Firefox 91 – Revert back to old tab style | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 91 – Revert back to old tab style

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146 pointsthangalin61 comments

The new tabs are objectively bad and someone at Mozilla is awful at their job.

Another boneheaded thing they did with tabs was replacing the favicon with a loudspeaker when the tab is playing audio[1], instead of displaying the loudspeaker at the end of the title or overlaid like when you pin a tab.

Now I have trouble finding the tab of a YouTube video among a lot of tabs because I can't just look for the YouTube favicon. It was clearly better before, and that should have been obvious to any UX designer worth their salt.

They're clearly not asking "What is a good interface?", they're asking "What is a shiny interface?".

[1] https://i.imgur.com/T13tZXq.png

> _replacing_ the favicon with a loudspeaker when the tab is playing audio

Ah, that explains how I've inadvertently muted tabs several times over the last few days, when I've never done that before.

This makes so much sense! I’ve also done that much more often over the past few days and wondered what was up. This explains it.

This interface style where there are no visible edges and where control surfaces are entirely indistinct is considered the gold standard today, unfortunately.

That's because you're using the unsupported "compact" mode. Switch back to normal mode and the speaker only shows on hover (in addition to the "PLAYING" text on the second line, which is omitted in "compact" mode).

I disagree with unsupporting compact.

"You're holding it wrong"

Thanks. That gives me another place to start looking when I try to fix this with a custom style - optimally I'd have the favicon work the same as on pinned tabs.

I won't be switching to "normal" mode as long as I use Firefox in a smaller window, displaying chat applications, videos, or whatever as I go about other things.

Mozilla seems to assume people will use Firefox in a maximized window, which isn't true for me 90% of the time, but I am getting exceedingly tired of having to fix the interface with custom styles every 2-3 releases.

>The new tabs are objectively bad and someone at Mozilla is awful at their job.

Nils a part of learning to be a good programmer will be learning to be a good human, too.

Somebody at Apple is doing this to Safari. The iOS UI inexplicably puts the URL bar at the bottom of the screen and hides a bunch of stuff. On macOS they’re doing some really insane thing where the tabs are also URL boxes. It’s absolute madness.

A browser has like two main UI controls, the tab bar and the address bar. How do you make a redesign that fucks up approximately 50 % of your primary UI? Just don't get it. This screams "Oh but it looks so fancy and modern to me, a UX designer". Meanwhile you a) removed the main UI visually "flowing" into the active tab header (which signals which tab is active) while b) severely reducing the contrast of the active-inactive background in the contrast (to wit: before the change it was almost literally black and white, now it's two slightly different shades of white).

Stuff like this should simply be rejected. Design that is unusable and tailored to look "clean" on a calibrated monitor is not design at all.

I don't dislike the ui per se, but the tabs have clearly been designed by someone that does not use firefox. I challenge any person to look at firefox with other tabs open in a Container context and guess which tab is the active one.

For the past several years the Firefox management has made many decisions that show disdain for their users. Disabling addons on the Android Firefox is based on a whimsical decision from the product management, not on the technical limits, as Firefox Nightly shows.

Notably, those changes cannot be adjusted with the options. Even if they care about the simplicity of the settings panel more than the experience of the power users, adding a setting to about:config would be the right choice.

I still use Firefox on the daily basis because I wouldn't want the pages I develop work only on Chromium. [putting on a conspiracy theorist hat] However, the biggest payer of Mozilla is not users, but Google. It is in their best interest to keep Firefox in a state that has a small share of the market, and yet does not let the regulators claim that Google holds a monopoly on browsing. The decline of FF usability is sad but not surprising.

I don't understand what Mozilla does. I've been using FF since Deer Park, and it was great then. Adding increased security, speeding rendering... probably some nice incremental changes there. But blowing up the extension universe, preventing you from using ftp, not letting you ignore old security on ancient websites, and the assorted UI cripplings of which this is just the latest? It could have been a perfected tool, unchanging in appearance because it's the way everyone knows and can wield whether a novice or master.

