Firefox 94 has No Visible Border on unfocused tabs
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From the posted image, is it really that hard to differentiate the not active tabs? There’s a clear pattern: icon, title, close “x”.
I’ve liked the direction Firefox has been going in. It’s my primary browser again after a few years of Chrome. I can’t be alone in preferring the updated look, I’m sure there are dozens of us.
It’s optional. The option is called “Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order.”
To close the tab, you now require an additional click - one to select it, then another to press the 'x' button.
I don't recall if this was the same experience in the previous version.
I also like the new look. I've had a hard time quickly identifying the active tab so this way seems best to me.
Releases are generally well thought out enough that they don't break any mental models or workflows, even when the UI noticeably changes (which in this case, it didn't for me)
I don't even install it by rote on new computers anymore - it might as well be Edge. The rendering performance sucks, the need to constantly adapt to new ui changes is infuriating, so buh-bye Firefox. I prefer software that doesn't screw with my muscle memory for absolutely zero good reasons.
UI as a "discipline" is cargo cult corporate waste. I'd rather use a tool designed by an engineer that uses it than performance art disguised as ergonomics or accessibility.
If it looks good, fine, but the point of a browser isn't pretty tabs, it's navigating content in a way that doesn't interfere with navigating content.
I often open up a bunch of text files in tabs from a FTP-like site without a favicon, and sometimes it is hard to tell where one tab ends and the next begins in the new interface.
The only exception was the original iOS. They both hold up today. The original was a little cheesy but was still close enough to classy to work.
Messing with UI for little gain is a middle finger to existing users. Hope their "increased adoption" is worth annoying all their current users.
Why would I want the UI to take up more space? I am using it as a browser, most of the space should be available for the page I "browse" or serve as an efficient way to navigate pages.
> don't make it look more like modern UIs
If making something look more modern is the goal just take a dump in the middle of an art gallery, that is plenty of modern and about as functional.
> Be that Windows or Gnome
Edge still has proper tabs, so are you just making shit up now?
I don't care what you want, that wasn't the question. The question was how it is consistent. Preferences are notoriously subjective, plenty of people like less clutter, it tends to make things more readable.
>Edge still has proper tabs, so are you just making shit up now?
On my machine in edge and chrome both unfocussed tabs are flat and divided by like a 1 pixel grey-ish divider or something. I can't really tell much of a difference between that and firefox.
The active tab looks like a button, it has no connection to the content at all, while on edge I still have a clear connection. That might just trigger an ingrained mental "fuck another incomplete UI framework" response in me, it looks wrong and that the tabs actually still behave like tabs is more surprising than expected, why would anyone expect a button to behave like a tab?
Last point, as the new tab style takes up more space than the old style I had it disabled. Of course that didn't work long but somehow the option still fucked up highlighting of the active tab. With that fixed it is at least slightly lighter gray on light gray instead of just light gray for all. Still missing an option to fix that waste of space.
> The question was how it is consistent.
Then why does it take up more space then the bookmarks? Both are just an Icon with a line of text. Hah, just comparing both lists in the UI makes it clear that consistency is not something Firefox devs. have ever heard of. Note: This is not meant as a request at the Firefox designers to fuck up the bookmarks.
Mozilla in recent years has been flagrantly ignoring the usability costs of their changes and has shown a willingness to make gratuitous changes. Many of these changes could make sense if Mozilla expected their user base to be on an exponential growth trend, such that the existing users who are alienated or annoyed by changes will soon represent a small portion of the overall username. But that's obviously not the situation Mozilla is in.
Considering that the visual processing model of the human brain is based on change detection (hence why animations will get your attention and are distraction), all unnecessary changes do is add mental noise and force reaccommodation, wasting countless hours of trained behaviour. Once a UI becomes familiar, you don't need to pay attention to it and can focus on the content instead. But when it changes, it attracts attention for as long as it takes to changes one's long-term-memory of it.
I haven't done any studies on it, but it wouldn't surprise me if those who hate these sorts of changes the most are also the ones with the best long-term memory and observational skills.
First, I dislike that I cannot quickly count how many things there are. Borders also make me feel more confident in locating a button.
