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Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

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Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#141

Post by [deleted] »

rom16384 wrote: post #137
throwaway2048 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new ui update has the specific goal of reducing configurability, so new users dont get "confused". Such changes include the inability to edit any of the UI except a row of buttons on the top left, shockingly just like chrome!. I'm sure these changes will help focus their design vision, or something. So in short, no, you wont be able to configure your client to look exactly like it did before.

It seems that too many times I have to install a plugin to revert some design decision I don't like. This sounds like one of those times.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#142

Post by rimantas »

kevingadd wrote: post #83
thomasjoulin wrote: post #31

Yet after Lion, Mountain Lion, and in a few month the new Mac OS, they still haven't implemented the native scrollbar and bounce scrolling... Mozilla is doing a lot of stuff, but I don't see any focus.

Yeah, how dare Mozilla not instantly implement the constant stream of random UI modifications Apple makes on a whim that require every developer to overhaul their UI and potentially make the UX worse? From my perspective, not making that nonsense priority #1 demonstrates Mozilla's focus on features that actually matter. Also, patches welcome, write an extension, etc etc etc.

In this case it is not change made on a whim, it's system-wide, and UX not following your system-wide settings is worse for sure.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#144

Post by voyou »

scott_karana wrote: post #111
magic_haze wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a title bar really necessary, though? The vast majority of the time, the exact same sentence is repeated again in the page as a h1. More prominently. With better styling. When I have the browser open, the favicon and the few characters on the tab are usually enough to figure out what the page is, and when it's minimized, the text shows up in the taskbar and alt+tab... I'm curious, what's missing?

I have three tabs open, all of which begin with the title of the site. How do I distinguish which is which?

How does having the page title in the title bar help with that, though? It only shows the full title of the currently selected tab, but can't you usually tell which tab that is from its content?

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#145

Post by electrotype »

I'm always afraid when such UI changes are announced for Firefox. Thing is, I love how I currently configure Firefox and I don't want to loose the ability to do it.

So wathever new defaults you choose for Firefox, please always provide a way to revert to what we prefere (even if that requires to use about:config).

Here's my current Firefox setup : http://i.imgur.com/PwiPeDM.png . I'd like to be able to keep it that way. I seriously don't care about round corners and stuff like that if that means I loose some control over how I can configure Firefox the way I like.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#146

Post by PommeDeTerre »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #107
Taylorious wrote: post #13

Hi I'm Firefox and I'm trying to be just like Chrome. Maybe if I try hard enough I will eventually be indistinguishable from Chrome and then I can just give up and let Google push me out of the browser scene entirely.

Except they can't seem to emulate Chrome where it counts: The snappy page loads and heavy heavy caching. Regardless of benchmarks, Chrome is noticeably faster loading existing and new pages for me. Everyone else I know has the same perception.

I agree, this is one of the most absurd things about Mozilla's actions over the past few years.

Time and time again they've gone out of their way to bring the worst of the Chrome experience to Firefox. Much of this revolves around the awful UI changes starting with Firefox 4 that have made it harder and far less efficient to use. It's pretty sad that we now have to manually enable the menu bar, and install extensions to get a status bar, for instance.

Yet at the same time, they just haven't managed to implement any of the truly beneficial things that Chrome offers. Like you mention, Chrome clearly does perform significantly better than Firefox. While the Firefox supporters like to trumpet how Firefox is "comparable to Chrome" in the arewefastyet.com micro-benchmarks, this just isn't observed under real usage patterns.

If the users are going to get the Chrome experience while using Firefox, but not Chrome's better performance, then what's the point of using Firefox these days? They might as well just use Chrome, and at least get some decent performance along with the rather bad UI.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#147

Post by shock »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #93
Svip wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but unlike Chrome, in Firefox, you can configure your client to look exactly like it did before. I know this is extra work for you (and me), but I guess it might work better for the vast majority of users.

The new ui update has the specific goal of reducing configurability, so new users dont get "confused". Such changes include the inability to edit any of the UI except a row of buttons on the top left, shockingly just like chrome!. I'm sure these changes will help focus their design vision, or something. So in short, no, you wont be able to configure your client to look exactly like it did before.

The day the customizability of FF is removed will be a sad day for me. Hopefully someone will create a fork.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#148

Post by PommeDeTerre »

copypasteweb wrote: post #96
baby wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I don't believe Firefox UI is busy 2. We always had those kind of "busy" UI since IE, Netscape, Opera and Firefox. 3. Chrome comes around, makes a very simplistic UI and now many people assume that it's the only way. IMO Chrome is just too simplistic, It's beautiful yes but is it efficient? For example, the first thing I do when I install Firefox on a machine is to display the menu bar. And I think it's a shame th…

>it's a shame there is no more status bar as well https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar...

This is one of the most shameful things to have happened to Firefox. The status bar is core functionality. It should be included by default, and it should be enabled by default.

Now, if they really felt the need to play design games with the UI, they could have at least disabled the status bar by default, and allowed it to be quickly re-enabled (like can be done for the menus).

Forcing users to go through the hassle of installing an extension just to get back core functionality is truly unjustifiable and very shameful.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#149

Post by makomk »

magic_haze wrote: post #78
DHowett wrote: post #66

And Firefox continues the inexorable march towards Chromeness by removing the actual title of the page from the window chrome. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Firefox. This just strikes me as wrong; the rest of the new UI is fine.

Is a title bar really necessary, though? The vast majority of the time, the exact same sentence is repeated again in the page as a h1. More prominently. With better styling. When I have the browser open, the favicon and the few characters on the tab are usually enough to figure out what the page is, and when it's minimized, the text shows up in the taskbar and alt+tab... I'm curious, what's missing?

It's often repeated again in the page as a H1, but that's only visible if you're scrolled to the top of the page. If you're part-way down a long HN discussion and want to quickly double-check what the topic was again, where do you look?

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#150

Post by baby »

ars wrote: post #123
loupeabody wrote: post #8

Here are some very detailed mockups(?) on major platforms whose links are kind of tucked into the parent link: Linux: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design... Windows 7: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design... Windows XP: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design... OSX: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design... I personally think…

Those tabs look nice when you have 3 or 4 of them. But I have 26, and it won't look so good then. (I tweaked my chrome to shrink the minimum tab size, so I can get lots of them without having to scroll the tab bar.)

Try Tree Style Tab, it displays tabs on the left. It's a bliss.
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