I still use FF, but it is no longer the easy to use yet deep power tool that vim/emacs/imagemagick are.

Mozilla has a substantial payroll and those folks need to justify their pay, so we see all kinds of changes introduced for the sake of change. It's not just Mozilla, it's the broader mature software industry.

On Android, they removed saving pages locally. No PDF, no mhtml, nothing. Forced me to go to bromite after years and years.

A traditional question for these threads: are there real alternatives yet? I mean, such that you actually did switch.

You said that you didn't, and neither did I. I just don't know if anything but Chromium would be sustainable, and I still don't want to switch to Chromium. If anything, FF profiles are still a reason to use it. Even though I don't really believe FF is still much better than Chrome in terms of privacy and such (well, TBH, it still gives me peace that I can disable some stuff in about:config I almost surely couldn't in Chromium: I'd need to investigate, and it doesn't help that Chromium users generally don't bother themselves with such issues). And it hardly is in terms of actual browser technology. I didn't check if all plugins I need work under chromium, but I assume they would, since most non-major stuff was broken in FF anyway, and major stuff tends to have even better support in chromium nowadays.

Depends on your criteria, I guess. If you are okay with closed-source (but based on OSS), then Vivaldi is a great alternative, IMHO. It supports most extensions from the Chrome Store. Has had vertical tabs for years (the main reason I switched). And it's very privacy focused.

I'm straddling vivaldi and firefox 84 on two screens. First and foremost Vivaldi updates via it's own exe so you can rename that and all updates are disabled with no nag. I put control above privacy, what matters privacy if your flow can be taken from under you on next forced update.

Vivaldi is still behind FF84 in three notable areas: video/PiP (why they dim the video when the mouse is over the pip window I have no idea), occasional tab thread instability (requiring esc press to unlock), scrolling physics.

But vivaldi also makes up for it with other features. Mouse gestures are a godsend and improve browsing immeasurably (e.g. I made an up-left-right gesture to bring down bookmarks bar). I briefly hooked into a fake email server so I could enable the built-in RSS features and that's going places. The stacked tabs are solid, they seem to be taking great care in getting them right.

I was mad when I upgraded Firefox and suddenly I couldn't see the boundaries between my tabs anymore. I have a lot of tabs. Glad to see that there is a trick in Firefox 91 to restore the old style, otherwise I would have just stayed on Firefox 89 forever. Interesting that CSS is used to style the browser chrome.

Another thing I didn't like after upgrading to FF89 was overscrolling, but fortunately once I figured out the term itself (which took a good bit of Googling as the effect is hard to describe) it was easy to disable.

Recent updates to Firefox have made me pretty unhappy with Mozilla, though. Really not a fan of major UI changes happening between updates with no warning. They should make it easier to revert to the old UI.

> otherwise I would have just stayed on Firefox 89 forever

I'm still using Firefox 68.11 on Mobile because the new Firefox mobile engine still doesn't support most addons/extensions... what a joke.

What I don't understand is why this isn't just a checkbox in the "customize toolbar" sheet. As proven by all the "fixes" that have been posted, it's purely stylistic, and with addons no longer being able to muck with XUL, breaking addons is not a concern either. Maybe I'm missing something, but from my viewpoint the development overhead of offering such an option is almost nothing.

It's dumbfounding that you have to go to these lengths just to restore a standard UI metaphor. It's also very worrying that Mozilla is giving the finger to power users who care about that sort of thing -- the very people who helped make Firefox the success it seems determined to no longer be.

To Firefox developers reading this: we know it's to much to give us the old style back. But please, just add it as an option somewhere so that when those of us who use it update Firofox, it is preserved. I understand you may not want to keep it in the general preferences, but please at least keep it in the about:config and don't remove this code in the future releases. I hope this is not to much to ask. The amount of bending backwards we do now to undo that is ridiculous.