Second, by detaching the borders from the main window it disconnects the analogy of a "tab" as a, well, tab. Now a button takes you to a new window, but I dislike that it breaks a long-standing analogy that is easy to grasp.
More importantly, it's really hard to see the upside. That's usually why people complain about UI changes in Firefox or anywhere else -- if you can't elucidate what the upside is, all anyone can see is downsides. And mild lack of familiarity is enough downside to outweigh an inexplicable change with no upside obvious.
UI changes attract a lot of ire from current users in general--this isn't a Mozilla-specific thing--but Firefox is ostensibly an open, OSS project. there shouldn't be much organizational discretion to just keep UI research or data private: Mozilla should be more than happy to share data or UX research demonstrating why they're making changes, but they don't.
absent explanation from Mozilla or a helpful UX expert to pip up and say "the change is actually good, here's why", the changes often feel like they're either trend-chasing or change for change's sake to show that the UI designer's salary isn't going to waste.
[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/modern-clean-new-fi...
"Good design is invisible. So if things just work, you don’t really think about it."
Ah yes, and if you can't see the benefits of a change, that just means you're blind to its invisibly good design.
"Bookmark bar – About 5% of the clicks go to the section where people bookmark their frequently visited place"
"5% of the clicks go to the thing we haven't touched in forever and have actually made worse over the years. Naturally we're going to continue this strategy of fostering attrition until you only ever go to the sites listed on your new tab page (which we're watching how much you use)."
It's all basically that, more of doing whatever they want and calling people who don't like it wet blankets. I still don't know why they changed to that supremely unintuitive "sliding panes" menu design. Ah, such is the cost of being on the cutting edge with my ESR installation.
That page says they "put a lot of thought into it," but I haven't seen where that thought might be reviewable, because I'm skeptical that a lot of thought went into this. A lot of thought may have been how to counter criticism, but that's not the same thing.
If something has a clear advantage people don't tend to complain about it. The ability to search from the URL bar has a utility that is clear. Making tabs break a paradigm and be (mildly) harder to see doesn't really seem to have any utility and the system would work the same both ways.
I still use Firefox, don't get me wrong. But I don't understand why this stuff is changing before being made into a skin so that us old people can have something stay the same for a few weeks.
The lack of stability in everybody's technology and online experience is a problem. Move fast and break things, who cares how it affects the users!
Modern UI feels like painting the shark in Jaws hot pink in order to make sure everyone sees the great special effects. Yeah, the shark is still cool, but you've made the film much more difficult to enjoy.
Why would I bother getting used to a feature they're going to take away again? No matter how good it is. I don't get this.
I think that's it. I like this change, but not enough to post anything about how much I like it.
Not anymore. Addons like that dont work anymore.
And each update you have to adjust your CSS to fix whatever the UI changes broke. That is of course until Mozilla remove userStyle.css entirely - they have already disabled it by default so for new installs you have to toggle toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in about:config.
More generally: I really like firefox developer edition's UI. It's dense and pragmatic, and I think the toolbar customizer they've built is one of the best of any application I've used. Broadly I think they've been doing stellar work, especially when they aren't blindly copying Chrome. Chrome has made some nice UI improvements that have deserved their spread, but I'm glad that Firefox has copied some and rapidly changed them, and abandoned others.
Also: container tabs. They're so, so good. And the colored bar on the tab is more than sufficient to identify them IMO. The UX is a little janky when it comes to modifying your containers, but the core concept is marvelous and steadily (if slowly) improving.
If you want to see "design for design's sake", look at Safari. It changes rather significantly with almost every major OS upgrade. I think they broadly get away with it because they have far fewer features, but it's kinda bonkers sometimes.
But why do you even have to start with "is it really that hard to..."? - i.e. arguing that the change only makes things slightly worse.
What actually becomes easier or better through this change?
Isn't each tab clear from the fact that it starts with an icon?
Also, tabs without a favicon don't start with an icon at all.
It doesn't seem to be the novice people speaking up against it? Or are they all acting in defence of novices they don't know?
I think this change is overall more consistent than previous Firefox versions (menus). I also think it removes clutter and looks simpler, cleaner, and less distracting.
