.

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