To Firefox developers reading this: please stop active warfare on your users or soon you will have no market share left at all.

Signed,

a Firefox user since the time it was still called Firebird

Adtly. Signed,

a Firefox user since the time it was called pheonix

Fwiw, I love the new style. Looks good and clean and more modern to me. I see no downsides.

I really like the Close Tab button on the left, so while custom userChrome.css still works, I've fixed that. But for the rest, it's fine for me.

It was pretty interesting when I updated and my reaction was and still is "Oh wow. This looks great."

Then I came across some threads about the new UI expecting everyone to be congratulating Mozilla on a job well done but instead were just on fire with vitriol about how it may be the worst thing to ever happen. I didn't even notice the dozen of tiny changes all of these people found.

I'm not a tab slouch either (typically 250+ tabs open accompanied by the shame and anxiety that brings) so I'd expect to be pretty sensitive to even minor inconveniences added to the tab bar but apparently not.

Same here, i have no idea what the fuss is about… but i assume i don’t run into these issues because i have a different workflow.

Me three. At first it was a bit jarring, now I've forgotten what it used to be like. I definitely don't tab horde though and I've only got 4 open right now for example.

Between Firefox's Proton UI update and Safari in Monterey Beta 2, I'm genuinely baffled.

If modern UI theory is to make it as simple as possible and no simpler, then it seems we're straddling the line where important information (e.g. which tab is which) is now being lost.

As much as I kept using firefox while it progressively got more unusable, I just straight abandoned it after 91, at some point time spent fighting configuring my browser to be usable is better spend choosing from alternatives.

What did you switch to?

If you'd like to play around and see your changes take place live as you're editing:

Enable the Browser Toolbox[1] > Style Editor > userChrome.css

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Browser_Toolb...

Haven't seen the regular tab bar in ages. Just install the Tree Style Tab extension and never look back. :)

I was just reading the thread realizing the same.

Some other useful resources, including how to get tabs on bottom for those of us that like our world topsy-turvy:

- https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix - a good base including different light/dark themes. See Tips for code to put tabs on bottom

- https://github.com/aris-t2/customcssforfx - huge collection of different CSS that you can mix together for the perfectly customised UI

Hoping some day someone builds a playground so it's easy to build/customise interfaces through a GUI as I find it a bit of a chore to get things tweaked exactly right!

In the meantime it's worth noting you can use remote debugging[1] to live edit the interface.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/73dvty/tutorial...

I didn't have as much of a problem with the new tab style as I thought I would after I started using it. It was a jarring change to see in the changelog, but in practice I hardly notice.

Maybe the Firefox devs will at some point have mercy and undo this change to the tab bar. Maybe they can sell it in version 95 as a "fresh new idea to improve usability".

The amount of vitriol and hyperbole directed at Mozilla and Firefox developers is astounding. I actually like the changes and the direction the browser is heading.

I didn't know about this experimental CSS function `color-mix`. Can't wait until it gets widely implemented.

   https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color_value/color-mix()

(code formatting because HN doesn't support the trailing parentheses in links)

The new style looks awful on Windows, and that's on a 1440 screen, can't imagine how unreadable it must be on 1080.

You can also add this

    .tab-secondary-label { display: none }

to hide the annoying all-caps 'PLAYING' subtitle.

I'm still undecided about the PLAYING subtitle, but I might disable it. Thanks for this.

I don't see the builtin tab bar anymore due to my userchrome file, but the Firefox team is hell bent on chasing every single user from their software. The writing was on the wall ever since they fired the dev tools team. Being a dev and a Firefox user, I am the only person on my team and the only person, I am aware of, at my company testing that our features work in my once beloved browser.

Increasingly I need Vivaldi(chromium) to get my work done. I can't read most HAR files that chrome horks up. There are both new and long-running bugs in the dev tools as well. I haven't dropped it yet, but when I do, yet another company will have no one who cares about Firefox.