To address a common complaint? Frankly, I have no trouble at all and I think most people are complaining due to change - a tale of software developing old as time
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2021/10/7/22715179/fir...
Exactly this. All posts on the internet act as a selection filter; the people most likely to comment are those with strong feelings on the subject. When we read comments, we tend to think "wow, I just read 10 comments and all but one hated the UI! People must really dislike this UI". But our sample isn't random, it's heavily biased! And we develop a biased understanding of the general population -- the vast majority of whom won't have left a comment at all. Instead of thinking "9/10 people dislike this UI", it's probably closer to "9 people out of all Firefox users dislike this UI". And more exactly, it's "9 people out of all Firefox users who saw this on HackerNews dislike this UI." Actually, I wonder if you can use Bayes' theorem to get the actual population's distribution somehow...
For what it's worth, Firefox has been my daily driver for years and I'm very happy with it. The new tab design doesn't bother me at all.
Thank you for this reply, and trip down memory lane; I hope it is well received. I'm not trying to be a contrarian, I just wanted to interrupt this glass of Metamucil to share an alternative viewpoint.
Does anyone have an up-to-date user CSS that hides the top tabs and moves the toolbar up into the dead space? I used to have a snippet that worked, but it broke a few dozen versions ago.
https://gist.github.com/eproxus/f95c2d2bd0f9b8f5d2b6f464e27c...
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
And even more exactly, it's "9 people out of all Firefox users who saw this on Hacker News and cared enough to leave a comment dislike this UI"
But yeah it seems like every release of ff there's a vocal group saying how it's going to pot and it's all doom and gloom.
I have been using ff since it was called Phoenix and it's fine. I fire up Chrome and Edge out of necessity for work and have never been compelled to switch.
Maybe I just don't need whatever it is that Chrome has that makes it so special but all the browsers are pretty decent these days.
At some point around IE11 I realized I wasn't writing W3C standards HTML/JS and then having to hack it for noncompliant browsers. I wrote code once and it just worked.
Yeah, even with your Bayes mention I'm gonna go ahead and get a second opinion on your statistical analysis there. I know, there's always someone in every crowd who quibbles with a poster's perspective, but you're hanging your entire sentiment on this one.
To rephrase what I was saying, I think that when we read 10 comments, of which nine are negative, we think "90% of people must dislike this". I don't think most people would actually think 90%, but I do think we "get a feeling" it's a very high percentage. We get this impression that the 10 comments are by 10 random people, so it's close to a random sample. But it's not, it's a very biased selection. The very post itself acts as a selection filter, only selecting people with certain properties. In this case, people with strong opinions about Firefox's UI.
In short, the denominator isn't 10, but something much much greater. And this isn't a stastical analysis (not yet anyways!), just a statistics/psychology hunch :)
I don't. When I see something like that with such a small sample size, I think that the downvoters just got there first. That could be because the YouTube algorithm put the video in front of people who happen to have higher standards, or who are bitchier, or who are familiar with the poster and their disruptive complaints over on the Slack for $X. Could be anything...anything other than generalizable overall quality.
And your statement does show this bias in a different way. You comment on the 10 being too small a sample size. That implies that if there were more posts, say 90 vs 10, you would draw some conclusions about the question "Do people like the new UI?". In the same way you're saying that the sample would be biased because someone posted on YouTube, I'm saying it will _always_ be biased, regardless of size, because the post itself (and all posts) attracts a biased sample. A larger sample is good for a random sample, but I think posts attract a sufficiently biased sample by their very nature, so increasing the sample size won't help.
On the other hand, Firefox has been steadily losing tons of users and market share for the past decade so maybe people really do hate it?
We just get used to it later with the flatness and then they make it more flat. The cycle continues.
The main tab-related visual I need is to see easily which tab is activated. That’s still easy to do with the new style.
And I'm somebody who likes to leave 200+ tabs open with a dozen pinned tabs, so I use them heavily.
I always use favicons to separate tabs, not the borders.
I do use a lot of keyboard shortcuts and color-coded containers, so maybe that's part of it.
