Firefox Proton UI userChrome.css fixes. (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Proton UI userChrome.css fixes. (2021)

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There are a ton of other userChrome fix repos. I've gotten rid of my tab bar entirely and replaced it with a sidebar addon. Unfortunately my css seems to break with every other Firefox release.

I really wish Firefox would make the UI more stable and make user chrome mods some kind of plugin system where I can pick and choose how to deeply customize the interface.

> I really wish Firefox would make the UI more stable and make user chrome mods some kind of plugin system where I can pick and choose how to deeply customize the interface.

Firefox extensions before Mozilla decided to kill XUL had the capability to radically alter the UI. This is what made FF extensions so powerful.

There were arguably good reasons for them to remove XUL[1], but it created a void of functionality that previously existed. I still think that a more secure version of XUL could offer a better user experience, but unfortunately we're forced to settle on the severely limited WebExtensions standard nobody is happy with except browser developers.

[1]: https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

When they removed XUL, Mozilla promised to provide relevant APIs to support at least some top extensions.

Obviously that never happens, And TabMixPlus (the top1 extension) died immediately.

> I still think that a more secure version of XUL could offer a better user experience

In a way, webextension experiments are exactly that; you have complete access to all the “privileged” APIs in the browser, just like XUL extensions did. Problem is you need to toggle some prefs and use Dev or Nightly builds.

> Unfortunately my css seems to break with every other Firefox release. It almost feels like it's being done intentionally. I recall how after one of the updates the entire contents of my custom userchrome file was automatically bracketed with css equivalent of `if false then`. It could simply be fixed by setting read-only attribute for the file but after some time they started randomly renaming css features without any obvious reason. It's like they are trying to make you to give up on customization and force to use the crappy default ui.

Really? I removed my tab bar years ago (I use Tree Style Tabs) and never had to tweak my userChrome.css once.

I remember it breaking exactly once. Last year they changed the syntax. But before that it was running fine for 3 or so.

Oh no! I am on ESR, so I guess I haven't gotten this change yet. How did you fix it?

Here is the change (as reflected in the sidebery wiki):

https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/wiki/Firefox-Styles-Snipp...

It was Firefox version 113 that changed it.

Used to do this but then I switched to Floorp which is a fork of Firefox with this built in, + some other cool customization options

I've never used their actual project, but I really like the article they wrote covering Firefox UI changes over time (you can find it under the wiki pages of the repo) - https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/%5BArticle%...

Mozilla has made significant UI changes every 3-4 years, with the last one being in 2021. Perhaps we're about due to see another?

Photon my beloved. No redesign felt so "right" upon first sight before or after it. No excess padding, timeless colors.

You can feel the seething rage of current Mozilla designers for us wanting to turn off "grandparent mode" esque proportions when you see that the "compact" density is the only one that says "not supported" next to it, meanwhile the even more hilariously oversized Touch setting is totally ok.

One of the best parts of Floorp is being able to choose between all of these redesigns.

Now if only 1Password would make it so they’re extension worked properly it.

I hope not. UI fiddling is what you do when out of ideas.

Mozzarella has so much potential I don't want to see it wasted (again).

In my experience, UI fiddling happens when the design team decides everything needs an overhaul, and the developers would rather fix bugs and add features.

And I suspect designers like to redesign everything for the same reasons that developers prefer to implement new shiny features.

> he developers would rather fix bugs and add features

From my experience (as a user) these two contradict each other. (see Google and Microsoft products for examples).

Were they out of ideas in 2011, 2014, 2017, 2021?

  UI fiddling is what you do when out of ideas.

I would expect no less from a developer forum.

In the beginning Firefox was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move.

What gets me is how every minor quirk or fault of FF makes people, despite knowing of and ostensibly being against the chrome monopoly, throw their hands up and declare that they need to go back to chrome.

It surprises me how many people here can be extremely critical of Firefox/Mozilla and claim that Chrome-based browsers are better when they're _so much worse_.

I'm not saying that Mozilla is infallible - they're definitely not - but for all their questionable decisions, they're still the best player in the browser market and the only one fighting for the free web.

Do I wish Mozilla were better at managing Firefox? Of course. Is their lacklustre management enough for me to change to Google's almost monopoly? Hell no.

Proof, meet pudding: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

Mozilla hasn't been a contender for, let alone are, the best player in the browser market for a long time. They often willingly trade their users' best interests with abject nonsense and gaslight them when they complain.

I know this might be an extreme position to take, but if Mozilla truly wanted the best for internet users, it should dissolve and deprecate their browser. Their death would leave behind a large clearing for other projects that actually put their users first.

I use Brave now and I hate it, but at least they seem to actually care about my privacy.

Check out librewolf - Firefox with with all “spy” stuff disabled

https://librewolf.net/

I was also not-much-satisfied user of Brave but ever since I found Librewolf I never looked back.

Ooooh, that quote finally clicked for me !

Proton is what made me ditch Firefox.

I don't want my screen real estate taken up by bigger and bigger toolbars, which was exactly one of the motivating reasons Firefox evolved its UI back in v4, circa 2011 [1].

I went to Vivaldi. It has tons of customization options, like classic Opera.

[1]: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/%5BArticle%...

Unfortunately, Vivaldi is proprietary/closed-source... and of course, using it results in supporting the Chromium browser monopoly / Google Eco-system.

This is also my main reason to use Firefox. I generally like Firefox, but I find Chromium more snappy. But it's Google. The Manifest V3 changes were the nail in the coffin for me.

Unfortunately I still have to use it when developing with Flutter, but otherwise I try to avoid it where I can.

Proton is what made me come back to Firefox after many years.

It finally didn’t look cramped and complicated anymore.

