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Comment by dagurp | Hacker News Reader

So.. can I disable australis somehow?

There's an extension called Classic Theme Restorer that aims to do it, as well as customize australis.

The fact that such an extension exists, and that it may get broken again in later versions, says a lot about what Mozilla really think of customisation.

> says a lot about what Mozilla really think of customisation.

Oh? And what is that? "Customization is great and you should have the option to do so"? Try having a "classic theme restorer" with Chromium.

> it may get broken again in later versions

Future changes may cause incompatibilities in any project. That is why such changes are released in major new versions so that add-on developers have plenty of time to make adjustments and fixes.

It's different when breaking changes are infrequent and optional. This is no longer the case with firefox: breaking changes can come at any time and you generally don't have the option to upgrade (although I do recall there being an option to turn off auto updating, I'm not sure this is a good solution though).

Mozilla periodically releases 'ESRs', or extended service releases, that are exactly what you complain they don't offer: the ability to lock yourself to a given release without being forced to upgrade (the most recent ESR gets security updates, IIRC.)

What used to be possible with the stock browser, without any extensions, now needs one or more. They're not quite at the level of Google, but it looks like they're heading in that general direction.

They didn't make the addon. What, you want them to go back on 15 years of history and make the UI non-customizable? What are they, Google?

I think he just wants them to not screw up the UI so badly in the first place that numerous addons and customization is needed to bring it back to a minimal level of usability.

I'm not sure what were the datapoints that suggested to them that the UI was in need of an overhaul but I would have been much happier if they lowered the cpu usage of Firefox. To be fair I have a massive number of bookmarks (12000+) and tabs :-/ I was happy with the UI as it were. I'm using Ubuntu, btw.

I've fallen in love with rekonq recently, it always has really low memory footprints, loads instantly, and uses webkit so 99.9% of sites that work in Chromium work in it too. (I say that because it hasn't updated to blink yet).

It is supposed to get Chrome extension support this year too, and if I ever had the time I'd try to expand their sync options (currently Opera + Chrome) to sync tabs and such.

Have you at least tried it or are you simply change averse?

I have done the move a few weeks back, and I don't regret my decision. The toolbar and my add-ons located there still work very well, also the new menu gives a quick access to useful features.

I, for one, have tried it and it makes things I do frequently, more difficult: there's no longer available a bookmark button to open the bookmarks sidebar, there's no longer a menu item to show all bookmaks, when I bookmark something I click the bookmarks star twice in order to enter tags but the second click is only sometimes registered. For me, the previous theme worked much better than australis. I struggle to see the improvements in australis.

Opening the bookmarks toolbar takes indeed two clicks now (but you can use the keyboard shortcut CMD + B to open it instantly). Regarding your second point, the double click works great, and the bookmark details overlay appears.

I'm on Ubuntu, if that makes a difference about the double click on the bookmark star so perhaps it's a platform issue. But I was referring to the bookmarks sidebar not toolbar. How do you open the sidebar?

On Windows Ctrl+B opens the bookmark sidebar, and ctrl+shift+b opens the "library" popup with bookmarks selected.

My point is that there used to be a button that you could place in a toolbar and clicking the button would open the bookmarks sidebar. That button is now gone. I'm sure that in time I'll get used to the changes in australis but I think it would have been better if they would have been introduced gradually. As it was introduced, lots of things stopped working at once the way I was used to. For me, this is friction and it's not good.

I have tried Chrome and I didn't like it.

As nightly-build user I've worked with it a few weeks. I got used to everything - except the tab's on top (more mouse-movement and they just don't make sense, I don't get why they removed that option). But now working with classic theme restorer, so as long as they don't break that plugin everything's fine.

I got the Australis updates yesterday, tried it for half an hour. Never use the menu, want my tab real estate back, so I got the addon to fix it.

The shiny gloss over everything is still annoying, and they made the RSS icon monochrome rather than the normal RSS icon when you can sub to feeds, but otherwise I can just get rid of the menu I'd never use and have my old UX back.

If by tab real estate, you mean the amount of tabs that can be shown at once, you only lose 1/8th of a tab http://i.imgur.com/uT0oHl3.png

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer...

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