Firefox has been my primary browser for years now. I mostly use Chrome for Gmail and other Google services. Typing this from a Firefox browser on Android. I also mostly use a small screen laptop that has a huge collection of bookmarks (I am not even sure I will come to read all of them). These bookmarks now overflow the screen due to increased spacing between them. On Firefox 90, I could disable Proton ui settings. These are no longer possible in Firefox 91. While it is a very small annoyance, the overflown bookmarks irk me so much that I am now contemplating moving to Chrome for good. Privacy be damned. Well, at least for me.

I'm using Tab Center Reborn with a custom theme[0] to have tabs on the left as that's the only way I can efficiently use a browser these days, so I'm lucky to not be impacted :D

[0] https://framagit.org/ariasuni/tabcenter-reborn/-/wikis/Theme...

I started using a theme called Qiyu Light (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/qiyu-light/) after the tab style changed to be able to find current tab reliably.

It doesn't seem to change anything other than marking current tab blue.

They've completely eliminated the visual signal for which tabs are in which container if you're using their own recommended Multi-Account Containers addon. Now you have to click (and load) a tab just to figure out what it belongs to. This is sort of bizarre after all the effort they've put into encouraging people to use containers. Did they just forget it existed?

No they haven't. There's a colored line over container tabs, even if you've restarted the browser and the pages haven't loaded yet.

Seems they have, in 91.0. The colored bar that appears above the container tabs are not appearing for me after the update.

OMG. Ok, I'll just stick with 89 then and stop updating, even if I get these annoying update notifications all the time then. Why on earth do they need to keep destroying useful things.

I've just disabled updates & will be sticking to V89 until it breaks, at which point I'll jump ship to something else. Maybe even go back to Chrome.

Mozilla have shown and time and time again that just when you think they surely can't make a bad change (and keep all the previous bad changes) for the Nth time in a row, they absolutely can.

How do you disable the nagging about new versions?

Here's my userChrome.css to revert to Photon: https://github.com/pellaeon/firefox-91plus-photon-userchrome

Here's my take on it: https://raymii.org/s/blog/Firefox-89-proton-ui-tab-styling.h...

And mine:

  /* Deprotonify */
  @-moz-document url(chrome://browser/content/browser.xhtml) {
    #tabbrowser-tabs .tab-background {
      border-radius: 3px 3px 0 0 !important;
      margin-block-end: 0 !important;
    }
  
    #urlbar:not([focused="true"], [open]) > #urlbar-background, #searchbar:not(:focus-within) {
      border-color: var(--lwt-toolbar-field-border-color, hsla(240,5%,5%,.2)) !important;
    }
  }
  menupopup > menu, menupopup > menuitem {
    padding-block: 3px !important;
  }

(I actually have a few other rules to hide buttons I don't want, but I omitted that here to keept the experience standard.)

  #pageActionButton {
    display: none !important;
  }
  .urlbar-history-dropmarker, .urlbar-history-dropmarker:hover {
      display: none !important;
  }
  
  #TabsToolbar{ 
     display: none
  }
  
  #menu_newNavigatorTab {
     accessey: none;
     acceltext: none;
     display: none;
  }
  
  #context-openlinkintab,
  menuitem[label="Email Link..."],
  menuitem[label="Import From Another Browser..."],
  #context-searchselect,
  menuitem[label="Block element..."],
  #context-bookmarklink,
  #inspect-separator,
  #context-inspect-a11y,
  #context-inspect,
  menuitem[label="Pin to Overflow Menu"],
  menuitem[label="Bookmarks Toolbar"],
  menuitem[label="Search DuckDuckGo for*"] {
     display: none;
  }

All UI stuff like this should be part of the "theme". Once in a while, sure go ahead and change the default, but always make it easy to roll back to older themes..

This only changed the look of the tabs, not their size. The tabs still look oversized and eat up screen space.

Guys just hide the tabbar with userChrome.css tweak and install Sidebery!

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