Hacker News Reader

Comment by grandpoobah | Hacker News Reader

Personally one of the main things keeping me from switching back to Firefox, as a current Chrome user, is the existing UI. I love Australis and I can't wait for it to go stable.

View on HN

The great thing about Firefox is that it is completely customisable. You could use a theme like this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/ I personally like it even more than Australis

It's good that Firefox can be customized, for sure. But I'm finding that after each major release these days, I need to perform more and more customization just to bring it back to a usable state.

I want a practical browser that does what I need it to. Yet with each new release of Firefox we tend to see further useful functionality stripped away, additional config panel options removed, and the UI dumbed down in one way or another. So whenever an update happens, it's off to searching for add-ons to basically undo whatever unhelpful changes the developers have just made.

Add-ons and customization should be there to enhance and already good piece of software. They shouldn't be there as band-aid that's applied to fix the numerous mistakes and bad decisions of the software's developers.

I gave up on config panel removals and UI dumb downs and now configure Firefox solely using about:config. I recommend you this approach. You will get much less annoyed.

You're right, that is generally a better option these days. Unfortunately, it still does suffer from the same problem, to some extent. Settings are sometimes renamed, and then it takes some time and effort to track down the new name, assuming the setting (or an equivalent) still even exists.

Funny, we're having the exact opposite experience.

I find that with every release of Firefox, I need less and less addons. Better dev tools? Okay, goodbye Firebug. Download popover instead of a different window? Goodbye DownloadStatusBar. Australis? Goodbye Firefox-button mover and FXChrome (I use Tree Style Tabs, but FXChrome make everything else look prettier anyway).

I'm the opposite. Chromes UI is awful. Doesn't scale for non-standard DPI screens, ghastly colour scheme, and the integrated Window decorations are primitive.

In KDE I can hide the FF window decorations, and it then uses no more real estate than Chrome, while still offering a better native UI. I'm just crossing my fingers that any UI changes in FF don't negatively impact us Linux users or drift too far away from native widgets.

Right now, Firefox is the only browser on Linux that supports non-standard DPIs.

It's not really any different on windows; chrome's UI there too isn't brilliant (I've got a high dpi screen). It's much better than a year ago, when everything was simply blurry, but it's still much worse than FF or IE.

Exactly. I was fiddling with non-standard DPIs on my machine and I noticed that Chrome trainwrecks on them, and Firefox looks great.

I get frustrated because all the people who complain about the new Ausrtalis UI seem to want to drag FF back to the oldschool Netscape/IE6-looking thing. I think FF's UI is in a perfect place in the current version - clean, crisp, and compact. My only complaint about current FF is the redundant "bookmark-star" button in the Address bar that I'm constantly accidentally clicking.

Good news: Australis moves the bookmark star out of the address bar into the toolbar. You can then customize your toolbar to remove tha bookmark star button, if you like. I did. :)

I have the old style addon to put the bookmarks star back in the address bar, because the Australis bookmarks button comes with the bookmarks menu stuck to it, which I don't need, I have ctrl-b.

Yeah, that's pretty silly. I mean I'm sure they had to implement new code to make this silly two-button Siamese construct exist. Is there even a designer in the house? At least give us the option to have just the Star.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com