Those idiots cannot respect me and let me choose when and what I wish to update. They bombard me with 'update available' messages jumping into my face in the middle of what I am doing, disrespecting me and my flow.
No option to turn off updates completely. Again, what can we expect from such brainless idiots?
Oh, but of course, they are too busy with idiotic useless facelifts.
I couldn't care less about their idiotic UI "inventions" never needed in the first place. Those people simply do not know what to do thus directing their endless idiotic activity to useless BS.
And then they bombard me with 'update messages' and how it is absolutely 'essential' to install their 'new' BS.
Where those people are coming from I wander ? Where are those idiots created and multiply? At least they should learn respect the choice of people not to deal with them and their 'bs updates'.
At least, that's what I thought it was, and now I'm not sure. Without a border, there is no way to tell which "x" goes with which tab. Without a visual grouping using some kind of border or shading, wouldn't the "x" make more sense located next to the icon and title?
Yes, and if you're running the Multi-account Container extension you'll see a colored band up top that separates the tabs. Plus get all the perks of Multi-account Containers! (a feature which no other browser has I think)
That being said, it can be more difficult to differentiate some inactive tabs. Some tabs lack a favicon (e.g. PDF files) and the close button blends into the text.
There's no way you can justify a change like this.
Also, why change the UI? If people are using your product that's enough market proof that they are fine with it, why change it in such futile and silly ways? No one's going to start using Firefox because tabs have no borders, literally no one; yet I can see plenty of users looking at this as the drop that spilled the cup and leaving.
Every single Firefox new "feature" or UI change has made them lose users, I wonder if they're doing it on purpose.
Yes, there is a pattern, but that's not good enough. If the site doesn't have a favicon, that part is omitted, breaking the pattern. If the title includes emojis, they look like favicons, making another (false) pattern breakage. And looking at the same image you reference, it isn't clear why the "x" icon would close the stuff far away to the left of fromit instead of the favicon/title it is very close to.
This is change for "clean design" sake, not usability. Sure, we can get used to it ok, and maybe even start talking about it being a more "beautiful" (a word thrown around waaaay too much in UI design, IMHO) design, but it is a very much less usable design and that's something some of us care about.
However I agree with you otherwise, and I noticed the same about the emoji titles.
I agree it feels like they care more about how cool it looks than how easy it is to use.
It doesn't even look good. It doesn't even look "clean" or "sleek". It's just sterile. Dead. Non-functional.
I use Windows Blinds to make my Win10 look like Win98, and certainly I don't expect anyone to go that far, but some time between then and now, we've lost the plot.
Of course, if it's just for fun then we shouldn't be asking why!
It starts at Big Tech (Material Design for example). I think we should teach designers history of UX/UI and how things used to be. From 1950's typewriter UX to the latest AR tech. This education can put perspective and curate a better understanding of the user. A more empathetic approach. Not fashion trends, rounded corners and huge purple typography.
Big Tech operates like a horse-eyed A/B tests driven UX/UI machine and doesn't understand anything but. There is no Steve Jobs to overrule.
Here's a good example: Check out all of the small SUV's you see now, they're all elaborations on the same shape and form. I think this is by design, in that deviating from the norm right now is not something that is rewarded, but giving something visually 'safe' that hits most of the needs of their customer is acceptable.
[0] - https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*RCyvppE9R3x85bCAmn...
[1] - https://5thcolor.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/all-cars-look-a...
For instance I'd like to claim that Apple is an industry leader that has been misattributed as a design leader; it isn't their slick aluminum rectangles in isolation, it is them cohabiting with a marketing message and brand position working together that gave it the entire perception that leads to their success.
If say, Dolly Parton came out with a restaurant themed after a country jamboree and it went gangbusters it'd likely be incorrect to conclude Starbucks should have bales of hay and employees in 10 gallon hats and spurs to increase sales. A country themed restaurant is the correct way for Dolly Parton to execute a restaurant because she's Dolly Parton. It's not a brilliant idea in isolation and it's certainly not one that should elbow its way into other established brands in the same product category.
Yet this is the exact kind of logic that is done in software. We ignore the context of why something was successful for a particular institution and pretend it is transferable to all similar institutions regardless of context.
It's just not smart.