Use sidebar tabs. Most websites don't use the full width of your screen. So, it makes total sense to put tabs in the sidebar, instead of them taking up valuable vertical screen state.

sidebar tabs are so great. more horizontal space for the title, reduces tons of whitespace in 99% of sites, hierarchical collapsing in many (ya like tab groups? tree-style-tabs users have had them for a decade already), and it's easy to make them use little vertical space.

it's such a no-brainer, I'm surprised it's not a first-class feature in the main browsers (I'm aware that it is built in or default in a number of niche browsers).

>it's such a no-brainer, I'm surprised it's not a first-class feature in the main browsers

Its one of those things like dark mode, where power users strongly request it for decades, yet corporations push back against it every time. And much the same as dark mode, I predict that all the same corporations will suddenly have a change of heart the second Apple starts implementing it.

Edge has this implemented in a pretty decent way.

Brave as well.

That would be great if there was an option to get rid of the tabbar at the top

Inside your profile folder, open or create chrome/userChrome.css

    /* to hide the native tabs */
    #TabsToolbar {
        visibility: collapse;
    }
    
    /* to hide the sidebar header */
    #sidebar-header {
        visibility: collapse;
    }

TreeStyleTabs author lists some more elaborate css [1].

[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

I remove the horizontal tab bar in all of my Firefox profiles:

https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-ta...

Vivaldi is great I love the vertical tabs and the F2 menu but it's still so dog slow.

Firefox has had an issue open for years that it's trivial for a website to create invisible tabs.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749835

Seems a quick fix could be on empty title use hostname?

Maybe a min-width on tabs would solve?

It already did that for an empty title; the issue was with a title that was not empty, but contained only invisible Unicode characters (there are a number of such -- Unicode is very extensive and flexible).

(Min-width is also already present, but doesn't ensure the tab is visible when inactive/unhovered if it has neither a visible icon or title; it'll just be some blank space in the tab bar.)

As it happens, a patch is just landing that will handle more cases of "invisible but non-empty" titles, so that change should appear in a couple of months or so once it works through the release channels.

The main reason I've been using this is to make my tabs look like tabs again, and not floating buttons.

That bothers me too. But my fix doesn't have as many stars :)

https://github.com/torstenvl/userChrome.css

I’ll give this a shot. The “new” tabs are awful

I'd just like a nice, one click option, to completely remove the tabs. I make use of Tree Style Tab extension and just want the top bar gone.

It's well more than one click, but only takes about 60 seconds to remove the top horizontal tab bar:

https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-ta...

Have been meaning to check something like this out again after an OS reinstall. I've had hit and miss success with some of these before, but it is handy at these workarounds are available.

The userChrome system seems to change a little bit too often. Or maybe I’m just using it wrong.

A couple time I’ve set my tabs so that they’ll show up in the same bar as the URL bar. This let me get down to one bar.

It was wonderful but it only ever seems to last one update before breaking for some reason. Very annoying, especially coming from the one group that usually doesn’t think they know more about your computer should look than you do.

Unfortunately Mozilla has said that userChrome is explicitly deprecated, with no plan to support it fully, but also no plan to remove the functionality. It's honestly one of my favourite features of Firefox which I've used for more than 10 years... I will be heart broken if they ever remove it.

It would be really annoying to look for a new browser, because most of them are chrome based at this point, but that’d do it.

Try Floorp. It's folk of Firefox, just like Vivaldi/Edge in Chrome.

It supports switching the look and do things like this repository does.

Isn’t it going through some controversy of its own at the moment? I understand they want to “source available” rather than keep open source features they’ve developed, because others are forking their work.

The irony being not only are they a fork, their initial feature set was from existing add-ons that they were just downloading/installing by default.

I genuinely don't understand the appeal of a closed Firefox fork. At that point why not just use Vivaldi?

Anyway, after googling the issue, the running of that browser is a bit too amateur hour for me to rely on for something as sensitive as a web browser, even if they have reversed course on the decision.

As noted, there are quite a few of these, I use this project:

https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx.

It's actively maintained and lets me put the tab bar directly above the content but you can set it up to fully return you to the days of Firefox 4 if you want...

I wish there was a working userChrome.css fix for "Close all tabs to the right" to appear at the top-level right click, not nested in a submenu. I don't understand the decision by Mozilla and the argument that this is only needed by pro-users. Chrome has it at the top-level, too.

How often do you use that option?

Multiple times daily. Whenever I end up with enough tabs so that they fill up the horizontal space of my monitor (e.g. 25), I move the relevant ones to the left and click "close all to the right" from some tab onward.

With all faults accounted for, I still have to give hats off to Firefox for having user customizable UI. Are there any other software applications out there providing customization features? Not many.

This is a great project! Once you use it, it's hard to go back, you'll miss a lot of these fixes.

Can you make nested menu hover-to-expand-able again in Firefox (instead of having to click)? This is the change I hate most and I still can't get used to it (due to the fact no other software on my computer does this).

I'm using this project (have for a long while) and nested menus open when hovered over in the menu that opens when right clicking on the page. Nested menus in the burger menu (top right) still need to be clicked on.

Firefox needs to copy Vivaldi features and then it will become the best browser on the market.

Or maybe Vivaldi could develop a browser based on Firefox.

Definitely a must once you install it. I love the improved usability and readability. Thank you author for making my browsing more pleasant !

When FF released Proton (which seemed to prefer visual candy over function) I switched to Waterfox. Never looked back.

Amazing. I'm using it daily.

damn i stumbled upon this it reminded me of how long it has been since i committed to https://github.com/ewen-lbh/ffcss lmao

pretty sure it's broken, maybe i should revive it?

Or pair up with one of the other tools. Sum greater than parts and all that.

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