Comment by brianpgordon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianpgordon | Hacker News Reader

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I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since it was called Firebird, and I have to say that I'm on the cusp of switching away from it. It seems like every time I update, the UI breaks. With the latest update, for some reason my address bar is gigantic:

https://i.imgur.com/2QlIZwo.png

It also enabled address bar autocomplete, which I did not previously have enabled.

The previous update, Firefox 29, came with Australis, which left me with a completely unusable configuration and required me to fiddle with yet another "classic restorer" style addon. I now use:

  * "Classic theme restorer" to gut Australis
  * "oldbar" to get rid of the AwesomeBar
  * "Old default image style" to restore the old style for displaying raw images.
  * "Switch to tab no more" to cut off yet another head of the hydra that is AwesomeBar
  * "Undo close tab replacement" to restore the Recently closed tabs menu.

All to fight back against UI-breaking new features. I also had to muddle around with browser.urlbar settings in about:config to restore some kind of sane behavior to the address bar after AwesomeBar was introduced.

But what can I do? I obviously need security updates and the latest support for web standards, so I can't ignore new versions. But I'm tired of fighting a browser that I no longer recognize.

What's wrong with the AwesomeBar? Every time the Firefox team has come out with a new feature, I've been excited about it, and it's improved my workflow.

Awesomebar is awesome. Every time I need to revisit a site, I can type a few words that remind of me of the page and awesome bar just reads my mind and brings me there.

It's completely useless to most if not all pentadactyl and vimperator users, and actually interfered with my configuration of the former. Now no addon icons can be added to pentadactyl's statusline (well they can be, but they reset every time you start the browser).

How many firefox users actually use those add-ons? I'm a vim user, but that doesn't mean I want to use vim key-bindings everywhere.

First of all, it wasn't so much a specific reason why Australis is bad as it was an example of how it broke existing addons. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Second, both projects have been in active development for years so I'd imagine their userbases are substantial. Pentadactyl has about 20k downloads for release 1.0 alone, probably closer to 100k for all versions. Certainly not the majority of FF users but hardly ignorable either.

>First of all, it wasn't so much a specific reason why Australis is bad as it was an example of how it broke existing addons.

Australis was in the pipeline for a long time, and all work was done in the open. It's one of the reasons there was such a huge fuss made about it.

Addon/extension authors had plenty of warnings and opportunities to make sure that their code didn't break.

Trust me you do. I started using vimperator two years ago and never looked back.

I used Firefox (more specifically Iceweasel) as my sole browser from roughly version 3 until somewhere in the late twenties.

Recently I started using Chromium off and on because FF just seems to be so damn slow if I have more than four tabs open. Reddit + RES is so slow that it's completely unusable. I'm talking a several second delay between each keystroke and the character appearing in the input boxes.

Also, FF's sync is quite a pain to set up, especially if you don't have another device with you.

I fear the recent UI changes may have been the last nail in the coffin for me. I had a very nice setup using pentadactyl with some select add-on icons on the statusline. Now, that isn't possible. I have to choose between a superfluous navigation bar or no icons.

> Also, FF's sync is quite a pain to set up, especially if you don't have another device with you.

This was fixed in Firefox 29. More info at https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/02/07/a-better-firefo...

You could try "Reset Firefox". No guarantees, but it fixes a lot of performance problems like the ones you're seeing, while preserving history, passwords, bookmarks, cookies, etc. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi... for details.

If you're having problems, consider trying the Gecko Profiler (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...) and attaching a profile to a bug. We can't fix what we don't know about!

Iceweasel is probably your issue. I don't use the Debian hack of firefox and have no problems, >50 tabs open all the time. Also, looks like the last release of pentadactyl was March 15, that is old by Internet standards. I don't think firefox is the issue here.

I had the same issues on vanilla FF on Windows 7 too.

If you think UI changes are annoying, they happen all of the time in Chrome as well.

This may sound like heresy, but I think Internet Explorer has the right balance between tab space and the URL bar. It's not perfect, but it is smaller than in Firefox and Chrome, while still being usable.

I'm waiting for a complete "Sane" plugin in Firefox that has all the modifications you mentioned rolled into one.

I'm not denying any of your other issues with the browser, but

> With the latest update, for some reason my address bar is gigantic

For some reason? What would you expect if you have UI-altering addons installed (Classic theme restorer and oldbar), which might or might not work correctly under the most recent version of the broswer?

Someone in the comments worries that recent firefox versions are not entirely compatible with pentadactyl. But they are forced into enabling the awesomebar (which, admittedly, is useless when using 5dactyl) only because 5dactyl doesn't restore addon icons on browser restart, which is a bug in the addon, not firefox (sorry if I misunderstood the issue, but that's the way it looked to me).

If you are using some UI altering addon (which I understand the need to and also do), you should be aware this kind of behavior can happen, and that it is not entirely the browser's fault.

The problem isn't caused by a UI-altering extension, but a simple theme:

> 2. Location bar is too big. (Only in Firefox 31 and newer.)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-2-the...

Looking at the version history of the theme, it looks like the author has been heroically trying to shield users from changes. I'd be pretty annoyed if I had written some addon in the distant past and were forced to make fixes because the Firefox devs broke something that should have been stable 20 versions ago. Firefox's main selling point (in my opinion) is its vast library of high-quality addons and themes. They should be doing everything possible to preserve backward-compatibility, not breaking large swaths of their library.

To be fair, if you've been using it since Firebird then you're not likely the typical user.

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