The change is only on the delimiter line between inactive tabs, and you still have space and each favicons between them, it's not like they all magically blended together. I actually didn't even realize the line disappeared until seeing this post.
All in all, new design can look good or bad, but this specific one has sensible trade-offs and functional advantages, which is to me far from just following a random trend.
I wonder why this is happening, and am constantly surprised at how readily the world seems to accept these changes. Perhaps I am getting old.
Now in this context, imagine the inactive item is invisible and clickable, and the active item looks like a button (that is traditionally clickable) but is not clickable. Imagine furthermore that you still have freaking buttons elsewhere in the same UI that look the same as the unclickable thing but are clickable, well, you have a problem. Now imagine the even bigger problem of reusing the exact same style for things like text fields that have an entirely different function.
This isn’t just Firefox, a lot of this is what Safari tried to pull, too. Or the entire concept of flat UIs.
I really, really want to respect the field of UI design and imagine that this stuff is hard, etc. but frankly some of this stuff is really not that hard to get right. There needs to be discipline, some science, some user testing, and someone with enough power to shoot down the truly dumb decisions, for a start.
And barring all that, I want a config file (or back in the day, ResEdit) where I can undo all the madness.
I miss having blue underlined links, and raised "faux 3d" buttons so I know what I'm supposed to be able to click. x.x
We can all blame Matias Duarte for creating and launching Material Design without performing any usability testing. A few days before the public launch, he presented Material Design at the Google all-hands meeting and admitted in the Q&A that they had just started usability testing.
I predict that everything will be flattened by 2024 and they will begin adding back the affordances. Then it will take a few years for other companies to start adding affordances back. Everything will be usable again in 2029.
Arbitrary UI changes also help generate buzz for corporate marketing events.
If I slow down and pay attention I'm OK, but it's definitely less functional for me.
Fixed it for you.
What are we to do? Obviously we have to design for the majority. I presume there are high-contrast modes that can be enabled if you need that.
That isn't obvious to me. Why remove things that were helping the minority and not hindering the majority?
You're gonna have to actually defend the notion that having borders around interactive UI elements is "clutter". Calling it "clutter" doesn't make it "clutter".
> I presume there are high-contrast modes that can be enabled if you need that.
I don't, but I also don't see a reason to make "inaccessible" (or even "less accessible") the default.
Ultimately we’re all just giving opinions and a proper study should be done if people want to argue either way. Until then it’s up to the devs as the people doing the actual work I guess.
The UI/UX department of the future will have only two employees, a hipster and a dog. The hipster will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to bite the hipster if they change the UI/UX.
The depths of idiocy across the development landscape are ... depthy.
Firefox / Fennec remains my general very strong preference, though on this specific older Android device, Firefox/Fennec performance remains abysmal.
On a newer Android device, Mozilla's aversion to keyboard shortcuts is another major pain-point.
On e-ink devices, EinkBro is superior for some tasks (Chromium-derived), though it also has its annoyances.
I'd originally bought the device with a paired self-supporting case/keyboard combo. That ... was already failing from purchase.
The current keyboard doesn't mate with the device, but if used on a desk is acceptable.
(Logiteck K480, multi-device, PC/Mac, fairly decent reviews, chicklet keys though. I'm ... dealing with that.)
My estimate is that trying to use a soft keyboard drops my effective intelligence by at least half.
Typing is slower and far more error-prone. I'm staring at the keyboard rather than what I've typed, so if there's an error, I don't see it as it occurs (which would enable me to correct it immediately), and navigation is exctremely imprecise. My error / typo rate with a software keyboard is through the roof.
With a keyboard, all of that is much more fluid, and I can focus on what I'm actually trying to say. Being able to toggle between apps and access application hotkeys is another huge bonus.
Downside is that many applications literally don't know what the fuck to do with a keyboard. Apparently keyboard entry is not a consistent low-level Android feature.
- The Pocketbook e-book reader interprets spaces when writing notes or search expressions as "page scroll" events. This is always delightful.
- The Mozilla Pocket app loses focus on each motherlovin' keystroke when entering tags. My enthusiasm for this behaviour is utterly without bounds.
