The forward button is now hidden until you navigate back.
The cost of inconsistency and confusion is not worth the 40px of extra address bar space.
The cost of inconsistency and confusion is not worth the 40px of extra address bar space.
I think you're overestimating the opportunity for confusion, here... :)
-edit- I'm using OS X, perhaps the change is somehow more obvious on other systems?
I like this phrase. It makes me aware of bad practices. Studying anti-design patterns.
As it is only hidden when there is no forward-history, and the user wouldn't be looking for it at that time, I still believe it's a good change.
The only way I can tell whether or not I have any forward-history is by checking whether or not the forward button is disabled. If the button is altogether missing, I'm going to wonder for a split second if I did something wrong the last time I tried to customize my toolbar.
Well, I guess I'll get used to it after a few days.
Still, I wonder if there's some usability testing data comparing the lack of a button with a disabled button. A disabled button conveys different information from the lack of a button. Every web browser is trying to be minimalistic these days, but there's got to be a point where any further minimalization hurts usability rather than helping it.
Here's one study, not sure if it is the most recent: https://heatmap.mozillalabs.com/
40% of users never touched the forward button even once. And those who did use it, didn't use it very often.
Several of the very low% UI elements (like RSS or Go) were removed completely from the default setup.
Another way to interpret that data would be "60% of users at least sometimes use the forward button."
The back-forward pair of arrows conveys a very intuitive idea for most people. In the absence of a "forward" button, I wonder how many FF10 users will accidentally click "refresh" thinking that it's the "forward" button. After all, the arrow in the "refresh" button points in the opposite direction of the arrow in the "back" button, and now the two buttons are side by side. It's not difficult to imagine them as a pair. Yeah, one arrow is straight and the other one is curly, but I often think of "forward" as "undo back", and many programs represent undo/redo with curly arrows.
IIRC, I moved the refresh button right back to its original location as soon as the change happened, a couple of versions ago.
I think the ratio of back to forward button uses was something like 100:3 in that study.
(I rarely use either button -- I used to use keyboard shortcuts, and now use a trackpad swipe.)
As a example, one can navigate back and forth by gesture or shortcut keys, and never have to use the back and forth buttons. Still, the display of the buttons to conveys the presence or not of back and forth history can be useful.
Fortunately, this is Firefox we're talking about. I'm sure there will be an about:config option to disable the new behavior if you don't like it. Just like you can change browser.urlbar.trimURLs in Firefox 7+ to restore "http" at the beginning of URLs.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ui-chrome.html
The general gist is that /too much/ chrome is bad, and a good way to fix it could be to temporarily hide parts of the chrome, as long as it's consistent in how to find it again and that there is a simple and reliable way to re-enable it.
It seems that Mozilla nailed the consistency (in this case, the forward button will always come back when the user goes back), but I'm wary of the "simple and reliable" method of re-enabling it. From what I understand, you technically can't make the forward button show up until you go back, correct? You can't always reliably go "back", especially if you're on the first page when opening a new tab. I'd say that Firefox is violating design guidelines (or whatever you'd want to call the research just put out by Nielsen today).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-3-the...
and this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/backforward-d...
And now I am happily back in Firefox 3 / 4 days. Looks perfect.
I have a nice, large monitor that runs at a nice, high resolution. In fact, I have several. Not even my laptops are short of screen space these days. Some of this is high-end kit, but entry-level monitors are widescreen and run at decent resolutions these days too.
Space for an extra icon in a consistent position is nothing in this context. However, the irritation from having UI elements or page content move around under-cursor is significant, and the irritation from having to click multiple times or click-and-hold to access functions that used to be one-click is also great, particularly if you first have to guess which of the entirely meaningless icon thingies might hide the secret menu with the item you're looking for, or remember which browser you're using so you know whether the icon you want is on the left or the right of the other unlabelled random icon thingies and whichever text box bar thingies we're drawing this week.
I'm all for innovation, but we have platform UI standards for a reason. Breaking them because you think your software is more important than everyone else's isn't clever. Being the company that also makes the OS and wrote the platform UI standards is no excuse, either.
(A) "Novices" who get confused when presented with more than a handful of buttons, because they never bother to figure out what those buttons do. BTW, what's a browser? You mean Google? No, I use Bing.
(B) "Experts" who don't care whether or not there are buttons in the UI, because they know where everything is hidden, and they use keyboard shortcuts anyway. Meanwhile, everything Apple does must be the One True Way.
When Group B makes software for Group A, you get the results you're describing. Caught in the middle are a large number of moderately proficient users who rely on explicit visual cues (buttons, arrows, menus) to perform tasks.
Lets hide the http:// prefix... but we have to show it on https connections so really we have accomplished nothing.
>.>
People actually use those buttons?