- Depending on the keyboard and perhaps Android version, input of escape (hullo, vim), function keys, and other modifier keys ... is variable ... with Termux. The Logitech keyboard largely functions as advertised, though there are some workarounds required for function key usage (say, with Midnight Commander).
I'm sure you'll discover other fun surprises in your own preferred apps / workflow.
That it's easier to write longer pieces with a keyboard may or may not be a feature, though on balance I'd consider it a plus.
Using Termux or remotely accessing a Linux / *nix system with a real keyboard is also a huge improvement over soft keyboards. Termux (Linux userland available through F-Droid) remains the one thing on Android that does not precisely suck.
I've been aggressive in removing Google from all aspects of my computing experience. When purchasing an e-ink reader/tablet earlier this year, avoiding Android was high on the list.
I ended up with the Onyx BOOX line, which is Android, though a somewhat de-googlified variant. Google Play ... won't actually work, which I'm fine with. I've installed Google Play Services, though I'm aware of a third-party alternative. App stores are F-Droid, APK-Mirror, and Aurora. I'm trying to minimise use of non-free software as well. Not entirely successfully but within reason.
The stock e-reader, Fennec Fox, EinkBro, Termux, and Pocket are my principle apps. Pocket is the only one of those that's not reasonably available from F-Droid (there's a very old version there, very badly broken --- the current version on Aurora is only badly broken.)
Again, for doing its job, of showing, you know, text, it's an absolute fail.
I can't even screenshot the brokenness because Chrome thinks the content is DRM'd.
Even in a new tab not opened to any page. (I've just tested this.)
See: https://www.chromestory.com/2020/10/incognito-screenshot/
https://www.mobigyaan.com/take-screenshot-chrome-incognito-m...
I've wondered what happens when you stand up a team of people who mostly aren't necessary after a while and how good some might be at making themselves necessary.
I feel like a reasonably competent designer can make user studies and tests and research point to whatever conclusion they want about the need for more changes. But do we really need the change?
Or put it this way: how often does a team conclude, "our studies revealed that we're in good shape. Don't change anything!"
Around this time, there seemed to be a growing sense that maybe things had gone too far. But instead of just backing off the skeumorphism a little we got a complete reversal and a trend towards increasingly flat and abstract UIs. Now most buttons have no affordances at all and we get decisions like this to remove useful visual cues for no apparent reason.
What's seems to be missing here is any sense of moderation or restraint.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4485/back-to-the-mac-os-x-107...
"please tell me #firefox 94 has not flattened the display to the point there is NO VISIBLE BORDER on unfocused tabs."
0: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
I used to use this extension, but when they went to WebRTC I couldn't find this extension anymore and gave up looking for it. Haven't used this in years but is easily one of the best tab interfaces ever invented.
Edit: https://gist.github.com/colejd/665fdf388e3b80ca614187d1901d8...
in FF advanced settings
I swear we're going to have to start DLL injecting web browsers like game modding tools soon...
This war on tabs in browser UIs has to stop. There is no such thing as a functional square wheel. I'm also speaking of you, Safari.
I recently fished out an old laptop with windows 7 on it. I turned it on after years. Although it was pretty slow (I think it was underpowered even when it was new), the UI in windows 7 looks absolutely beautiful. Pretty icons with lots of detail, copy and move dialogs with amazing animations, pleasing translucent window borders, sensible control panel, perfect start menu. Windows 10/11 feel amateurish by comparison.
https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html...
(go to the home page for general instructions on enabling this mechanism)
That it's the first one you have seen is just one data point, not an unlikely one admittedly :)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22686070/apple-macos-safa...
https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAIkAQAAAAAAAABBqYhm849...
I have Xubuntu and run the Firefox release they give me. Last week there was an upgrade, but I did not notice any major change to tabs. Maybe the same change I saw a while ago ended up in ESR now? Just a wild guess, have not checked their release status for ages.
me: *plays quietly*
conductor: can you play that a little more piano
me: *plays very quietly*
conductor: a little more piano even
me: *pretends to play*
conductor: perfect
I can't imagine pinning my hopes on such a clownshow.
Or are you talking about something I'm unaware of?